Inside the fallout surrounding the NFLPA's collusion grievance, with Pablo Torre

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1:20Robert Mays: Welcome to The Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mayes. Something a little bit different for you guys today. Obviously, it's been a huge story in the NFL world over the past couple of weeks. The collusion ruling with the NFL and the NFLPA and the 61-page document that was released in correspondence with that ruling. Pablo Torre and Mike Florio did a great job shining a light on this. Pablo has done fantastic reporting throughout the entire process of just getting his hands on this document and letting people know what that process looked like from the NFL and the NFLPA side of this. And it's really set off a huge series of events with more reporting from ESPN as it relates to Loyal Howe, the executive director of the PA, and where the PA goes from here.

2:03Robert Mays: So I had Pablo on today to talk about all of that, the most explosive and important points from that 61-page ruling, why the union specifically decided that they wanted to suppress and bury that 61-page ruling when it seemed like it would be a pretty easy win for that group as they tried to fight for a little bit of leverage in a world where they always struggle to get some. And then we also talked about where the union goes from here. What happens with Lloyd Howell? What is the correct path forward? And what are some of the challenges to how the union is going to be able to sort through all of this in the coming weeks, months, and years?

2:41Robert Mays: So sincerely appreciated the time from Pablo. Really enjoyed the conversation. Hope you guys do as well.

2:50Robert Mays: Joining us now from the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, and a man who has done significant and important work on this topic. Very excited to have this conversation. It's Pablo Torre. Pablo, how are you doing, man? I was going to go straight to your last name and just say Mays, but we haven't actually hung out before. So, Robert Mays, thank you for having me on your show. This is great. We have a lot of mutual acquaintances, but you and I have not spent a lot of time together. I think Mays is appropriate based on, again, just the number of shared people we probably have in our lives. I mean, I'm going to get to a text message at some point by an NFL owner in which he calls another one Dino.

3:22So I feel like Mays is just setting the bar of intimacy at real comfortable as soon as possible.

3:27Robert Mays: I'm glad you started there because I do want before we hit on where this topic is right now. And it's been a whirlwind over the last week or so since you guys had your initial episode on your feed with Mike Florio about the 61 page document that came out after the arbitration ruling. So much has happened with Lloyd Howell. And we've learned new things about some of his entanglements and potential conflicts of interest from ESPN reporting. The NFLPA put out a statement, I believe on Sunday, about where they sit with everything and what that process might look like from their end. But before we hit on everything that's happened recently, I do want to sit in some of the information that you guys learned in that 61-page document and to me what some of the most important findings are from that.

4:08Robert Mays: So if you could just very quickly for people who maybe aren't as familiar with this, lay out what you guys found in that document and some of the most important takeaways when it comes to the collusion accusations at their core from the PA toward the NFL owners. What were the most important things that you guys stumbled onto? too. Yeah. So just like big picture, I just want to explain that this is an opportunity, yes, to revel in labor and management and unions in a way that like America seldom gets to do. Sports always provides that as a fun side quest of sorts from the actual games. But this is juicy, man.

4:46Like that's the thing about this is that there's expedited discovery. And for those who are not lawyers, expedited discovery means you got to give everything over. And so the people who gave everything over. I mean, we're talking about closed door hearings over the course of July and August of 2024, in which, my gosh, we got eight NFL owners, you know, Bob Craftson. I mean, it's a great list. OK, it's Michael Bidwell, it's Bob Craft. It's just it goes on and on and on. But also it's Lamar Jackson, it's Kyler Murray, it's Russell Wilson. Justin Herbert gets mentioned at one point. It's Roger Goodell.

5:25It's his former general counsel, Jeff Pash. You go on and on. But I mean, John Mara, like you can just start throwing in the mad lib of names. And all these guys were called to account behind the scenes about whether guarantees were in fact being restricted through some coordinated and collusive effort from the owners and the league. And so when it comes to the stuff that just jumps out to me, I mean, which of the which of the stuff that got produced in Discovery Maze, do you want me to sort of like start with? Because I can, I'm happy to provide a guided tour. There's just a lot of exhibits literally here.

6:00Robert Mays: So let's just start with a big picture takeaway of this. And essentially, I think the most important points from the timeline are at the NFL owners meetings in 2022, very quickly after the Sean Watson contract was handed out, we know that there was a presentation from the management council that we wanted to push down guarantees in NFL contracts. This was stated to the group of owners, Like we want this as a league to be kind of the direction that things head. That is stated fact, even in the arbitration ruling. The gap is there is not enough evidence to say that this led to each individual team making the decisions that they did.

6:35Robert Mays: That's the kind of the hop, skip and a jump. You cannot prove if you're the arbitrator. So on a big picture level, that's kind of what we're talking about here before we get into some of the smoking gun moments that exist in this document. Yeah, so by a clear preponderance of evidence, that is the legal threshold here, that it's a very high standard, in other words, unusually high standard, I am told, for proving collusion. They found it in one way and not another. They found it in the way that you just began to describe, which is there was an attempt, an attempt by the league office to coordinate with the owners to suppress full guarantees for NFL players because of Deshaun Watson.

7:11And I want to live in that for a second before getting to why this was not proven, because you could argue any football fan and your audience is, I would imagine, demographically abnormally educated about the way football works. But I'll just I'll be pedantic for a second. It was obvious to most people that the Deshaun Watson contract fully guaranteed was a disaster. It was not a thing you necessarily needed to say, please don't do this again. Right. Like naturally incentivized are these NFL owners to not want to do that. It was why it was historic and unprecedented in the first place. So I just want to acknowledge that.

7:49But that acknowledgement is why it's so amazing that Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL and Jeff Pash, his then general counsel, were emailing each other about what notes to put into the PowerPoint deck. effectively that they would give the NFL management council would give at the annual meetings to the closed door room of the 32 NFL teams. They wanted to leave no ambiguity that this was a bad idea, that they, you NFL owners should not do this, that this would have downstream effects that would make the league and its business and your team NFL owner sitting here as well as his representative, you know, regretful and worse off.

8:32And so the fact that there was no chance they wanted to take is so eye opening to me because this spoke to a how important this priority was be how much the Watson contract scared people. But I mean, see, frankly, how this NFL Management Council operates, which is coordination. Yes. Yes. And look, I've heard since this episode came out, like there are other examples, of course, of like you're telling me employers don't want to communicate and coordinate. Sure, of course. But in this case, I just don't know if I appreciate it. I'll speak just for myself that the sausage is made this sort of cleverly, this sort of even deviously.

9:19Like, so to get to just like the top line, which I think I probably shouldn't have buried, but it's suitable for the metaphor I want to make. This was a buried secret. This whole thing, this collusion ruling in which these details were released and I published the 61 page document. It was buried. It turns out, spoiler alert, by confidentiality agreement, as ESPN would confirm and report. and the fact that they didn't want people to know that this is how the sausage gets made is also glaring to me. But the reason why, of course, they weren't able to prove full collusion and why this was declared on one level a loss for the union is because there are lots of reasons why these owners would not have wanted to give those guarantees.

10:05And we just alluded to a bunch of them, right? You didn't need, they didn't need that as the impetus to not want to do it, But the attempt was made to ensure that they wouldn't. And so this is the story that neither side, it turns out, wanted to be told to the public for reasons that are, again, deeper and crazier as we go on here.

10:25Robert Mays: Yeah, every single quarterback, you can have an example of why this shouldn't happen. And Arthur Blank tried to give you several for Lamar Jackson. But Kyler Murray, who's also involved here, think about all the video game stuff and the studying clauses that need to be put into contracts. With every single one of these examples, you can find a reason to not give the guarantees. And I think that's why proving collusion to that extent is difficult. But there are three moments in here that I think really stand out when it comes to just like the sausage getting made is a good way to put it. Like you are really watching the meat get ground up here.

10:56Robert Mays: And the first one you already mentioned, the correspondence between Jeff Pasch, who was the former general counsel with the league and Roger Goodell, about wanting to get this nipped in the bud before it became even bigger problem. To me, that really stood out hearing you and Mike talk about that. And Roger Goodell in his capacity is essentially acting in the benefit or under the auspices of all 32 owners. Like he's a collective voice for ownership. And so in this moment, I think him acting as a voice for all 32 of those owners is really important when they're having that discussion. And then the other two to me, where the other funny part of this is John Merrick coming out after the fact and essentially saying, It's so silly that you would suggest that any owner could tell another what to do or that we would have these sorts of conversations and be pushing each other this way.

11:44Robert Mays: And then there are two things in this document that completely contradict that. The first is the set of texts between Michael Bidwell and Dean Spanos after Kyler Murray's contract gets handed out. So obviously it's not a fully guaranteed deal. And immediately Dean Spanos is texting Michael Bidwell being like, great job on the Kyler Murray contract. it's going to make the contract discussions with our quarterback so much easier. And everything about that, him calling him Dino, like so many of these things just directly contradict this point that John Mara is trying to make. We're like, how would you ever suggest that we're influencing the actions or the behaviors of each other in these moments?

12:24On one level. And I can say this because I've gotten to know Florio in the last month of our lives together. It on one level, if you told me this is not reporting, but Mike Florio fan fiction, I would have, yeah, said that sounds about right. Hey, Dino, let's talk about suppressing salaries together on a text exchange. I'm like, does that really happen that bluntly? Yes. I mean, that's the part of this, man. It's just, and so again, when you're invading people's cell phones, I want to give them some amount of just like leeway because, you know, there before the grace of God, do we get hacked, right?

12:57But the whole thing of this and why it's materially interesting is because, by the way, this explains the Kyler Murray video game homework clause, Call of Duty stuff. So when Michael Bidwell, the owner of the Cardinals, is trying to figure out how do I prevent Kyler Murray from getting the full guarantees, one of the solutions that we saw at the time but didn't totally realize was this set of clauses about how you had to earn it. And of course, for many reasons, you can understand why the Cardinals would want to implement that. Maybe Kyler Murray just loves Call of Duty that hard. Maybe that's true.

13:30Also, they wanted to hold the line to prevent full guarantees. And so the Justin Herbert thing, I mean, I want to be clear about this too. Part of what's so crazy about this document that we published is that none of the people in it, meaning the players, Russell Wilson, Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, or Justin Herbert, named in it, knew what was in it. They had never read it. They had never seen it. This is actually about their salaries. Like if you're a union and your fiduciary duty is to represent your membership, it just feels like the most logical thing to do would be to tell the people whose livelihoods this directly affected what was found.

14:11And yet there was this confidentiality agreement to suppress. And so that text exchange is one thing that absolutely no one wanted to see. It turns out it's just shocking that the NFLPA was one of the people, one of the entities in that agreement that fully signed off on it.

14:27Robert Mays: I want to ask you about that in a second, essentially why this was suppressed and who benefits from it being suppressed. The last kind of the third point here that I think when I heard it, when you guys were talking about it with Mike, I was, I almost couldn't believe that this happens when you think about the people involved in these decisions, but the Broncos now are the third team with Russell Wilson deciding not to give him a fully guaranteed contract. And there's a moment in the show that you guys laid out that Greg Penner is talking to either members of his ownership group or just when discussing the process of the Russell Wilson contract.

14:57Robert Mays: And they're saying not just to benefit us from not giving Russell Wilson all these guarantees, but this will be good for the league if we do this. And why I thought that was just so telling is that the Walton Penner kind of group here is worth like$70 billion. Like these are some of the most powerful people in America in a lot of ways. And even they, as their first entry point into this club, are making sure that they're ingratiating themselves to the rest of the owners by living by the status quo, which in this case is suppressing these contracts and not giving out guaranteed money. Like the Bidwells and the Spanos is this is old boys club like forever type stuff.

15:36Robert Mays: But the fact that the Broncos, the first thing that they did was to make sure they were playing nice with everybody else by falling in line, I think is so telling when we're talking about the culture of how all of how all of this operates. Oh, yeah. I mean, they look, this is Walmart money, realizing that they're now, you know, rookies and they want to they want to be accepted by the rest of these guys whose emails. and texts you can read about in this document. It's so telling that it suggests a level of, frankly, and I say this in our episode, of solidarity that the players can only dream of.

16:14These incredibly wealthy guys come in knowing we got to do this for the boys, for the rest of our dudes. Like, they're really going to, I mean, they're worried. They're worried. And this is why that John Mara thing and Mara jokes about, can you imagine if I told Jerry Jones what to pay his quarterback, what he'd say to me. Like the whole thing is the joke there is that you don't even need to tell Jerry Jones because everybody feels this sort of diffuse pressure that lives throughout the NFL about like how we're supposed to do this for our collective self-interest. And that sort of abrogation of collective self-interest, that divergence when it goes from I'm doing it for the good of the league or for the union.

16:59And I'm doing this for the good of myself, right? You could argue that the Browns did that Watson deal because they saw a lane for themselves. It made them, spoiler alert, extraordinarily unpopular in that club. This is all these guys reacting to what the stupid Browns did, right? And yet on the other side of the equation, you have the union and that tension in terms of like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got information that Lamar Jackson got zero incoming offers after the Ravens non-exclusively tagged him? Zero? And no one, you didn't think that, that was not useful information for anyone out there, even if, of course, there are nuances and arguments about like why that was, but zero for Lamar Jackson?

17:47That wasn't like news anyone could use when it came to like leverage in public? The idea that, I mean, you get it on the list. It's just, there are so many nuggets like that. before we even get to, yeah, how the owners are clearly a brotherhood in real ways.

18:03Robert Mays: And the problem is they have a lot of the power is consolidated with that group of 32 people or 32 ownership groups. And when you're combining that consolidation of power with solidarity, and then you're looking at the contrast of that situation compared to what the union is going through, that's where it just becomes completely lopsided. They have the power and solidarity. The union is seeking out power and seeking out solidarity in a way that's even becoming more difficult to find based on how all of this has unfolded. And the owners are paying extraordinarily close attention. That's another key difference.

18:40And I think you're right. There are structural power dynamic differences, socioeconomic complications when it comes to a union full of guys with many, many different rungs on that ladder. Right. Justin Herbert, frankly, doesn't have a lot in common with the practice squad guy. but you better be sure that the Walmart heirs are going to have a lot more in common with with Jerry Jones you know than the equivalent rookie and vet like it's just it's it's something that speaks to I mean without being so over the top about it whether these guys are incentivized to care as much as even I do about this stuff man like I am I feel like I'm just swimming in these details and I'm like I can't get enough I'm like at the all unique buffet of just like owner power palace intrigue sort of like stories and I just think and not to jump around here too much I just think we're at a point now where it's been over two weeks since this 61 page thing was released by my show and I I've been very interested in seeing whether or not some NFL players even are aware of it, which is, again, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not woe is me at all in this way.

19:57It's actually fascinating and explanatory when it comes to why it's so hard to win a percentage point in a CBA negotiation.

20:06Robert Mays: And why a lot of NFL players weren't aware of it is because it was suppressed. And we're going to get to some of the reasons behind the confidentiality agreement and why the NFL PA didn't want this out here. But first, we're going to take a quick break. Football season has arrived, and with the U.S. Bank Smartly Visa Signature Card, you earn an unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase, including at the stadium or at home watching on a brand new TV. Score big with unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com slash smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S.

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22:50Robert Mays: All right, so let's dig into what I have thought is the most interesting part of this from the start. From the moment that I heard the reporting and from before I had listened to the episode, my first response to this was, why would the PA not want this to be public information? Like immediately that was my question. And in your guys' show, it was a quote from, I believe, a union source that said this should be the holy grail for the NFL players union as they fight for public affection, for leverage, for anything they can get their hands on to kind of fight that power imbalance that we're talking about.

23:24Robert Mays: So as you started digging into this, and again, I know you guys have talked about this, but for people who are maybe a little bit less familiar, what are the reasons that you landed on as to why the NFLPA decided to sign that confidentiality agreement and kind of bury this in a way that seems shocking at first glance. Yeah, you're right. This is, I think, the most indefensible part of this entire story is how the NFLPA has conducted itself, frankly. And the NFLPA, whose job is to, again, directly hold the most powerful league in America in check, has been beset behind the scenes, really beginning with the departure of D.

24:01Smith, which was its own Magilla, as anybody who's covered the league remembers, right? Like, was this guy good for owners, good for players? He was already a controversial figure. But how to replace him became something that coincided directly with the timeline of those meetings, or Roger Goodell and Jeff Pash were sending those notes in those NFL MC meetings with the— I now introduce another key character, in my view, J.C. Tretter, formerly the starting center of the Cleveland Browns. All roads, Mays, leads to the Browns in this story. But he gets he gets released. He gets released as Watson is coming in and he is the president of the NFLPA.

24:41He's the player president. And one of the things about being the player president, as well as being a like long time Cornell, ILR, just like true believer, it seems in union guy, is that if you're not an NFL player, you can't be on the executive committee. And so what's happening is that on the way out, J.C. Treader manages the process of who's going to replace Demora Smith and the executive director of the NFLPA. This is a job held by a handful of people ever. These are ostensibly forever jobs or are aspired to as such. And so when it comes to who's going to replace D, it's just handled in a way.

25:18And I will spare you the tick tock because it's fascinating, but exhaustive. That process of selecting the replacement is handled in a way that speaks to a level of secrecy that will carry through the entire saga, because we're talking there about non-disclosure agreements, talking about amendments to the Constitution, where even the members of the executive committee don't know who they're voting on for ED until the day they got to show up for the election. You're talking about J.C. Tretter, in this case, sort of managing a we're going to close ranks around ourselves. The external media and people like you and me, I guess, are the enemy, people who are trying to interfere in our business.

26:01And the result is they elect a guy named Lloyd Howell. And Lloyd Howell is interesting, Maze, because I didn't appreciate this at the time, but the guy has no experience in unions, in sports, and he's not a lawyer. so not a great start especially when you add into the fact that he is uh now also regarded as you know a protagonist in one of the largest fraud settlements in american history he was a cfo of booze allen as again tldr they had uh some major major financial malfeasance he was the cfo unclear to me uh whether the nfl players association was aware of this or cared when And they decided to elect him after that stuff was beginning to be known.

26:45So all of which is to say that J.C. Tretter celebrated this. This was his guy, Lloyd Howell. And in terms of why this wasn't known, this whole collusion thing, the grievance, was filed under Demora Smith. So, again, basic corporate mechanics, right? That's a win for the previous regime, not ours. I want to acknowledge that. The second thing, in this document, there is a part where J.C. Tretter is footnoted and cited trashing Russell Wilson, blaming Russell Wilson personally for not getting the guarantees that he thought Russell Wilson should have gotten because J.C. Tretter may be someone with many interests, but he is definitely interested in full guarantees, as of course he would be as a union guy.

27:30But he blames Russell Wilson for not getting it. Problem. J.C. Tretter later learns that, in fact, those Broncos owners who we cited, they had a particular view of this themselves outside and beyond Russell Wilson, who was more of the pawn than he was the guy in the driver's seat. And so anyhow, this testimony from J.C. Tretter, which he blames Russell Wilson and he's caught texting to Morris Smith about it, actually, that exhibit becomes something that is used against the NFLPA. So you have the guy who wants to be, and I buried a bit of the lead here, J.C. Tretter installed Lloyd Howell because he wanted to replace Lloyd Howell down the road as the executive director.

28:14That's the Game of Thrones that I have now mangled in the unveiling of these details. But J.C. Tretter, not a good look if you're trashing one of your own players, if you're wrong, and also if it gets used against you as the union against the owners. And then on top of that, by the way, you have this general desire by the union to be go along and get along in a way that is anti the DeMora Smith approach, which was more adversarial. Serial. So Lloyd Howell is corporate glad handing guy. And basically I think about this as if the NFLPA was like, what if we decided to pay the bear about to eat us a couple of compliments?

28:53What if we were going to like, you know, maybe present a couple of gifts. Maybe the bear would like that. Maybe the bear wouldn't, uh, you know, eat us. And we're seeing now, uh, how, how flawed that is because we fast forward and I don't want to skip ahead too much, but you know they reverse course they reverse course like oh maybe we shouldn't have done that like well what about the confidentiality agreement along the way so it's massive i think conflict

29:19Robert Mays: of interest in terms of how they handled it there's so many things here that to me just erode and ship away at whatever trust as an nfl player you would have in the pa doing what's in our best interest and you mentioned how the selection process changed when it came to selecting lloyd Howell, and you did a very good job of pointing this out on the show, where there used to be a clause within the PA constitution that there was a 30-day period where that was the advance notice you had for what the candidates would be before we're going to vote on the new executive director. That changed to the day of.

29:54Robert Mays: I'm not a math guy, but 30 days to prep and doing it the day that you get there, you're making a somewhat, there's a big difference in how informed that decision is probably going to be. The way that the PA tried to justify this is that they were trying to put forth this idea that, well, you have to trust our process for how we landed on these candidates. And then almost immediately, we get the fact that a part of the background check probably should have uncovered the fact that this person was part of a$370 million settlement with the US government. And so immediately, I think you're betraying the trust of your membership because you didn't do enough as part of that process to set them up to make the right decision based on the candidate that you would put forth.

30:38Robert Mays: And I think that becomes a part of this to me over and over and over again, is that we have so many examples here of why it's going to be difficult for the players to believe that the PA is doing everything they can to forward the interests of the players, because there's so many examples to the contrary of that. Yeah. And when you factor in the, of course, the life cycle of a player, right? Three to four years, right? Like your incentives are just not aligned to take the long view. And so look, most generously, I get it. I get why disinterest and lack of self-interest in the union, all of this plays a role, but you're right, man.

31:16Like the whole question of how does the NFLPA organize its membership has been this eternal question that has plagued every executive director and every NFLPA president. How do you get guys to be informed and to care and to act with one common goal? It's really, really hard for all the reasons we said in contrast to the owners. And how you do that, by the way, how you gain leverage at all. The reason why this Holy Grail quote resonated with me, and as I began to talk to people since then about like, what would you have done with this information, with this ruling in hand. I've been told that the obvious thing to do is the NFLPA is in D.C.

31:57You go to Capitol Hill. You make a show of this. You call for Roger Goodell's job. You don't expect necessarily to get these things, but you use this information to create public outcry in a way that can provide one of the only, and maybe it's, I don't know how many levers the players have, right? Because it's such an imbalance of power. But one of them is that you have to presume that NFL owners still care about perception in some way, right? The fan, can you convince fans to care? Can you convince, I don't know, can you get another Will Smith movie where he plays a concussion doctor? Like whatever the sort of like dream goals are for like, hey, just know that this is how the sausage gets made.

32:50This thing is about as good as you could ever hope for,

32:52Robert Mays: and they buried it. Yeah, whatever levers that the players have, even if there aren't many, this seems like one that's standing right there in front of you. All you have to do is push the button, and they decided not to. And if their feelings on this is, well, the upside, what could have happened? Why would this be worth it? The downside of all of this stuff becoming transparent, and all this stuff becoming public about our process and the fault of it. That, again, just is another example to me of like, well, what do you guys do then? Like, how are you guys fighting for the players if that's going to be the calculation that you make at the end of the day?

33:27Robert Mays: And so all of that stuff happens. And then the league or the PA comes out and says they're going to appeal the ruling six months later, which is just its own part of this that we can talk about. It's my favorite update, man. And it's just it's it's 15 days after I release his PDF, but only after Don Vanetta, who is one of the great investigative journalists of our time, starts poking around. Are they like, well, I guess we got to do something about this. And it's like you guys signed an NDA with the NFL to bury it. Now, under finally some amount of public pressure, you change your mind. I'm like, what was what was the plan here?

34:02Robert Mays: What would you have done if none of this had happened? We just have kind of let this keep rolling the way it was rolling. That part of it to me is just tough to get over. I just don't think it's spinnable. I think it is the last Hail Mary attempt for an NFLPA leadership that knows that the gravitational force of logic, as much as we live in a suspended universe in which many strange things seem to be happening all the time, this feels inevitable. You had to deal with this. You had to deal with the Holy Grail in some capacity. And the last move is to be able to tell your players, your membership, we're doing something about this, even if you went to so many measures to prove to everybody for all time that you tried as hard as anyone has ever tried to not do anything about this.

34:49And that's the flip flop, which is just I don't know how you defend that.

34:55Robert Mays: Even if we close the door there, I think there's a lot to be concerned about. You mentioned Don Vanada. ESPN reports last week that Lloyd Howell has a paid consulting gig with the Carlisle Group, which is a private equity firm that has been approved to buy 10 % stakes in NFL teams. The messaging that's come out after that is pretty predictable, like this idea that he's working on the defense side of the company and that's very far removed from whatever side of the company. it's just it's just aerospace and defense like that's what he's doing there are information barriers up where there's never going to be any sort of interplay and relay of information with what the nfl with the side of the company that's working with the nfl is with the side of the company he's working with is that's fine whatever but this again to me even if there isn't a conflict of interest on that side is just another example of this person makes three and a half million dollars a year to be the executive director of the union he's on three boards and has a paid consulting gig.

35:51Robert Mays: If you're an NFL player, what reason do you have to believe that this person paid three and a half million dollars a year is spending enough time and energy doing everything he can as the head of this organization to fight for me as an NFL player? It's just there's so many examples in here where I just feel like it continues to erode whatever trust you have in the leadership of this place. And I should observe that unions in American history have long been beset by problems of corruption themselves. They are a vital aspect of the way that America functions. There are also places historically where people try to enrich themselves by gaining power because that is how human nature works.

36:33So this is not unique in concept, but it is distinct in this particular way. I don't think anybody has ever seen a character like Lloyd Howell, who is so, so openly problematic when it comes to the things at the top of his resume. And look, I get it. Like, sure, Carlisle Group maybe isn't, whatever. I'll buy whatever defense you want to give of the Carlisle Group for now. All I want to point out is, do you think players would care if you disclosed it to them very clearly? And frankly, I can't assure you that they would. I just think if you're paying attention and you're clocking all of this stuff, it is disqualifying.

37:25And so, look, you vote for who you want to vote for, right? I'm not here to tell the players who to vote for. I'm just saying, if it was me, this is insane. It's just insane that you would have a conflict of interest at the highest level of the union job. not like CEO of like company that's competitor. No, no, no. This is the union. I mean, what are we doing? What are we doing here?

37:48Robert Mays: The same way that releasing the report to me is just like a free public relations win in a lot of different ways. You're fighting to get public opinion on your side. This, the decision to keep this consulting gig, and there have been conflicting reports about who told him to keep it and who told him to discontinue it. whatever the actual like lines of communication were, if it was a group of union lawyers, they discuss whether or not he should have this. And they ultimately decided it was fine. It still feels like on the, like on the flip side of being able to just have the win PR wise release in the document, this is stepping on a PR rake unnecessarily.

38:25Robert Mays: Like this is the exact opposite example on the flip side of things. What it does is it assures the NFL that you're going to be easier to deal with. Right? And again, please don't eat us bare. We brought you cupcakes, right? Like that's maybe actually the strategy. I just cannot imagine why you think it's a good one. I just saw pages of text messages about how these guys operate. I have watched enough football in my day. I have seen enough reporting on this subject. The NFL owners aren't going to be like, you know what? We like this Lloyd guy. 50-50. That's not going to be how the CBA goes. So why are you pretending like it would?

39:13Robert Mays: I want to talk about what happens next and just the PA's response to all of this. But first, we're going to take one more quick break.

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40:53Robert Mays: All right, so Sunday, on Sunday, the NFLPA releases a statement as it relates to all of the stuff that's gone on with Lloyd Hall over the past week and some of the ESPN reporting. I'm just going to read it in full and we can talk about it. It says, As members of the NFLPA Executive Committee, we categorically reject false reports insinuating doubts within this committee or suggestions that we have asked our executive director to step down. We further reject attempts to mischaracterize the committee's views or divide our membership. We've established a deliberate process to carefully assess the issues that have been raised and will not engage in a rush to judgment.

41:25Robert Mays: We believe and remain committed to working with our executive director and other members of NFLPA staff and player leadership who have a shared mission to advance the best interests of players. As we approach the 2025 season, we look forward to continuing our important work together, ensuring the strength and unity of our association. When you saw and read that statement, what was your first reaction? my first reaction is that they're fighting a ghost um they are responding to reporting they have heard is happening but actually hasn't been published yet you know and i'll be a bit vague here because maybe they're onto something but the question of like is lloyd howell gonna stay or go you know that really hasn't been reported in that explicit of a way in which you have to say actually he's staying.

42:15My first thought was, in other words, they're really paranoid and in their own head. And I get it. The second thing is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. Right. The whole thing is like we we support Lloyd. We do not see any need to like do a process that is outside of how we want to do this thing. But also subtext. There is a special committee of executive committee members who are now tasked with evaluating whether Lloyd Howell can remain the executive director of our union because he's also under FBI investigation for a separate matter we haven't even talked about yet, which is the one team thing.

42:53And so, by the way, that's the other line on the resume where it's just like, I don't even know if one team is as interesting as this. I just know that the FBI is literally looking into it. And so they had to call a committee to be like, is this okay? Are we okay?

43:07Robert Mays: Explain the one team situation just for people who may not be as familiar with it. Yeah, so the very TLDR thing is that the Major League Baseball Players Association and the NFLPA, basically unions and sports came together in some sort of like profit sharing operation where you sell their rights to things and in other words, the players can make money outside of merely their own salaries. You sell licensing rights and all this stuff to player stuff. The one team investigation is about the fact that there is an arrangement in which the leaders of these unions, Tony Clark being actually the real protagonist of this story, the head of the MLBPA, the leaders of these unions get to profit off of this personally, as if they're CEOs.

43:51Again, it's sort of like a very corporate thing, right? The guy running your company gets to get a big check personally for himself. Problem being, these are once again unions in which this is not quite as simple. And so anyway, there's more to come on that, And I encourage you to read the reporting, even at ESPN, actually, they've been on top of this. But the point being that Lloyd Howell decided to not divest, essentially, from this operation. He decided to stay in it. And whether or not he was advised not to or not, I will not belabor those details for the moment. I will simply say that the choice resulted in him being part of an FBI investigation.

44:29And so now when it comes to this statement about like we're evaluating him, we have a process. I just I just feel like there is a clock that is loudly ticking and the clock is not ticking down on the next report that I might do or Don Van Atta might do or the athletic might do. whomever the clock is ticking on whether fundamentally the membership of your union is going to care about this before camps start that to me becomes that's the next question

45:07Robert Mays: right and i think that chris long did a very good job of pointing this out on his show this week just talking about that timeline and about the struggle and the challenge of getting players to engage with this. And I think that as I've listened to people like him and, you know, Dominique Foxworth has done multiple shows about this. And obviously Dominique has extensive history working for the union. He believes in the union, even just listening to, and you and Dominique are friends and I'm sure you've listened to what he's done, like his frustration and just kind of how beaten down he kind of sounds about this.

45:37Robert Mays: It would be really kind of deflating. I think if you were somebody who believed in this. And I think as I look at what he's talked about, when Chris has talked about, it just feels like apathy is like a really big villain and potential problem to work through here if you are the players. And the fact that we have four or five days here before camps open, when their attention is gonna be even more diviner than it would be now, it just feels like this may come and go without it having the impact or even close to having the impact it should have among the players. And it's really hard, I've noticed, observing my NFL player friends who are informed about this to be polite about like what it's I can see them straining to be respectful of the union process that is trumpeted in this press release because what is happening in real time beyond camps being almost upon us as you well know is the fact that this CBA is coming up in 2030 and if you're going to replace an executive director and you're going to organize your union and you're going to start a campaign, perhaps in public, to reframe this whole debate and to garner percentage points that can result in, of course, hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, then at that point, you don't really have a lot of time to waste, particularly when your current leadership structure has been staffed by people that have all co-signed one of the most disastrous, top-down, I would say, strategic efforts in the history of sports unions, even if they believe that they might actually be crazy like a fox.

47:12I guess. Maybe that's what they're thinking of themselves here. You just don't get the vision. I guess. I would say that more realistically, they're going to have to clean house, and the more time they waste, the less time you have to actually win and rebuild the trust of members. Like, all of this has that distinct air of zero-sum game. If you don't act now, you're losing time later. Likewise, if you're not going to fight for percentage points, the owners are going to take them. Likewise, as if you're on a roster, right? Like it's it's the business of this is so I mean, maybe it's the most obvious part of this.

47:51It's so obviously cutthroat that the whole idea of we're not going to go on the offensive. and more than that we're going to share our playbook with the opposing team which is what the NFLPA has basically been doing is I just don't, I can't begin to defend that

48:12Robert Mays: I was going to ask you what you think should happen next, like what do you think is the ideal path forward for the PA and to hear you say it there, you feel like changing leadership, trying to get this switched and kind of change the direction of things as fast as possible in order to get your footing back before those CBA discussions start, you think that's the best path forward? Well, I think about it this way, right? There's that sports dot experiment of like, what does my opponent want me to do? And I just think the NFL loves, outside of the leakage of this document, they've loved everything this regime has tried.

48:48I think you want to be friendly? You want to suppress embarrassing things with us? You want to put your executive director on a board that is in some sort of financial, mutual, beneficiary relationship with us? Great. Great. So to me, like, really, I think the answer at a union is a democratic function. I think what should happen next is people should be aware of what their leaders are doing, and they should vote with full awareness. I thought it was funny, Mays, that, you know, you're just starting to see the trickle, right? Like J.J. Watt quote tweeting, you know, like, you know, talking a bit of shit about this press release.

49:37Chris Long talking about how he thinks J.C. Tretter and Lloyd Howell have been conducting themselves is unforgivable in terms of these positions that are so, frankly, are positions that are meant to be held by honorable men who do things for a greater good. Like that's what it means ideally to be a union leader. I would say that I am hopeful but pessimistic that I'm going to feel like anything but a guy taking crazy pills who is super knowledgeable about something that doesn't affect me but affects the people that I'm reporting about. And there I'm like, well, that's not so different from a political reporter in America, I guess.

50:18Robert Mays: Yeah, I think that whatever happens, that the rebuilding of that trust from every single direction and how this has gone over the last year or so with the decision to suppress the information and then just with the transparency process with picking him as the executive director and then everything that's gone down with how they've tried to handle all of this. I think that's going to be an uphill battle. And this is always an uphill battle. I think that's the most frustrating part about this is that the PA is on the defensive all the time anyway. and the idea that so many, we have so many examples here of them not putting their best foot forward and properly representing and fighting for the players.

50:53Robert Mays: If I was a player, it would be incredibly frustrating to see all of this and we'll see ultimately what that collective frustration leads to as they kind of sort through how they're going to make this decision. Yeah, look, if you want to just check out and say, you know, I'm taking a nap for the next five years, you may wake up and nothing meaningful will have changed, right? You'll get an 18th game you'll be in this case playing an 18th game you know and maybe that's just a fait accompli that you've made peace with and you're like look we don't have a lot of leverage here like what's the point of any of this and pessimism in that case is justified I just think that before you just surrender to the inertia of that just understand that your status quo doesn't need to be this much of a clown show I just think that owners when they come to the table in 2030 would love to see lloyd howell across the table i mean it's gonna be hard why make it harder exactly you can't you can't find someone someone who is i don't know not gonna do any of the half dozen things we've said which feel insane like just feels like it's a pretty good job six jobs yeah it's like what what what if what if you got somebody whose main activity was this thing, you know, maybe that, maybe that'd be a good idea.

52:17Robert Mays: Yeah. For three and a half million dollars a year. Pablo Torre, sincerely appreciate the time. And thank you very much for helping us shine a little bit of light on all this stuff. Please tell people where they can check out all of the work that you guys are doing over on, over on Pablo Torre finds out. Yeah, we're on YouTube. Pablo Torre finds out we're a podcast. I have a sub stack www.pablo.show. we are on all platforms hoping that uh you know the algorithm sun god shines upon us so please help us please help us get some sunlight shined i know how that goes know how that goes very well pavlo torrey thank you very much we'll chat soon thank you guys appreciate you all right guys that's all we got for today thank you so much to pablo for his time we will be back with two more shows this week i am back in the country very excited to get the ball rolling as we move toward training Camp's here.

53:07Robert Mays: For now, that's all we got. Appreciate you guys listening. We'll talk to you very soon.

53:36Robert Mays: That's 5 % cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to Discover. Terms apply. See discover.com slash 5 for details. With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5 % cash back at different categories each quarter on up to$1 ,500 in purchases. That's 5 % cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com slash five for details. Hi, I'm Jack Crivechi, Kramer host of The Best One Yet.

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