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NFL collusion ruling casts light on ineffective, rudderless NFLPA just as much as concerns over contracts

Tuesday brought some rather surprising news to the NFL landscape when longtime journalists Pablo Torre, host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, and Mike Florio, who runs ProFootballTalk, teamed up to drop a new episode of Torre’s show. The episode featured the release of a 61-page document detailing a 2022 arbitration ruling for a grievance the NFLPA filed in regards to potential collusion and suppression of player salaries and reported a ton of new information.

The meeting that the NFLPA targeted in their lawsuit came just days after the Cleveland Browns traded three first-round picks for Deshaun Watson before giving him a fully guaranteed $230 million contract. The idea here is something that many fans have thrown into the wind since that contract was given out: The NFL owners would never, ever give out a contract like Deshaun Watson’s again — and this was well before everyone knew he was the worst starting quarterback in football.

While the grievance filing didn’t win and the arbitrator ruled against them, the NFLPA was given a silver lining by system arbitrator Chris Droney. According to Florio, on pages 55 and 56 of the document, Droney wrote, “There is little question that the NFL Management Council, with the blessing of the Commissioner, encouraged the 32 NFL Clubs to reduce guarantees in veterans’ contracts at the March 2022 annual owners’ meeting.” That’s an incredibly strong sentiment (and one that’s not all that surprising). No player has gotten a fully guaranteed, market rate contract since Watson and it seems unlikely that will ever happen.

From there, this becomes a story featuring a theme that fans of the league are all too familiar with: The NFLPA is not the cleanest and most effective union out there. There are a lot of reasons for that, but an important one is the financial and career-length discrepancies from the elite players to the guys who only play 2-3 years before moving on to another job. It’s hard to build a complete and strong coalition with so much of the labor force churning to new careers before they can make their voice heard. That has created a very insulated circle at the top of the union, which was highlighted by the borderline secret hiring of executive director Lloyd Howell in 2023. The union, in the eyes of many, hasn’t gotten enough from the owners in exchange for what they lose on the backend (i.e. rookie wage scale in 2011, 17-game schedule in 2023).

A small circle of insulation (in theory) makes community-based organizations weak, even one buoyed by some of the richest athletes in the world. As Florio noted on the show, it is absolutely baffling that they didn’t shout from the mountaintops that it was written on a real live document from an arbitrator that there is “little question” that all 32 teams were encouraged to make sure a fully guaranteed deal was never given out again — it didn’t require that plan being in action, too.

One year after Watson’s deal was inked, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson was hit with the transition tag and, by rule, was free to sign an offer sheet from another team. However, not a single team entertained the idea of signing Jackson, who immediately won the MVP in 2023 and nearly won it in 2024. A near three-time MVP, future Hall of Famer, mega elite quarterback was, by the rules written in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, free for any team to sign following a negotiation with the Ravens. A much cleaner opportunity to acquire a franchise-changing quarterback than where Watson was the year before coming off of his sexual misconduct lawsuits.

No offers. A 26-year old quarterback with a unanimous MVP on his résumé was available for hire and no one even tried. People can argue whether or not the Ravens would have matched a ludicrous offer sheet, but the fact that no one even tried raised a lot of eyebrows among consumers of the league. If the union had acted appropriately in response to the owners’ reaction to Watson, maybe Jackson would have been able to make out with a little more coin.

It’s impossible to even tell how much franchise quarterbacks would get paid on the open market (because they never make it there), but when one quarterback got $230 million guaranteed, the owners organized and made sure that didn’t happen again. That’s the same level of clarity and decision making the NFLPA should be operating with for its player base. It’s much easier to get 32 billionaires to stand tall on a subject than an entity representing thousands of NFL players, but rolling over and playing nice isn’t getting them where they need to go.

Ineffective leadership is how a report like this, which features very favorable results toward the NFLPA’s idealized plan, doesn’t see the light of day for three years. Shedding tears isn’t necessary over Jackson or Joe Burrow or Josh Allen not getting fully guaranteed deals on their extensions, but the focus at the top of the organization to keep things quiet shows there is still a long, long way to go before the NFLPA can actually be an effective opposition party to the powers at be — if that’s something they’re even interested in.

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