While the NFL technically won the collusion grievance over the effort to suppress guaranteed salaries, the NFL Players Association scored a partial victory. It also generated compelling evidence of actual coordination among owners. Inexplicably, the NFLPA has not used the outcome to its advantage.
Only now, two weeks after Pablo Torre Finds Out exposed the ruling and the NFLPA’s efforts to conceal it, is the union exercising its right to appeal the ruling.
Along the way, union management apparently downplayed the situation to player leadership.
The new report from Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler of ESPN.com regarding the collusion case includes an interesting nugget about the things said, and not said, by executive director Lloyd Howell to the union’s executive committee.
Per the report, Howell briefed the executive committee and NFLPA president Jalen Reeves-Maybin on the collusion case in the aftermath of the previously secret agreement between the NFL and NFLPA to keep the ruling quiet.
“According to several sources briefed on the meeting,” the report explains, “Howell informed the [executive] committee that the NFLPA had lost its collusion grievance but did not share any details of [system arbitrator Christopher] Droney’s findings or share copies of the ruling with the players. Instead, [Howell] blamed his predecessor, DeMaurice Smith, for wasting resources on the three-year legal battle. Smith filed the grievance in October 2022.”
Smith filed it in October 2022. And Howell took over in June 2023. The ruling came in January 2025. Howell could have settled the grievance. He could have abandoned the grievance. Instead, he saw the grievance through to a conclusion, and he secured a jarring finding that the NFL’s Management Council, with the blessing of Commissioner Roger Goodell, urged teams to collude. The case also generated persuasive circumstantial evidence of actual collusion, Droney’s acceptance of the predictably self-serving denials from the NFL’s witnesses notwithstanding.
Why would Howell cover up something good? Unless he was protecting NFLPA chief strategy officer J.C. Tretter from criticism for the mean things he said about quarterback Russell Wilson, Howell was simply (in my opinion) trying to undermine his predecessor’s efforts — to the clear and obvious detriment of the men Howell now represents.
While it’s great that someone has finally pushed the ball forward (and Van Natta and Kahler deserve plenty of credit for not sticking their heads in the sand, as many other NFL reporters have done), the situation keeps getting stranger. And it will be interesting to see how things play out moving forward, both between the NFL and the NFLPA and between the NFLPA and players who may choose to pursue legal rights based on a claim that the union violated its duty of fair representation to its membership.
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