You are correct, Ry - my mistake. I was thinking it was something the league/teams gave the Union in exchange for the Union agreeing to the original salary cap, since it happened at roughly the same time...

Link

As an aside, I was just reading an article on free agency in the NFL and the beginnings of the salary cap. The first year of the current cap structure was 1994, and in that year, the cap was set at $34.6 million. It's crazy to think that 22 years ago, the cap was approximately 9 TIMES less than it is today. Not many industries can claim that kind of growth...