The most stunning, and underreported, development of the summer came from the news that the NFL and the NFL Players Association hid for more than five months the 61-page ruling in a collusion grievance regarding fully-guaranteed player contracts.
The NFL won, but the NFLPA secured a finding of an attempt to collude — along with persuasive evidence of actual collusion and the right to appeal the case. The union should have used the document as the basis for a legal, political, and P.R. assault on the NFL.
Former NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell didn’t do that. Former NFLPA chief strategy officer JC Tretter insists he was excluded from the development of the strategy to conceal the ruling.
Appearing earlier this week on #PFTPM to promote his new book, Turf Wars, former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith was asked what he would have done if the collusion case that had started during his tenure had been resolved while he was still on the job.
“I always try to avoid speculating or putting other people in a box based on what I would do,” Smith said, “but, you know, given a finding that the Management Council, which literally runs and controls the entire National Football League, had urged teams to avoid fully guaranteed contracts, I think I would have — well, actually, I know — I would have filed another grievance based on that finding, looked to see if there was a class of players that, based on that finding, could have been negatively impacted by that decision by the Management Council, and certainly would have appealed anything in the ruling that I had thought, or we thought, was inconsistent with the law or inconsistent with the facts.”
In other words, he wouldn’t have struck a confidential deal with the league to keep the outcome just as confidential.
“You take the evidence that you have, and we had evidence that gave us a basis for filing, and you take the next step,” Smith said. “And again, I know and you know that while I was the executive director, there were always a few people who wanted to throw out the tagline that ‘De Smith would rather litigate than negotiate.’ You know, that was never true, but I was also never ignorant — willfully ignorant — of the history of not only this player’s union, but the history of every player’s union that ever existed.
“You don’t have to go far, but if you don’t understand the role of Oscar Robertson and if you don’t understand the role of John Mackie and if you don’t understand the role or the importance of Bill Radovich and if you certainly don’t understand how important Curt Flood was to the business of sport, if you are willfully ignorant of the stories of collusion and the fights for free agency in the history of sports unions, I don’t think that you can be qualified for that job. If you do understand the role of those people over history, you understand that you have an obligation to pay it forward. And that would have been an easy decision for me.”
While Smith never mentioned Howell, the message is inescapable. Howell had no union history. By all appearances, he lacked any basic understanding of the role of a sports union in ensuring a proper balance between management and labor.
That’s why people should care about the current chaos within the union. If things get too far out of balance, problems can arise. Up to and including a work stoppage aimed at restoring the right balance.
As to the collusion case, the NFLPA caught the NFL with its hand in the cookie jar. Howell opted to look the other way and to say, basically, “Enjoy the cookies.” That fact alone proves that Howell was not qualified for the job he held for more than two years.