DeMaurice Smith, elected last month to head the NFL Players Association, has been working without a contract.

And if the dollars, cents and other terms thrown around by ESPN are accurate, he might be for awhile.

He wants five years and between $3.2 million and $3.7 million, according to the story. The NFLPA is pushing for, cough, $1.5 million to $2 million.

The late Gene Upshaw made $6.7 million his final year, $4.3 million of which was in salary. The remainder, according to ESPN, was in licensing fees.

Strangely, the Washington, D.C.-based Patton Boggs partner appears to have been elected originally to a three-year term – or at least that’s what the Washington Post thought the union announced when they said he’d been elected unanimously last month.

Smith might be confident that the league will keep playing football without a work stoppage in 2011, according to the USA Today, though we believe he’s  still espousing positions – that if the salary cap goes away the players won’t agree to bring it back – that would harm the genesis of what has made the league great.

He’s been working without a contract for several weeks. But if a significant salary gap can’t be bridged who knows if he even gets the chance to try and keep the league and the union working toward a new agreement.

I’m no expert on how this stuff works. But wouldn’t the players union have wanted to have at least some sort of framework for this position in place when they went and voted Smith in in the first place?