Due to a labor dispute between league owners and players, a lockout began on March 11 and ended on July 25, lasting 130 days.
[9] By March 2011, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) and the NFL had not yet come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), thus failing to resolve the labor dispute.
[10] After the renunciation of collective bargaining rights, quarterbacks Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Drew Brees joined seven other NFL players and filed an antitrust suit to enjoin the lockout.
[13] The NFL officially recognized the NFLPA's status as the players' collective bargaining representative on July 30.
The following rule changes were adopted at the NFL Owners' Meeting on May 24, 2011: A "defenseless player" is defined as a: The league has instructed game officials to "err on the side of caution" when calling such personal foul penalties, and that they will not be downgraded if they make a mistake so that they will not hesitate on making these kinds of calls.
The 2011 season began on Thursday, September 8, 2011, at Lambeau Field, with the Super Bowl XLV champion Green Bay Packers hosting the New Orleans Saints in the kickoff game; the last regular season games were held on Sunday, January 1, 2012.
The playoffs started on Saturday, January 7, 2012, and ended with Super Bowl XLVI, the league's championship game, on February 5, 2012, at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
[39] It marked the Bears' second game played outside the United States in as many years, as they were a part of the Bills Toronto Series in 2010.
The Detroit Lions hosted their first Monday Night Football game since 2001, when they faced the Chicago Bears on Columbus Day/Canadian Thanksgiving (the Detroit-Windsor market straddles the U.S.–Canada border).
[41] The 2011 Thanksgiving Day slate featured the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers winning 27–15 on the road against the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys coming back to defeat the Miami Dolphins 20–19 at home.
(Luck was expected to declare for the 2011 NFL draft if Harbaugh left, but decided to stay at Stanford.)
To commemorate that event players, coaches, game officials and sideline personnel all wore a special stars and stripes ribbon bearing the dates "9/11/01" and "9/11/11" as a patch or pin.
[148] The St. Louis Rams wore their throwback uniforms in week 8 against the New Orleans Saints; the date was determined by fan voting.
The move was made due to overwhelming fan support to return to using orange as the team's primary home jersey color, which harkens back to the days of the Orange Crush Defense, as well as John Elway's return to the organization as the team's executive vice president of football operations.
ESPN extended its contract for Monday Night Football on September 8, during the opening week of the season.
[156] The league also signed a nine-year extension with CBS, Fox and NBC on their current contracts starting with the 2014 season through 2022.
[159] ESPN lost both of their sideline reporters from 2010: Michele Tafoya moved to NBC, where she replaced the departing Andrea Kremer,[160] and Suzy Kolber reduced her on-field work to focus on hosting studio programming.
At NFL Network, Brad Nessler and Mike Mayock became its new broadcasting crew, replacing Bob Papa, Matt Millen, and Joe Theismann.
On December 22, 2010, the league announced that its national radio contract with Westwood One, which was acquired by Dial Global in the 2011 offseason, had been extended through 2014.
[163] The league did not announce plans to compensate their media partners had the season been shortened or canceled as a result of the work stoppage.
NBC had ordered several low-cost reality television shows for the 2011–12 TV season in the event that Sunday Night Football could not be played, but other networks had not made public any contingency plans in the event NFL games could not be televised (in the case of CBS and Fox, the Sunday afternoon time slots could have been left unfilled and turned over to the affiliates, likely to be used for time buys by minor and extreme sports organizations, or locally programmed infomercials or movies as they are during the offseason).
A work stoppage could have potentially cost these networks billions of dollars in ad revenue and other entertainment platforms that depend on the games being played.