MARCO ISLAND, Fla. — One week into the lockout, the NFL and the players are drifting further apart. Loudly.

The animosity Friday stretched from the players’ annual meeting in this Florida Gulf resort all the way to the league’s New York headquarters.

Leadership of the former union, along with the players themselves, said they consider a letter Commissioner Roger Goodell sent them the previous day an attempt to divide them.

They refute the league’s contention that the NFLPA walked away from negotiations.

They dispute the owners’ depiction of the league’s last-minute offer made just before talks broke off March 11 and the union dissolved, then had 10 players file a lawsuit to block the lockout they knew was coming. Pete Kendall, the former union’s permanent player representative, called the league’s offer “kind of the old switcheroo.”

“The better the league does under their last proposal, the lower percentage players receive and eventually players would become a fixed cost,” Kendall said. “That’s a fundamental change as to the way the business has been done with the players — player percentage always has been tied to revenues.”

And, the players claim, the owners’ offer would have eliminated the players’ chance to share in higher-than-projected revenue growth. They say the proposal would cut players’ take of more than $9 billion in annual revenues from 50 percent to 45 percent in the first year of a new contract.

Not so, the league responded.

“If the union had a problem, the best course of action would have been to make a counterproposal, continue to discuss the issue, or explain the problem,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “They were in such a hurry to get out of the room last Friday and file their lawsuit that they never mentioned this ... issue.”

During the sport’s first work stoppage since 1987, players can’t sign new contracts or get paid under existing ones. Their health insurance premiums are not being paid by teams.

A hearing on the players’ request for a preliminary injunction to stop the lockout is scheduled for April 6 in Minneapolis, and there appears to be little chance of a return to bargaining before then.

In a speech Friday to players at the NFLPA’s annual meeting, executive director DeMaurice Smith said he does not consider Goodell’s letter — sent to all active players Thursday — an attempt to engage in good-faith negotiations. The league, he said, could attempt to restart talks by writing, instead, to lawyers representing the players now that the union has dissolved.