System Arbitrator Christopher Droney had no choice but to find that the NFL tried to get its teams to collude regarding guaranteed contracts, given the black-and-white clarity of the evidence. Regarding whether the teams followed the league’s lead, Droney ignored strong circumstantial evidence.
Plenty of the evidence comes from the negotiations between the Broncos and quarterback Russell Wilson.
Wilson testified that, early in his discussions with the Broncos, he requested a seven-year, fully-guaranteed contract that would pay “around $50 million a year.” The Broncos, said Wilson, “didn’t blink.”
The trade that sent Wilson to Denver became official on March 16, 2022. In the following days, something changed.
“I would say shortly after [the trade], maybe within the next ten days or so, they started getting cold feet on this fully guaranteed thing,” Wilson testified in the hearing.
Coincidentally — or not — “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,” as Droney concluded. The encouragement happened on March 28, only 12 days afer the Wilson trade was announced.
Is it really a surprise, then, that the Broncos backpedaled?
The backpedaling continued through August, when the team was sold to the Walton-Penner group. After the sale became final, a deal with Wilson was pursued.
The Broncos, despite Wilson’s testimony that the team “didn’t blink” at the prospect of a fully-guaranteed deal, took the position that a fully-guaranteed contract like Deshaun Watson’s “was a non starter.”
During the talks, Broncos owner Greg Penner told other members of the Denver ownership group that “there’s not[h]ing in here that other owners will consider off market (e.g. like the Watson guarantees).” Later, Penner told his partners that G.M. George Paton “feels very good about it for us as a franchise and the benchmark it sets (versus Watson) for the rest of the league.”
Those comments are as powerful as the smoking-gun text exchange between Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill regarding the Kyler Murray deal. They are circumstantial evidence of the existence of an agreement among owners to hold down guarantees, and of a desire by Penner and the Broncos to comply with it.
Why else would Penner care about other owners and other teams when negotiating a contract with Wilson? When Penner was the CEO of WalMart, did he care about the impact his decisions regarding key employee pay may have on Target’s compensation structure for similar employees?
The evidence of collusion was right there. Droney blew it. There’s no other way to put it.
And the NFL Players Association continues to blow it by not publicizing the contents of the 61-page ruling.
The Broncos made Bo Nix the sixth quarterback off the board in the 2024 NFL Draft, but his ranking was a bit higher after his rookie season.
Nix piloted the Broncos to the playoffs while throwing for 3,775 yards and completing two-thirds of his passes over the course of the regular season. That performance quieted most of the debate about whether Nix would continue playing at a high level as a professional and it sparked some about how good he will get in the coming years.
Broncos left tackle Garret Bolles isn’t putting a cap on that upside or on how much he enjoys being part of the plan to keep Nix upright in 2025.
“Bo’s a tremendous football player,” Bolles said on NFL Network. “I’m so grateful I get to protect him and being his blindside protector, giving him all the time in the world. He’s a freak of nature. You look at the numbers that he put up last year, between him and [Jayden] Daniels, those were the two young quarterbacks in the league that’s gonna be very successful, and I have one of them behind me. His demeanor, his composure, his work ethic, just always wanting to get better, his arm talent and just the way he sees it, he has swag, man, he really does.”
Ending a long playoff drought meant that no one paid much mind to the Broncos bowing out of the playoffs after one game, but they’ll need to keep moving up in order to show real progress in the future. If they do that, Bolles will have plenty of company when it comes to admiring Nix’s talent.
The 61-page ruling in the collusion grievance contains plenty of fascinaring details. Several of them relate to the contract signed by Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson in 2022, after the trade that brought him to Denver from Seattle.
A deeper dive on the Watson negotiations and eventual deal is coming. For now, it’s important to applaud the instincts of then new-owner Greg Penner.
In contemporaneous notes created by Penner at the time, he wrote this: “2 years left on contract, why not wait?”
It would have been the smart move. Wilson always received new contracts with one year left on his existing deal. The Broncos could have given Wilson a year to prove that he can still cook, before burning millions on his next contract.
But the Broncos didn’t wait, committing $124 million to Wilson in full guarantees from 2022 through 2024. And they cut him in March 2024, before his $37 million injury guarantee for 2025 became fully guaranteed.
Still, the Broncos ultimately gave Wilson $124 million (minus the league-minimum $1.21 million he earned in Pittsburgh last year) for two seasons of so-so football. While not the same degree of disaster as the Deshaun Watson contract for the Browns, it was a very bad deal for the Broncos.
And the Broncos could have avoided it, if they’d simply acted on the instincts of their new owner and waited until after the 2022 season to fashion a new contract (if any) with Wilson.
The Broncos have announced their schedule for open practices at this summer’s training camp.
They will be holding 13 practices open to fans, although attendance will be capped at 800 fans per day because of the ongoing construction of the team’s new practice facility.
The first of the practices will be held on Friday, July 25 and there will be another one on July 26 as part of the NFL’s Back Together Weekend. The other open practices will be held on July 28-31, August 1-2, August 4-5, and August 12-14.
Fans at the August 14 session will also be able to see the Cardinals as they will be in Denver for a joint practice with the AFC West club.
From the moment System Arbitrator Christopher Droney signed the bottom of a 61-page written decision in the landmark collusion case, both the NFL and the NFL Players Association kept it secret.
The secret was finally exposed today, thanks to Pablo Torre. The next question becomes why both sides zipped their lips over Droney’s decision?
Torre and I delved into the subject during the latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out.
Although the NFL ultimately won, the NFL had every reason to keep the decision quiet. The case proved that the NFL tried to get its teams to collude. From the decision: “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.”
The NFL avoided what could have been multi-billion-dollar liability (more on that later) because Droney accepted the self-serving testimony of no fewer than eight owners that they didn’t heed the Management Council’s encouragement to collude. The document nevertheless includes more than enough evidence, in our view, on which a finding of actual collusion could have been based.
The best metaphor (or at least the best one my relaxed brain can come up with) is this: The league was caught with its hand in the cookie jar and with crumbs on its shirt. But because Droney didn’t actually see the league eating the cookies, he accepted as truthful their claim that they did not.
Keeping it secret had another benefit, which also will be discussed later. By hiding it for more than five months, the NFL may have prevented other potential victims of collusion (starting with quarterbacks who since 2023 have not received fully-guaranteed contracts) from pursuing a grievance of their own.
The far bigger question is why would the NFL Players Association not trumpet this ruling?
The union should have been shouting it from the rooftops. They’ve finally proved that which had been suspected for years — that the quarterly meetings are (as former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith calls them) “collusion meetings.” The details are unprecedented, and the takeaway is unmistakable.
With the Deshaun Watson contract lighting the fire for fully-guaranteed contracts, the league needed to put it out. Quickly. And the league (through the Management Council, with the blessing of the Commissioner) grabbed a hose and started spraying.
Even though Droney ultimately failed to connect the dots and/or apply common sense (in my opinion), the union proved that the league WANTED the teams to collude. That’s a massive finding.
One reason to keep it secret deals with internal union politics. New executive director Lloyd Howell is viewed as a business person who can secure gains through negotiation, not litigation. Smith, who filed the collusion grievance, was the wartime consigliere. With a ruling that tends to prove Smith’s approach works, Howell has no reason to do a victory lap with the fruits of Smith’s brainchild.
That’s just a theory. And if it’s accurate, it’s a mistake. It doesn’t serve the interests of the players. And it may have slammed the door on the ability of other players to parlay this partial (but significant) victory into a case of their own.
The other potential explanation comes from the fact that former NFLPA president J.C. Tretter criticized in text messages then-Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson for failing to parlay the Watson contract into a fully-guaranteed contract of his own.
The decision refers to Tretter’s criticism of Wilson. As best Torre and I could determine, Tretter at a minimum referred to Wilson as a “wuss.” Tretter also said this, I was told: “Instead of being the guy that made guaranteed contracts the norm, he’s the guy that ruined it for everyone.”
As Torre has reported, the union kept the ruling quiet in part to protect Tretter. If the former union president and current NFLPA chief strategy officer has designs on becoming the executive director after Howell (and some think he does), it does not help Tretter’s cause to have been caught making pejorative remarks about a member of the union.
Of course, that cat is now out of the bag. And one of the big questions going forward is whether and to what extent the union’s failure to use the collusion ruling as a sword against the NFL will have practical consequences for current NFLPA leadership.
