A Major NFLPA Fumble

0:04Don Van Natta:Congratulations! You made the varsity, the podcast. My name is John Arand and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, I'm joined by ESPN's Don Van Natta, who has written a bunch of stories with Kalen Kaler all about the dysfunction in the NFL's Players Association. I was so eager to get Don on the pod, as it was his stories with Kalen that directly led to the resignation of Lloyd Howe as executive director just a couple of days ago. So on today's pod, Don and I are going to talk about strip clubs, sexual harassment, overbilling allegations, and of course, OJ Simpson.

0:47Don Van Natta:This is quite a tale. You're really going to like today's pod. But before I get to Don, today is Sunday, July 27th, and here's what I'm watching. It's all about Skydance's$8 billion merger with Paramount that will put David Ellison and Jeff Schell in charge of CBS. Now, here's the thing about CBS. The news division is in upheaval. Entertainment is in shambles. But sports, it just chugs along. In fact, I don't expect to see any significant changes at CBS Sports, at least not initially. In fact, the sports division is the one aspect of the broadcast network that Skydance executives really like. They really like the long-term NFL contract that runs until 2033.

1:31Don Van Natta:Well, actually 2029, because that's when everyone expects the NFL to exercise a clause in its TV deals that will allow it to renegotiate all of its media deals. Anyway, CBS carries March Madness through 2032. It's carried the Masters for 70 straight years. 7-0, you heard that right. It first started carrying the Masters way back in 1956. It has PGA Tour rights, college football. If anything, Skydance is going to cause CBS to be more active in trying to pick up rights. You know, baseball and the NHL, those are a couple of sports that are going to see their rights come up in the next three years.

2:10Don Van Natta:Back to CBS Sports. Sean McManus ran the division for more than 27 years. He retired about a year and a half ago, and the division is now being run by David Burson, who spent more than a decade at Sean's side as his number two. Burson is well-known, he's well-liked, and he's well-respected by just about every league and conference that's out there. So if you subscribe to the theory that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, which I think both Ellison and Shell do, then expect CBS Sports to continue running as is. But even if it was broke, let's say the changes needed to be made and they don't, I still wouldn't expect anything to happen anytime soon because there's plenty at CBS that's already on fire.

2:57Don Van Natta:And sports, that's going to continue to be a drama-free place for the network. Now, let's get to Don Van Nadeau. Don Vanada coming back to the pod, just a voluminous number of stories that you've been writing on the NFLPA and all of the problems going on there. In fact, you have this one great story about parking spots that Lloyd Howell wanted. You know, it was two spots. He wanted it one spot because he didn't want his Porsche to be dinged. And he wanted also he wanted it to be numbered 32 after OJ Simpson. Such great stories that I want to get into. I want to get into the nitty gritty. But my first question for you, having read all of these stories, is everything that I have been hearing for the past two years from league sources and from team sources is that, you know, 18 games is a fait accompli.

3:59Don Van Natta:The number of international games, you know, it's going to increase from 10 to 16. And those almost aren't even bargaining chips anymore. You know, they're just things that the league really believes is certain to happen. With the changes going on at the NFLPA, what does this do to those negotiations? Are we back at square one? I don't get a good sense on where we are right now. Well, we very likely, John, are back to square one. 18 games was seen as a near certainty, not just by Roger Goodell, but by owners around the league that I had been talking to. In our story that we did this past Tuesday that I did with Kalen Kaler, we have two owners independently in the summer of 2024 saying that they believe that 18 games was a certainty.

4:48Here's why they believed it. Because Lloyd Howell Jr. said it. He said it out loud to the Athletic in the summer of 2024. He said, 18 games would be great. Who doesn't want more football? Which is a remarkable statement for the head of the National Football League Players Association to say on the record before any negotiations start. The very best leverage you have as an NFLPA union head is 18 games. And so, Howell is saying out loud that he wants that without ever getting any concessions. And he said it again to the Washington Post. And that concerned a lot of people because my reporting shows, John, that he never spoke to any players about whether they wanted it.

5:33And he had to walk those comments back at the Super Bowl, this past Super Bowl in New Orleans at the press conference. And he said, well, well, wait a minute. 18 games is not necessarily a certainty. No one that I have talked to wants 18 games. So this is just a reflection of Howell being so pro-business minded, that was his background, obviously, being at Booz Allen as a top executive, including chief financial officer when he left after 34 years. And he said something that people that I've talked to who have worked for unions, union lawyers say, it's just a remarkable thing that he said. And so clearly he was somebody, I think that the owners and people on Park Avenue at the legal office said, okay, we like this guy.

6:16This is a guy we feel we can actually get a really good deal when the next CBA comes up. And that's clearly one of the problems I think that he had, that there was a disconnect between him and the players on probably the most important issue confronting the union and the league in the coming years.

6:33Don Van Natta:Underscores the whole chaos of his reign that you've documented so perfectly out there. Now, the collective bargaining agreement ends in 2031. So there's no real pressure to get this done. But again, the league and the owners and the teams, there really seemed to be a sense of, if not a brand new collective bargaining agreement, we would certainly open things up and get it done. And my read of this, just having covered this stuff for decades, I actually haven't looked into this specifically with my sources yet. But it seems like it's just not going to happen quickly, that this is something that's going to go closer to the 2031 deadline that they have.

7:21I think so. But John, one thing that is important to note is that if Lloyd Howell did not run into all these problems that we've been reporting about for the last two weeks, that's led to his very abrupt resignation, is that it could have been something on the table where the union decided to agree to 18 games prior to the expiration of the current CBA. I think that's something that the NFL and its owners wanted. I mean, as you know, there's going to be an opt out on the media deals coming up in 2029. And obviously, if you can get 18 games before you open up for a bidding frenzy with all of your broadcast partners and streamers, then there's a lot more value that you can unlock.

8:06So I believe from my reporting that the 18 games was something that Lloyd Howell and Roger Goodell were going to possibly do. And again, the fact that Lloyd said it so loudly and so clearly, and the important point is without consulting a single player and they had to walk back those statements six months later, uh, is I think one of the, you know, bigger embarrassing moments. Uh, and there's quite a few of them, uh, during his disastrous two-year tenure.

8:33Don Van Natta:Yeah. And in fact, the, the idea that the, uh, NFL is going to reopen its, uh, its media contracts in 2029, that still appears to be something that's going to happen. But I had reported just a couple of weeks ago that they were actually considering doing it even earlier than that and just sort of getting the networks on board with to just open it up and extend it on the far end there. Given all the chaos right now in the PA, that might not make a lot of sense for the league to do. Yeah, I think that's right, John. It's total chaos. And our reporting shows that there will likely be an interim executive director that the 32 player reps, the board of player reps will select.

9:18That person will likely be a sort of caretaker to get through these very tough times where there's a federal criminal investigation going on in Brooklyn. There is an outside counsel investigation going on. And there's a lot of issues, criminal and civil. And then there's also the possibility that some players could file a lawsuit against the NFLPA for withholding that collusion ruling back in January. All of the guys that signed deals in this off season have an option, and I'm hearing it's being explored, to potentially file a lawsuit against their own union. So that's another issue that we could see in coming weeks.

10:00So it's a really, really tough time. And whoever the permanent executive director is that will likely come in after this upcoming Super Bowl, has a lot of work to do to get the house in order and prepare for all these very important decisions upcoming for the players.

10:16Don Van Natta:In fact, your story that you did with Kalen, you talked about that sort of with the collusion coming out, there were senior people in the PA that he just said, oh, we lost and didn't actually see the ruling that came out. So when you talk about the secretiveness, it began and ended with Lloyd Hall, it seemed. It did. So Lloyd got elected, a completely unlikely choice because of his business background, in the most secretive election process in union history. The 32 player reps, when they showed up at a resort in Leesburg, Virginia, at the end of June 2023, John, they didn't know who the two finalists were.

10:57Usually in past elections, there's 30 days. The player reps have time to do some vetting, talk to their agents, speak to other people. But J.C. Tretter, who was the architect, he's now the former head of strategy that Lloyd hired. But at the time, he was NFLPA president. He was really the architect of all the secrecy, which led to Howell's election. And then the two years that Howell's in charge, there's secrecy at every step of the way where players are kept in the dark. And to answer your question more directly, that collusion ruling, this was a grievance that was filed about guaranteed contracts that an arbitrator heard and ruled for the league.

11:41But there was a lot in that opinion that any NFL PA executive director could weaponize against the league and a lot of information that, in fact, there was conversations among owners that appear that there was some collusion to keep guaranteed contracts down. That particular ruling, there was a confidentiality agreement struck between the union and the NFL to keep it private, keep it quiet from the players. Even J.C. Tretter didn't know about it. And what you asked about is Lloyd was talking to his player reps about a month later, and he said, yeah, we lost that. His predecessor, Demora Smith, is the one who filed it.

12:20It was a waste of time, a waste of money, and said nothing else. And so for months until June, that didn't come out. And there's many examples in Lloyd Howell's two years where faced with a choice between leveling with his players, telling his players what's going on and not telling them, he chose the choice of not telling them, which is in hindsight of great concern now to agents and players as they're sort of reckoning with his tenure as leader.

12:49Don Van Natta:In Lloyd's defense, again, per your reporting, one of the reasons that he got the job was he was effective in saying, let's stop being a thorn in the NFL side. Let's work with the NFL. A rising tide lifts all boats. So maybe that doesn't excuse him not being upfront with the players, but that does comport with how he sold himself to the people making the hire. He did. And now there are people in the world of labor unions that are offended by that. They're like, wait a minute, this sounds like somebody who at NFL headquarters on Park Avenue would love to have leading the union, right? I mean, you're right.

13:33And so that's -

13:34Don Van Natta:The nature of a union is to be a thorn in the side. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And say what you will about Demora Smith's tenure from 2009 to 2023, Lloyd's predecessor. There were two CBAs that he struck and they were for 10 years each, as you know. And a lot of people said that that was more friendly to owners than players in hindsight. And D has been roughed up for that, but Dee would weaponize everything and was always harshly critical of Roger Goodell on player safety issues, on concussions, on all sorts of things. We had the Ray Rice scandal in 2014. Dee was out there vocally raising all sorts of serious questions about the way Roger Goodell handled that.

14:16Lloyd was quiet pretty much other than saying 18 games is great. Who wants more football in his two years? He really didn't say much. And we're going to continue to report, Kalen and I about, you know, the legacy of that and, uh, and look at this one team partners issue, which I assume we might talk about at some point, which is still a problem for the NFLPA and the MLBPA. Um, but yeah, that's one thing that's really interesting about the reporting John that we found is the executive committee really bought into Lloyd Howell to the point when he resigned last Thursday night or a week ago, Thursday, um, and said, you know, he's out, they were begging him to stay.

14:56And the executive committee is these 10 guys. They decided who the two finalists were. They didn't choose him, but they were all in on Lloyd, even knowing that he had a conflict with the Carlisle Group and all these other questions that we raised in our reporting. They begged him to stay and they believed they made the right choice. And I think it was one of those things where you can't flunk out of Harvard because if you mess up, then Harvard has to admit you made a mistake. I think there's a little bit of that with the NFLPA. You can't flunk out of the NFLPA because if you make lots of problems, they have to admit they made a mistake.

15:30I think that's a little bit of what we saw last Thursday night as they begged Lloyd to stay and he still decided to go.

15:37Don Van Natta:Yeah. Of all the crazy things that you and Kalen reported, that is what really struck me. When he was trying to resign and the house was on fire, it's like that meme of the dog with the flames going on everything's fine here though we'll keep right i want to go into some of those details but uh let me take a quick break and uh come back and i'll ask you about them

16:10Don Van Natta:all right so don i referenced uh the parking lot um the incident uh early on you posted that on x And you said, and I'm going to quote now, this is one of the most mind-boggling things I've come across in my long investigative reporting career. To me, there are also three or four other mind-boggling things that you have there, including visiting a strip club and spending thousands of dollars. I guess he says that it was out of his own pocket. But it was union money. Yeah, yeah. Why did he resign? You come across a dozen reasons why there were conflicts and why he could have resigned. Was there one specific stone that just pushed this over the edge and created the landslide?

16:56Yeah, I believe it was the strip club receipts that we were able to get our hands on. So a week ago, Thursday afternoon, we had heard rumors in the reporting for about a week that Lloyd Howell had visited strip clubs while on union business. and the suggestion was made to us on background that potentially union money had been spent on some of these trip club visits. I got a lot more details Thursday afternoon about them, specifically about a trip with a car service in Miami from the airport. We can talk in more detail about it. And also a trip during an NFLPA summit just this past February in Atlanta.

17:37And so I started raising questions directly with the union Thursday afternoon. And I'm told within a few hours, Lloyd decided to quit. Now, whether or not he made the determination that if he quit, we weren't going to write about them or not. But in that evening, Thursday evening, as he was meeting with the executive committee members who were begging him to stay, I actually did obtain the receipts, as the kids like to say. the actual documents from internal, the internal documents from the union that laid it all out. But Lloyd, even on his way out the door, was not completely honest with the executive committee.

18:16He said that he had spent some money out of his own pocket for these trips when, in fact, the documents that we obtained showed that he did not. And, you know, the one trip in Miami, the optics of it, John, were just so bad because basically all the receipt shows when you look at It is a car service that was hired for, I think it's$738.82, if I'm not mistaken. But that's a lot for a car service. And somebody inside the union, somebody young, looked at that and saw that Lloyd had been picked up at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport at 10.36 PM and was dropped off at home at 6 AM. But there was one other stop.

19:00And the stop was just an address in Miami Springs, Florida. So a young person in the finance department of the union Googled that address. And when the address came up, it was for Tootsie's Cabaret Strip Club, which is the largest strip club in the world at 76 ,000 square feet. It's literally a fortress. It used to be a warehouse that was turned into a strip club. And so the car sits outside apparently for seven hours while Lloyd's inside on a Thursday night going into a Friday morning. So when we received that and clearly union money went to it, whether Lloyd reimbursed it after being caught up in it or not, you know, the optics of that are were quite bad, to say the least.

19:47And then we found another receipt for twenty four hundred dollars, as I said, in this event in February. to the Magic City.

19:54Don Van Natta:It was for$2 ,426. Okay. Right. $2 ,426. And that was to a trip, an excursion during this NFLPA summit in February with two employees of the union that Lloyd went with. And there were lots of cash withdrawals at the strip club there in Atlanta, the Magic City Strip Club of a couple hundred bucks or 500 bucks. And that was also put in, but not by Lloyd, by another employee. But Lloyd did get a small amount reimbursed there. So when we had those actual documents that night and we laid it all out on Friday, as I said, I think that that's what was the last straw. Well, it's not that I think it. I know that that was really the final straw that pushed Lloyd out of the union that he decided to move on.

20:46Don Van Natta:Your whole story, well, not your story, Lloyd's whole story is, again, I keep coming back to the word of chaos, you know, just keeping players in the dark, really kind of, you know, somebody who works for the Carlisle Group is working for a PE firm that's looking to invest in teams is supposedly now dealing with, you know, player issues and advocating for players. It's a tough spot to be. When you bring up the strip club and you bring up the car service. If you were to sort of step back, what does this speak of in terms of the way that Lloyd Howell ran the PA? That's a great question. You step back, and this is a lot of reporting also that Kaylin, Kayler, and I did on this run of stories over the last two weeks.

21:40And it's Lloyd Howell saw this almost and approached it almost as a part-time job in the sense that we heard from people inside the building, the NFLPA is headquartered in Washington, DC, that he was rarely there. This is a guy making$3.4 million a year as the NFLPA executive director. And there was only a few days a month, some months that he was in the office to start. There were times when people, top lawyers in the union needed to reach him right away for an important piece of business. And it took them a day or a day and a half to reach him. And I know you asked me about the parking garage.

22:21That anecdote to me speaks to a lack of seriousness in his leadership because very early on, Lloyd decided he wanted to turn one parking space into two. And this is a parking space in the parking garage there. And the reason is he didn't want his Porsche Cayenne Turbo to be dinged by other cars. But the really odd thing about it, John, is he decided that he wanted new numbers on the ground and he wanted number 32 to be his new double parking space. And that was an homage to OJ Simpson, which as I understand it, was a hero of Lloyd's when he was a kid. And so I spoke with Craig Jones, the longtime director of security of the NFLPA who explained all this to me.

23:13He had no idea why 32 was for OJ and maybe not for somebody more iconic running back like Jim Brown. But Mr. Jones is sort of a legend in the office there. He's been there since back in the Gene Upshaw era. Mr. Jones is a former security guard or security guy for Sugar Ray Leonard. And anybody who's ever been at the NFLPA headquarters, I've been there many times over the years, gets to know Mr. Jones. And he thought it was odd as well, obviously, and helped confirm it for us. So all of that, again, raises questions about his leadership, how much time he actually spent in the office. And this was an open secret inside the union and that people were telling Kalen and I about as we were doing this run of reporting.

24:00And so I think the strip clubs fit into that. I want to say one other thing about the strip clubs. I spoke to a couple of former Booz Allen executives, John, and they said that Lloyd had an issue when he was at Booz Allen back in 2015. And he went to, I was told, to a strip club in New York City with a colleague who expensed it. The colleague got fired over it. And it was a senior person at Booz Allen. And Lloyd got in a little bit of trouble for it. Apparently, it was reprimanded, but nothing more than that, which is what I was told. And just a year after that, he was promoted at Booz Allen to be the chief financial officer.

24:36So that's a warning that Lloyd got with his behavior that he escaped from. And then a decade later, he's doing the same thing as the head of the National Football League Players Association. So again, I think that raises a serious question. You had this issue once, you escaped it and maybe thinking he could escape it again a second time.

24:55Don Van Natta:Yeah. And a warning. And you also had in there during During his interview process, he was asked about a sexual harassment claim that was, I was confused whether it was levied against him or just was part of the company that he was working with at the time. No, it was a lawsuit against him by a top executive who worked at Booz Allen. He was a defendant in the lawsuit, was filed in 2011, and it was not settled until 2015. By the way, when that strip club incident happened and I was told that that lawsuit was still pending and it was suggested to me by one of my sources that perhaps that was in the frame and the thinking of how they handled any punishment for Lloyd because they still had this open sexual discrimination and retaliation lawsuit specifically against Lloyd Howell.