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This is what we do it for, folks. Exposé journalism? Secret arbitration claims? Private equity? Conflicts of interest? NIL deals? Collusion? Trips to strip clubs on union dime? This story has it all.
If you’re like me, and you’ve been seeing all these headlines roll in about the recent resignations at the top of the NFL Players’ Association, but haven’t really gotten up to speed on this whole odyssey yet, then allow me to catch you up.
First thing to be aware of: since the NFLA was founded in 1971, it has only had four leaders — Executive Directors — at the helm. Each of the first three served for over a decade (Ed Garvey from 1971-1983, Gene Upshaw from 1983-2008, and the one you’ll probably remember, DeMaurice Smith, from 2009 to 2023).
The most recent was a guy named Lloyd Howell. He came from the technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and was hired after a yearlong search shrouded in secrecy. The point I’m making is: historically, you can say this much for the union. They tend to be pretty selective in terms of hiring at the top, and they haven’t had a lot of turnover.
The guy who led that search was a former player named J.C. Tretter, who also resigned this week. Having studied labor relations at Cornell (with a friend of this newsletter, no less), and then played in the NFL for eight years, he had a pretty ideal profile as someone who could help lead the union forward. In 2020, he was elected player president of the NFLPA, taking on a ton of responsibility through the COVID pandemic. Much of his work in that period is commendable, and seemingly above board.
What seems less commendable is how he ran the aforementioned leadership search leading to Howell’s hiring in 2023. What outlets like Pablo Torre Finds Out, Pro Football Talk, and ESPN have all reported since is that that search was less… democratic than in years past. Players were kept in the dark until it was down to Howell and one other candidate.
Tretter says he was correcting for what he saw as bureaucratic inefficiencies in the process. But at the end of the day, Howell and Tretter are inextricably linked in all this. Tretter largely led the search to hire Howell, and Howell quickly re-hired Tretter (in a newly created position they called the Chief Strategy Officer) after Tretter’s retirement from the NFL made him ineligible to continue serving as player president.
So — given that Howell had to resign this week in the midst of multiple scandals, the process that brought him there is under new scrutiny lately.
Which brings us to the scandals! We haven’t really touched yet on what Howell did to lose his job. And I’d say the biggest revelation to date, which gets a little complicated on the details, amounts to a puzzling decision that suggests the NFLPA under Howell was more inclined to accommodate teams and their owners rather than the players it’s supposed to represent.
Basically, while DeMaurice Smith was still running the union in 2022 — and Tretter was here for this as player president — the NFLPA filed an arbitration claim accusing NFL owners of colluding to stop handing out fully guaranteed contracts.
This followed a bunch of teams grumbling about the Browns handing Deshaun Watson a fully guaranteed, five-year, $230 million deal that offseason. They didn’t like the idea that that deal might set the market for other quarterbacks.
So, when a bunch of other prominent veteran QBs didn’t get deals even approaching that, the union thought: hey, that’s weird. No one got paid as much. Did you guys (meaning the owners) talk about this?
Now, the union did not win that claim. That’s important to point out. The arbitrator dismissed the overall claim of collusion. But it did establish something else important, which you’d think the NFLPA would have an interest in saying aloud. The proceedings revealed that, at the NFL’s annual meetings in March 2022 — right after that Watson deal with the Browns — high-ranking league officials expressly encouraged teams to reduce the guaranteed money they were handing out to players. In short, they asked them to suppress player salaries.
That’s bad already, IMHO, but it’s not inexcusable from the position of the league. If they think it’s bad for business, then they’re within their rights to say so to the owners. What’s troubling here is that the union — which was under Howell by the time this case wrapped up — agreed to keep that finding a secret by striking a confidentiality agreement with the league. Again, this is the union that represents the players whose contracts are affected. So that feels relevant.
Beyond that, Howell was then revealed to still be doing consulting work for the Carlyle Group, a renowned private equity group that was recently approved by the NFL to invest in franchises. Such a purchase hasn’t happened, but just to be clear, that isn’t exactly exculpatory.
The problem there is that the Carlyle Group — even if he was only working with their aerospace and defense division — could be seen as having an ‘inside man’ as they explore investments in the league. That’s a problem! Even if a deal hasn’t yet materialized. The fact that Howell was reportedly approached by a union lawyer about resigning that position with Carlyle, and declined to do so, doesn’t help the impression that Howell was uh… ethically challenged.
Next up: I’m all for creative bookkeeping, but calling a ~$2,500 trip to Magic City (IYKYK) a "Player Engagement Event to support & grow our Union” likewise does not help that impression. And that wasn’t even a one-time thing. One night in Nov. 2023, Howell called an Uber after landing in Ft. Lauderdale (strike one), stopped at a strip club in Miami Gardens (strike two), and then made one last stop eight hours later at Howell’s condo nearby (you’re out). That’ll be $730.
For those keeping score at home, that’s two strip club trips paid for with union dues. I can’t put it any better than veteran labor lawyer Bob Stropp, who spoke to ESPN about this whole mess:
“I don't know how you get around that. It's hard to believe that anyone would be that stupid."
Well said, Bob.
And finally — yes, there’s somehow more — the FBI is now investigating both the NFLPA and MLB Players’ Association financial ties to a licensing group (AKA an NIL organization, for my college ball knowers) that they co-founded, a firm called OneTeam. Though more of the allegations currently point to the head of the MLBPA (maybe we’ll write about him next!), allegations of financial impropriety there as well don’t help the overall picture for Howell. As the head of the union, Howell sat on the board of OneTeam by default.
What this all amounts to is a headless union as it prepares to start negotiations on the next CBA with the league next year. I have an inkling that the matters named above will probably come up in the course of those talks. But the real shame here, of course, is that the players really do need good representation, and they’ve been without it for a while now.
Players felt betrayed by DeMaurice Smith at the end of his tenure, accusing him of not getting enough in return for agreeing to add a 17th game to the schedule. With an 18th game likely on the table this go-around, the NFLPA would do well to have its terms ready.
And you know what would help with that? Not having to do an urgent search for new leadership right before coming to the table. Better get headhunting.
🏀 Is the NBA going to bring in expansion teams or what? ‘Not so fast’ seems to be the message coming from Adam Silver this week. A European super league might now take precedence over new NBA franchises coming to, more likely than not, Seattle and Vegas. (And no, I’m not bitter about St. Louis not being on the shortlist.) And if you’re wondering why they’re pumping the brakes, I would point you to my friend Lester Freamon.
I don’t think Dolan and co. like the idea of sharing the new broadcast revenue.
🏛️ President Trump signed a curious executive order on Thursday — man, he really is up for anything to change the news cycle right now — directing his Cabinet to take the next 30 days and figure out how to “protect college sports.” This is the sort of duplicative effort that I wrote about a few months ago. That’s here:
Do We Need Two College Sports Commissions?
If you’re lost, you’re not alone. There’s been a whole lot of sound and fury in college sports of late, signifying very little if not all the way to nothing. Much of the loudest S&F has revolved around the idea of a college sports commission. For what problem cannot be solved by creating a commission? Can we get DOGE in here?
Executive orders being executive orders, it’s hard to say what, if anything, will come out of this. One of the main declarations of the order is that schools shouldn’t let athletes accept “third-party, pay-for-play payments.” But that’s what the College Sports Commission — the new entity formed by the Power 4 conferences — is already specifically tasked with doing. So… yeah. All the same, the part that would be getting any AD’s attention is the threat to withhold federal funding as a lever to make schools comply. Nobody wants to be the new Harvard in the crosshairs.
⚾ The NL Central has quietly taken pole position as the best division in baseball over the last few weeks. The Cardinals are Slouching Towards TheRestOfThem as they fall back to the .500 club they probably are, and the Reds are similarly middling. But the Brewers are on top of the mountain right now, and the Cubs aren’t far behind.
📚 Can’t believe I keep forgetting Book Corner around here. Another gem from the honeymoon was The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. One of those modern classics that I hadn’t found my way to until I had a couple weeks to lay on the beach. Definitely glad I picked it up, but it might’ve been my least favorite book of the trip. Too often, it gave me that Moby Dick feeling of tangential bloat. Hold up: we’re on page 40 now of characters debating whether laughter is blasphemous? But what I’ll say for it is that Eco does do a very nice job of threading through the ‘point’ of the novel, a characterization I’m sure he would dispute, but seems clear to me all the same. He was famously a student of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their meanings to humanity. He was also willing to concede, in his work, the frequency with which seemingly meaningful symbols actually don’t have any meaning at all. It is a very human thing to try and impose order on random chaos: finding a pattern that ties together X, Y, and Z. In telling the story of a series of murders at an Italian monastery, he makes this point by doing. Anyways. One to try for all you nerds out there.