Back in January, an arbitration case between the NFL and the NFL Players Association came to a quiet end. The case was initiated by a grievance filed by the NFLPA in 2022, which argued that NFL owners had colluded with each other to deny players fully guaranteed contracts. The arbitrator's final ruling, that the league's owners had not engaged in collusion, was public, but the details of his ruling were not. The arbitrator's full report was published today by Meadowlark Media's Pablo Torre, and it reveals how the NFL's corporate structure makes it possible for owners to openly discuss collusion without technically breaking any rules.
The full ruling, which Torre covers at length in his latest podcast episode, is primarily concerned with a March 2022 meeting between NFL owners and the NFL Management Council (NFLMC). This meeting occurred just a few weeks after Deshaun Watson signed an unprecedented five-year, $230 million contract with the Cleveland Browns that was fully guaranteed. The NFLPA argued that during this meeting the owners conspired to ensure that Watson's contract would be the last of its kind, and that evidence of this conspiracy can be found in part by the fact that quarterbacks Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, and Russell Wilson were not offered fully guaranteed deals upon entering free agency after Watson's deal was signed.
The arbitrator's ruling contains an email exchange between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and then–NFL general counsel Jeff Pash showing that they both wanted to use the meeting to warn owners about the potential downsides of signing players to guaranteed contracts. "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," Goodell wrote to Pash. The arbitrator's ruling then goes on to detail what happened at that meeting: Representatives from the NFLMC stood up in front of the owners and told them to knock it off with the guaranteed contracts. A talk track corresponding with one of the slides shown during the meeting concluded with an explicit message:
Lastly, if guarantees continue to grow in both amount and number of players, then there's a risk that they become the norm in contracts regardless of player quality. [Redacted—Privilege] That not only has the potential to hinder roster management but set a market standard that will be difficult to walk back.
Of course, all Clubs must make their own decisions. But continuing these trends can handcuff a Club in the future.
The arbitrator found that the NFLMC did more than dispassionately relay some facts about guaranteed contracts to the owners during this meeting. "[T]he NFLMC's message was not purely educational and informational as the NFL contends; it unmistakably encouraged the owners to reduce the trend of increasing player guarantees," the report reads. And yet, the arbitrator ultimately ruled that NFL owners did not engage in collusion by attending that meeting. Several owners successfully made such an argument to the arbitrator:
[New York Giants owner John Mara] explained that the NFLMC merely informs and educates owners so that they can discuss the issues with their general managers or cap managers and make the best decisions for their own franchises. In other words, presence at the meeting did not constitute acquiescence of the NFLMC's message—decisions are made once owners talk with Club personnel and gather more information about their individual situations. In short, attendance at the owners' session does not mean that the Clubs gave adherence to the scheme.
That may be a legally sound conclusion for an independent arbitrator to come to, but what goes unspoken in this report is how the owners' meeting itself was crafted in such a way as to insulate the owners from accusations of collusion, even as collusion was being openly evangelized. The key to the owners' defense is the accepted distinction between the NFLMC and the owners themselves. What is the Management Council, exactly? There isn't much public information available about who is on the council and how big it is, but it essentially functions as an in-house law firm for the league. It's most important role is representing the owners during CBA negotiations. It is a way for the owners to have their common legal interests represented without the NFL itself becoming a legal entity.
The NFLMC also, as this 61-page report demonstrates, makes it possible for owners to get in a room together, spend 20 minutes listening to a presentation that might as well have been titled "Everyone Start Colluding, Please," and not expose themselves to any legal trouble. There may be a legal difference between some faceless representative of the NFLMC making a recommendation for collusion and Robert Kraft standing up to say something like This Deshaun Watson disaster can't happen again, but is there much of a practical difference? What is the actual distinction between the owners speaking to each other and being spoken to by an entity that exists to be their voice, especially when every single owner went back home and did exactly what the Management Council advised them to do?
If nothing else, the publication of this report shows how attuned NFL owners are to using bureaucracy and arcane distinctions to get away with things. Like all good syndicates they understand the value of plausible deniability, and like all good cartels they know to never speak of the conspiracy with their own mouths.
The full report can be read below:
