Monday was the deadline to apply for the supplemental draft. The general belief in league circles is that, in the coming days, the NFL will issue a memo identifying the date of the supplemental draft and the players who will be in the supplemental draft pool.
There’s still an open question as to whether the NFL will reject quarterback Brendan Sorsby’s application. On Monday’s #PFTPM, Sorsby’s agent, Ron Slavin, was asked whether there’s any reason to think the league could decide to not let him in.
“I would hope not,” Slavin said. “I mean, if anybody reads the NCAA investigation, they went through all four years of Brendan’s bets. The conclusion was there’s never integrity of the game violations. Again, his bets at Indiana were from the dorm room, not on the travel roster. The minute he was on the travel roster, there was never another college football bet ever placed.
“What I keep hearing over and over and over is, ‘Oh, can I trust this kid on my roster? Is he gonna bet on games that he plays in?’ He had 35 starts in college football. He never bet on any games he played in. He never bet on college football once he actually was playing. Again, I think this was a situation where we’ve created 18-to-22-year old kids, if they’re gonna watch a game, they’re gonna put money on it. And at the time, that’s what he did. But he never did it again. And, I mean, this is a kid who literally doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke. He’s just a great kid who, you know, made a mistake at 18. He was getting crucified now, four or five years later.”
There continue to be two questions, as it relates to the league’s approach to Sorsby. First, will the league let him in the supplemental draft? Second, will he be suspended after he’s drafted?
Since Sorsby is not yet in the NFL Players Association, any effort to keep him out of the supplemental draft would be subject to a challenge in court. A suspension after he’s drafted would be processed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
For now, we wait to see whether the league will have a supplemental draft — and whether the league will let Sorsby enter it, or whether the league will make him wait until April 2027 to enter the NFL.
Before Mike Mayock became the G.M. of the Raiders, he had served for years as one of NFL Network’s primary voices in and around the NFL draft. Mayock recently shared past frustrations regarding the manner in which NFL Network staffed other aspects of its draft coverage.
“I think there are too many guys that just get used to — because they were such good players — having people give them things,” Mayock said on The Ross Tucker Football Podcast, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing. “And it was one of my really sore points at NFL Network. It used to drive me crazy when they’d bring in a guy for the draft that was a big-name guy, that was going to talk about his position, and couldn’t tell me three names in the draft.
“And I would be like, ‘What are we doing? Like, what’s important here?’ And the producers and all the people would be like, ‘He brings credibility.’ And I would be like, ‘What about Daniel Jeremiah, Charles Davis, and me doing all the grinding of the tape? Isn’t that all the credibility we need?’ And the answer was pretty much, ‘No, we need these names.’”
It’s not an uncommon approach. Some networks prioritize names over knowledge, sizzle over substance. They believe that having played the game, for however long or short of a career, leads to a perception of inherent expertise that supersedes years if not decades of study.
Why does it happen? There are several reasons for it. One is that the bar for educating a broad audience is low. If the information that is conveyed in basic, digestible sound bites can be communicated by someone with a bigger name, that’s better for the network.
Could someone else who didn’t play know more? Sure. But there usually isn’t enough real estate for the audience to listen to a big-name player and conclude, “This guy is clueless.”
Basically, the guys who made it on the field can usually fake it ‘til they make it with a microphone. And the presence of a big name also makes it easier to fulfill the overriding goal of leveraging those big names into bigger advertising revenues.
The hosting of the World Cup entails various direct and indirect costs for the 11 NFL stadiums staging matches. One practical reality is that the temporary installation of grass in buildings that use artificial turf for football undercuts the argument that grass isn’t an option in those facilities.
"[T]here’s always been multiple excuses made,” NFL Players Association executive director JC Tretter told Albert Breer of SI.com. “One of which was feasibility of, ‘Hey, it’s not possible, it’s an indoor stadium. We can’t grow grass here. It’s impossible.’ [The World Cup] has taken that out. It’s feasible. Now it’s really a choice.”
And the owners who choose artificial turf have chosen the path of least expenditure.
“[T]hat choice clearly comes down to cost,” Tretter told Breer. “And there’s two types of costs. One is the cost of upkeep and installation. But clearly they’re OK doing that for this event, they just seem not OK doing it for the actual employees they pay. And then the other cost, which kind of frustrates guys, is it’s the trade-off cost of potentially not being able to do other outside-of-football events the teams make money off of. And the players see none of that [money].”
The points are valid. Regardless, it’s now a collective-bargaining issue. How far will the players go to get the surface they overwhelmingly prefer?
“It’s not where I stand, it’s where our guys stand — 92 percent of our guys prefer grass,” Tretter told Breer. “It makes it easy for where I stand. . . It’s hard to find 92 percent of people that agree on anything, and we’ve got 92 percent to agree on what surface they prefer.”
The question is whether at least 51 percent will agree on the strategy for pursuing the issue on which 92 percent of them agree. Will the players make concessions elsewhere to get grass in all stadiums? Will they strike over the issue?
It’s one thing to have a preference. It’s another for that preference to become a sufficient priority to effect change.
Tyler Shough’s preparation for his first full season as the Saints’ starting quarterback includes a little help from the franchise’s most successful signal caller.
When Shough outlined his plans for the weeks leading up to training camp at the end of the team’s offseason program, he shared that he has been working with Drew Brees to set up time to work out with his teammates in San Diego.
“Drew is kinda helping us set up our QB/wide receiver throwing retreat,” Shough said. “We’re getting all the guys to come down there and just work and bond together. For me, it’s just kind of continuing to study the playbook and then just put my feet and my eyes in the right position. That’s my whole focus.”
Shough told Katherine Terrell of ESPN that Brees “might be there for a little bit,” but the main point of the gathering will be for the current Saints to hit the ground running as they try to build on a promising close to Shough’s rookie year.
The NFL believes that turmoil within the NFL Players Association has left the league’s business (as one source put it earlier this year) “constipated.”
An enema isn’t coming any time soon.
Speaking to Albert Breer of SI.com, NFLPA executive director JC Tretter made it clear that he knows what the league wants — and that he’s not prepared to engage in negotiations on those or other issues.
“They want 18 games,” Tretter told Breer. “They want 16 international games. They want to lower our revenue share. They want to have us pay for more of the costs of operating the business — socializing costs, privatizing profits. They’ve said all these things publicly at this point. And that’s a long list of really shitty things for players. . . . Play more, travel more, get less money, take or cover the costs of billionaires’ businesses and then not have upside to make as much money as you can, like, that is a list where everything goes in the wrong direction.”
The league’s desire for 18 regular-season games and 16 international games per year has become so established that it’s viewed as inevitable. And while 18 and 16 may happen sooner or later, Tretter isn’t on board with it happening soon.
As to shrinking the player’s share of money, Commissioner Roger Goodell mentioned that topic during the press conference following the owners’ May 2025 meetings.
“We did spend time today talking, at length, about areas of our Collective Bargaining Agreement that we want to focus on,” Goodell said at the time. “The two areas that we spent time on were really the cap system itself, the integrity of that system, how’s it working, where do we need to address that in the context of collective bargaining, when that does happen. That was a very lengthy discussion.”
So the NFLPA knows what the NFL wants. Tretter is in the process of figuring out what his constituents want.
“I’ve been clear to the guys, this can’t all be based around what the league wants,” Tretter told Breer. “Like, we as players need to figure out what we want, period. And I don’t think we’ve done a good job of truly knowing exactly what our guys want. My job is to go and figure that out and make sure I know, we know, and player leadership knows exactly where our membership stands, both as an entire group but also as individuals.”
So when will Tretter be ready to talk turkey?
“Right now, there’s just no timeline for when we would be ready,” Tretter told Breer. “And I’m not going to let an artificial timeline dictate that because in the end we do have a deal for another five years. So we have runway.”
Technically, they have five years of runway. The current CBA expires in March 2031.
Still, the league wants to get an expanded season and international footprint in place. The sooner that happens, the more money the players will make.
And here’s the inescapable reality. What the NFL wants and what the players want ultimately will be influenced by how determined each side is to achieve their goals. History tells us the league is far more willing to shut it down than the players are.
The clear imbalance in the willingness to use the nuclear option hovers over everything. For now, then, the effort to find out what the players want should include an effort to get them to understand that they may have to be ready to take a lockout — or initiate a strike — to get there.
Given the realities of the industry, most of the players who are currently on NFL rosters won’t be when the CBA expires. Thus, the messaging should extend to college players who are and will be earning NIL money over the next five seasons.
They need to be advised to start squirreling some of that cash away in the event that, come 2031, the members of the union will be ready to call the billionaires’ bluff and accept as much as a full season of not playing football, and not getting paid.
