Journalism sucks.
That’s what I told Pablo Torre at the end of our third (and probably not final) collaboration on the misadventures of the NFL Players Association.
(Here’s episode one. And episode two.)
Journalism sucks because journalism is hard. It takes effort. A lot of it. There’s not always (or not often) a financial incentive to spend the time and effort contacting this source and that source and working on this person and that person to become a source and to convince trusted sources to trust the reporter sufficiently to turn over very sensitive information and to piece it all together into a narrative that is both accurate and interesting.
It is, as I told him, exhausting.
We taped the latest foray on Monday. Roughly two hours of conversation were distilled to half of that for a Thursday morning release. That was Hall of Fame game day for NBC, so it’s taken me a little while to circle back to it.
Here are my biggest takeaways from the sequel to the sequel.
First, the lingering federal probe of the NFLPA resulting from its involvement in OneTeam Partners is far from over. OneTeam, essentially an NIL repository for pro athletes, has mushroomed into a $2 billion business with stated aspirations to quintuple that. With so much money comes the temptation to siphon it off, particularly for those who may have a pattern and practice of grabbing any and every dollar they can.
This is what happened. The NFLPA, which owns 44.5 percent of OneTeam, has four seats on the board of directors. Two come from the NFLPA and NFL Players, Inc. Two come from private industry.
As the story goes, the two from private industry wanted to be paid for their service to the board. (They previously weren’t, and still aren’t.) That prompted an effort to devise a way to create a legitimate method for paying them — along with the two other NFLPA-appointed board members. One of whom was former NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell.
In June 2024, the OneTeam board of directors passed a resolution implementing a plan, vetted and approved by multiple outside law firms, to provide a tangible benefit to the unions involved in OneTeam, with those unions then deciding whether to keep the benefit or to convey it to the individuals providing services to the board of directors, as compensation for their work.
The plan landed on the radar screen of the federal government after someone filed an anonymous whistleblower claim with the National Labor Relations Board regarding MLBPA executive director Tony Clark. One of the specific complaints focused on the convoluted OneTeam compensation program.
That sparked an effort by the NFLPA to hire an outside lawyer to investigate its own role engineering potential payment to Howell (and others) for providing services to the OneTeam board, even though (ostensibly) Howell’s job as executive director already included serving as the OneTeam board chairman.
While OneTeam itself isn’t a target, the feds continue to explore the situation. The two key questions, as we see it, are these: (1) how exactly did the compensation issue arise?; and (2) why was the June 2024 board resolution later abandoned?
At one level, it’s hard to believe that a potential effort to bamboozle the NFLPA into giving Howell more money for the job he was already paid to do would be reduced to writing. At another level, it’s hard to believe Howell reportedly charged strip-club expenses to the NFLPA.
Basically, once a set of facts takes on the feel of a Coen Brothers film, it’s impossible to rule out further Fargo-style moronity.
As the OneTeam compensation program goes, it likely boils down to whether there are text messages or emails that are damning to Howell, and possibly others. Would it be ludicrous for such communications to exist? Yes. But, again, we’re firmly in the realm of Joel and Ethan Coen.
The episode touched on other issues relating to the events that have consumed the NFLPA, including the hiring of Howell in June 2023 and the selection of Jalen Reeves-Maybin over Kelvin Beachum to be the NFLPA president in March 2024.
The potential theme that emerges from the three episodes is, for me, this: Someone apparently wanted to stack NFLPA leadership with people who could be controlled. People who wouldn’t ask, or couldn’t formulate, questions that would push back against the things that Howell and/or former NFLPA president (and now-former NFLPA chief strategy officer) JC Tretter wanted to do. Beachum, for example, may have been a superior candidate to Reeves-Maybin. But Beachum, as Pablo reports, was asking questions about OneTeam.
Whether it was deliberate or accidental, the effect of creating a top-secret approach to union matters was to enable potential (or actual) abuses to occur undetected and unchallenged.
And here we are. Howell abruptly resigned, on the brink of ESPN releasing the strip-club expense-report story. And that was preceded by reports regarding the OneTeam issue, a hidden collusion ruling that should have been used as a sword by the union, and Howell’s cartoonish conflict of interest arising from a paid side gig with a private-equity firm that is in bed with the NFL.
The probe of the NFLPA’s effort to pay Howell and others for OneTeam work caught the attention of the federal government. The inexplicably hidden collusion ruling sparked my unofficial partnership with Pablo Torre. ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler then joined the fray.
The snowball grew. Howell resigned. Tretter resigned. The federal investigation may be expanding.
Either way, there are still plenty of questions to answer, regarding both how the NFLPA got here and where it will go next. And, yes, it could culminate in yet another collaboration between PFT and PTFO.
FML.
