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.
It’s been a strange couple of days on the mean streets of #Scooptown.
Major media outlets — and prominent NFL reporters and insiders — have ignored or downplayed the reporting from Pablo Torre (and PFT) regarding the 61-page ruling in a landmark collusion case. Beyond the NFL getting caught with its hand pressed to the bottom of the collusion cookie jar, the NFL Players Association has inexplicably failed to use the decision as a multi-bladed sword against the league.
With the exception of Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports and Albert Breer of SI.com/Prime Video, none of the prominent NFL insiders or reporters have touched the topic. And no one seems to be trying to advance the story, despite the existence of plenty of meat on the collusion bone.
Meanwhile, the NFL and the NFLPA continue to be silent. If anyone is asking them to talk, no one is reporting that they’ve failed to respond or said “no comment.” The people who cover the sport are allowing both sides to remain silent, with no pressure or scrutiny to explain themselves.
These voices who cover pro football for a living should be demanding something, from both parties. Issue a statement. Release the full decision, with exhibits. Anything. Instead, those whose bread is buttered directly or indirectly by the league are, unfortunately, abdicating their duty to pursue truth.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. While the pissing and moaning from the league and the union regarding our reporting has been minimal, they’ll surely make a chess (or checkers) move at some point. Perhaps they’ll recruit one of the reporters who are otherwise ignoring the story to be the vessel for leaking something that potentially pushes back on what has emerged. Our guess is that one or more of the reporters who have enabled the league’s and the union’s silence in this matter will gladly do it.
Still, the only thing the NFL and NFLPA should be doing at this point is releasing the decision. And the union should be doing much more than that. They should be holding a press conference to explain the ramifications of the ruling. They should be having strategy sessions with players, agents, and lawyers for planning future legal attacks on actual or suspected collusion. They should be (as one source with knowledge of the dynamics of the NFLPA suggested to PFT) taking the decision to the Department of Justice’s antitrust division and instigating a broad investigation of whether and to what extent the NFL is colluding in other ways. (Because it probably is.)
But we know how things work in 2025 America. Anyone who has been made to look bad by accurate reporting will try to turn the tables, both to demean the reporters and to distract the audience.
It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t surprise me at all if it does.
The NFL was caught with its hand in the collusion cookie jar, as to the issue of fully-guaranteed contracts for players. And even though the arbitrator erroneously accepted the NFL’s position that it was eating no collusion cookies, the NFL apparently has learned from the experience.
The historical collusion/coordination extends beyond players. For years, it has been believed that owners collude regarding coaching pay, keeping the salaries down in the absence of a union or a salary cap. Apparently, they were coordinating/colluding elsewhere.
Per multiple sources, the NFL has shared on an annual basis salary data for every non-player position — from head coach to G.M. to area scouts to dietician to assistant athletic trainer. The league broke the information down by listing the high, the low, the median, and the average for every job in every NFL team.
This year, that ended. And the official position is that the information is no longer being provided for legal reasons.
It’s smart. Previously, it was dumb. Compiling and providing salary data among 32 independent businesses is per se coordination/collusion. And the league has been susceptible to an antitrust claim (or class action) from non-player employees impacted by the effort to limit competition for employee services.
Of course, the unavailability of the spreadsheet doesn’t mean the practice of coordination/collusion has ended. The league is simply making it harder to prove it by eliminating what would be clear and obvious evidence of collusion.
For many, the news that the NFL was caught with its hand in the collusion cookie jar (despite the nonsensical conclusion that the teams didn’t follow the encouragement/directive to collude) was met with a shrug. And for good reason.
Many assume the teams coordinate/collude routinely. Many assume it’s perfectly fine to do so.
They assume that the “franchises” are part of a broader business. That the NFL is one large company with 32 branches that the league office controls.
But that’s not the case. The American Needle case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, found that the NFL isn’t a “single entity” but 32 independent businesses. Which means that any coordination/collusion among those businesses amounts to a violation of the antitrust laws.
So how can the NFL have a salary cap and a draft and limitations on player movement like the franchise tag? By participating in a “multi-employer bargaining unit,” the NFL’s teams have secured a limited antitrust exemption that allows them to make common rules regarding the 32-team player workforce.
The common rules appear in a Collective Bargaining Agreement. And the CBA expressly prohibits collusion as to the things the independent businesses are authorized to do, within the confines of the CBA’s rules.
Remember when the league punished the Cowboys, Commanders, Raiders, and Saints for treating the uncapped year of 2010 as uncapped? That was blatant collusion, since the CBA allowed the teams during the uncapped year to spend at will.
The CBA also allows teams to give players fully-guaranteed contracts. Once the Browns exercised their right to do so with quarterback Deshaun Watson, the league office (through the Management Council) urged the teams to hold the rope in order to prevent the Watson deal from becoming the norm.
And they did. (Even though the arbitrator ignored and/or explained away the evidence that they did.) The next three veteran quarterback contracts for established starters were not fully guaranteed. Which allowed the Watson contract to be regarded as a blip on the radar screen and not a game changer.
It all happened because the teams complied with the instruction to limit guarantees in contracts.
Think of it this way. As it relates to the CBA, the league and the union are engaged in a broader game of tug of war. As it relates to the individual player contracts, the teams aren’t supposed to band together.
Specifically, owners aren’t supposed to be thinking about what the owners of the other teams want. Owners are supposed to be thinking about what’s best for their teams only — even if it creates a problem for other teams.
The problem is that fans and media expect the teams to coordinate. And, frankly, the NFLPA has done a poor job over the years of effectively communicating to fans and media that coordination isn’t permitted.
By launching the most recent collusion case, however, former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith tried. The only problem is that, once the NFLPA secured a ruling that the league urged the teams to collude, current NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell stuck the 61-page ruling in a vault and locked it.
That doesn’t change the fact that the 32 independent businesses of the NFL received an instruction to collude and, in my own personal opinion, they did.
The collusion ruling could, depending on what the players choose to do, have ramifications for the NFL and/or the NFL Players Association. The collusion story is a different issue entirely.
Will it die on the vine in the wake of the looming hard reset of Fourth of July weekend, or will one or more media outlets assign reporters to try to advance the matter?
What do union sources think of this? How do members of the NFLPA executive committee feel? What about the board of player representatives? Individual players?
There are several specific wrinkles to which people involved in union management may have strong feelings, from the hiding of the decision for more than five months to the disparaging comments made by former NFLPA president (and current NFLPA chief strategy officer) J.C. Tretter regarding Russell Wilson.
Agents may have strong opinions. Lawyers may want to chime in. It won’t matter unless reporters seek them out.
The entire situation has all the earmarks of a (technical term) shitshow. Will the NFL and the NFLPA manage to steer the situation into silence, or will it sprout legs?
Much of it depends on whether the small army of people who cover the NFL will throw caution to the wind and chase things they don’t want us to know. I’ll bet the under, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
In the aftermath of the release of the previously-hidden collusion ruling, many are wondering whether there will be consequences for key players like NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, NFL Players Association executive director Lloyd Howell, and/or NFLPA chief strategy officer J.C. Tretter.
It’s possible that the collusion case claimed a victim before it came to light.
Some are wondering whether the situation contributed to the departure of NFL general counsel Jeff Pash, after more than 25 years with the league office.
Consider the timeline. Pash announced he’d be leaving in May 2024. Although the hearing in the collusion case didn’t happen until July and August 2024, the evidentiary hay was in the barn. Documents had been obtained. Testimony had been taken.
And it was a document generated by Pash that became one of the key pieces of evidence to prove that the NFL and the Management Council encouraged/urged/told teams to limit guarantees in player contracts in the aftermath of the Deshaun Watson fully-guaranteed contract.
Pash sent on March 20, 2022 — two days after Watson signed in Cleveland — the following email to Goodell: “What we don’t know yet is whether we are seeing what we saw the last two years, where the very top players (for example, [Von] Miller, [Aaron] Rodgers, [Matthew] Stafford, [Deshaun] Watson) got large guarantees but many other players (2d tier free agents and below) signed much more club-friendly deals. As the top of the market clears and the next tier starts to sign, we wil have a better sense of whether the large guarantees are extending further into the free agent pool and also how they are affecting club deals with their own players. It is certainly something that we will want to discuss at both the football ops sessions and with the owners as well.”
The Pash email elicited this smoking-gun response from Goodell: “Agreed but the [top] of the market is most of the dollars and if we wait to see how it falls, it will be too late to counter. Agree with raising with a big concern that this will erode a key aspect of our CBA that resisted guaranteed money except as clubs determined on their own.”
That last sentence is critical to proving an instruction to collude. After twice fending off efforts by the NFLPA to secure fully-guaranteed contracts for all players (in 2011 and 2020), the league didn’t want the teams to surrender, one player at a time, the thing the league had managed to collectively resist. With the Browns giving Watson a five-year, fully-guaranteed contract, the rest of the teams needed to hold the rope through enough quarterback negotiations to make Watson’s deal an aberration. (And it did.)
The problem for Pash is that he put his thoughts in writing. Which prompted Goodell to put his own thoughts in writing. Which, once it became clear that those two emails proved the league wanted teams to collude, may have prompted Goodell to blow a gasket over Pash sending an email that invited an incriminating response, in lieu of having the conversation in person.
Anyone who litigates knows that it’s so much easier to get to the truth when it’s in black and white. Witnesses will wallow in as much nothing-but-the-truth gray as they can, forcing lawyers to chase them around and pin them down. Some witnesses (without naming any specific accomplished sports executives) are very good at slipping from the grasp of an effective questioner. With the witness’s words in writing, it becomes much harder.
So it’s not unreasonable to think that, once Goodell realized the impact of the email he sent in response to Pash’s email, Goodell blamed Pash for accidentally setting a bear trap for Goodell by putting something in writing that never should have been in writing. If they’d had the conversation in person, both could have tried to dance around the inescapable conclusion in Goodell’s emails.
That said, Goodell arguably should have known not to put in writing what he put in writing, even if he was simply responding to an email from Pash.
This obviously is all speculative. But it’s more than plausible. Especially if Pash’s retirement wasn’t as voluntary as it seemed to be at the time.
Tuesday was an interesting day. More interesting days could be coming.
After the NFL and NFL Players Association managed to hide the 61-page ruling in a landmark collusion arbitration for more than five months, the cat is out of the bag. And some players are paying attention.
Multiple individuals who routinely interact with players tell PFT that multiple players have begun to inquire regarding their rights, and regarding their options both as to the league and as to the union.
As one source with knowledge of the collusion grievance told PFT, Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert would be the perfect plaintiff against either entity. The exchange between Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill shows coordination (i.e., collusion) between two owners regarding the contracts given to Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert and Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray.
The threshold question becomes whether Herbert is within the additional 594 veteran players for whom damages were sought in the collusion grievance, beyond Murray, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, and Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson. There’s a still-hidden list of 594 names that was attached as an exhibit to the 61-page ruling. The league would argue that, as to those players, the issue has been concluded.
The counter would be that discovery was taken only as to the three quarterbacks. From Herbert’s perspective, there could be a treasure trove of communications within the Chargers organization regarding whether Herbert will (or did) want a fully-guaranteed deal, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Deshaun Watson fully-guaranteed contract.
The other 593 players (if Herbert’s name is on the list) could make the same argument. They would ask, essentially, how did my rights get caught up in and extinguished by the three-quarterback collusion case when I never had a chance to prove that the clear effort to encourage collusion resulted in a specific effort by my team to restrict guarantees in my deal?
The union faces a different problem. The claim by the specific members of the NFLPA would fall under the federal duty of fair representation. And there would be at least two different potential avenues, as we see it.
For the 594 players whose rights were tied up in (and extinguished by) the existing case, they would (or at least could) argue that the union failed to properly develop and investigate their grievances by simply lumping them in with the three main claimants and without fully investigating the claims. For all anyone knows, there are internal smoking-gun texts or emails as to any, some, or all of the 594 players that would say, for example, “I know [Player X] wants a fully-guaranteed contract, but the Management Council told all teams to limit guarantees. We need to comply.”
For the players not within the group of 594 who were added (presumably unbeknownst to them) to the case, there’s a different issue. Because the union hid the outcome from them (and everyone else) for more than five months, their 50-day window under the Collective Bargaining Agreement for filing a non-injury grievance based on the key finding of the collusion case has expired.
This assumes that the NFL and NFLPA didn’t enter into a tolling agreement that would acknowledge their mutual effort to keep the collusion decision secret and give any other players who choose to proceed a fresh 50 days from whenever the decision sees the light of day. Neither the NFL nor the NFLPA responded to the question of whether a tolling agreement exists.
Our guess is that there’s no such agreement, and that the NFLPA has — in their effort for whatever reason to hide the outcome of the case — hampered if not defeated the effort of any other player who signed a contract before today from using the collusion ruling as the starting point for a grievance of their own.
So what will happen next? It’s up to the players. And it will be up to whether any lawyers out there see the merit in litigation against the NFL and/or the NFLPA and choose to pursue it on behalf of the players.
Until that happens, the NFL and NFLPA will (or should) be sweating out the potential ramifications of the players finally knowing about the thing that was inexplicably hidden from them.
The NFL and NFL Players Association managed to hide the 61-page ruling in the landmark collusion case for more than five months. Now that the cat has escaped the bag, neither management nor the union has anything to say.
The NFL did not respond to a request for comment on the collusion ruling. The NFLPA did not respond to a request for comment, either.
The league’s ongoing silence is not surprising. The ruling, despite the victory, makes the league look not great. It confirms the longstanding suspicion that ownership meetings are “collusion meetings.”
Also, the victory makes the Commissioner and the Management Council seem weak and ineffective. They wanted the owners to collude, and the owners defied the directive. (Or “encouragement.” Eye roll.)
We think the owners and teams didn’t defy the “encouragement.” As evidenced by the fact that, after the March 2022 meeting, the once-is-an-accident of Deshaun Watson’s fully-guaranteed contract did not become a trend.
But System Arbitrator Christopher Droney didn’t see it that way. He accepted the predictable denials of those who had been caught redhanded, with a plan to tamper and — coincidentally — actual tampering. We firmly believe Droney got it wrong.
Far more surprising is the NFLPA’s failure to weaponize the ruling. It makes no sense for the union to hide what was, ultimately, a victory. They proved that the league colludes, or at least that it tries to.
What that means and where it goes from here will be a subject of further slow-time posts. Because we fully intend to milk this story from every possible angle.
Especially since, in the low tide of the offseason, there’s no bright, shiny object that they can use to distract us.
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.
Both sides were determined to keep it secret. Some in the media were determined not to allow that to happen.
With both the NFL and the NFL Players Association refusing to release a 61-page ruling by System Arbitrator Christopher Droney in the collusion grievance regarding guarantees in the contract of certain veteran players, two members of the media — Pablo Torre and yours truly — kept pushing. We had a friendly competition to see who could get it first.
Pablo won.
I’m glad he did. In the NFL media ecosystem, more than 90 percent of the “journalism” isn’t journalism at all. It’s positioning for advance notice of an announcement that inevitably will be made. The real journalism (and the only real journalism) in this space comes from finding out the things “they” don’t want us to know.
And they (here, the NFL and NFLPA) didn’t want anyone to know the outcome of the collusion grievance.
Although the NFL won, the NFL lost. As Droney wrote at pages 55 and 56 of the January 14, 2025 ruling, “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.”
In other words, the NFL wanted its member teams to collude.
That meeting happened only days after the Browns gave a five-year, fully-guaranteed, $230 million contract to quarterback Deshaun Watson. It also happened only two years after the NFLPA tried, for the second time, to make all player contracts fully guaranteed as part of the broader Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The league had fended off that effort, both in 2011 and in 2020. And the league didn’t want to concede full guarantees on a piecemeal basis, with one team at a time giving players fully-guaranteed deals until they became the norm.
The league ultimately won because Droney found that the evidence introduced at the 2024 hearing did not prove, by a “clear preponderance” of the evidence, that the teams accepted and acted on the encouragement of the NFL Management Council.
For anyone who has followed the inner workings of the league over the years, that’s an astounding conclusion. One that defies common sense. Why have a Management Council if teams are going to ignore the things they encourage the teams to do?
Some would say it’s stronger than encouragement. Some would say the encouragement of the Management Council must be followed.
We’ll have much to say about the evidence and Droney’s possible reasons for finding that, basically, the NFL was the gang that couldn’t collude straight. For now, check out the latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, with yours truly riding shotgun, for more about what one source with knowledge of the proceedings described as the most significant ruling in American sports since 1994.
And both sides managed to hide it from everyone. For months.
Indeed, even though the NFL won, it was caught with its hand in the collusion cookie jar. The league was saved only by the fact that Droney believed no cookies were consumed.
Despite the pervasive crumbs.
