The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors and attitudes a secret, even going to court to defend their right to keep their respective and collective sweatshop prerogatives private. Or at the very least, they sued to prevent the NFL Players Association from releasing the results of its annual players survey, which gave letter grades to the league's 32 rendering plants.
Yeah, that secret kept well.
A story by our much beloved and stealthy Comrade Emeritus Kahler, currently slumming it at ESPN, released part of the survey anyway, because every secret is just a whisper to be amplified later. What results she provided indicated that the Miami Dolphins are the best team to work for, provided you're not picky about your mood on Sunday evening. The Fish were rated for the third year running as the team that provides the best working environment, and yet their results remain deeply in the meh-to-feh range; with most projections for the 2026 season putting them in the rank-to-stank range, they'd better keep the thread count up in those table linens.
That split between quality of life and quality of on-field product is the beauty of this survey. For players, it's a useful guide to working conditions; for the rest of us it is just inconclusive voyeurism and an opportunity to daydream about the NFL's foremost salad bars. It's fun to find out that the Pittsburgh Steelers are an absolute mudslide as a workplace, and that includes their field, or that the Arizona Cardinals and Cleveland Browns maintain their commitment to being drags on their communities and ballast in the standings to their day-to-day operations. Less fun, but more illustrative, is the chance to see how the players feel about the medical care they receive from their bosses. On that alone the survey should be a (public) staple of every offseason, if only to break up the monotonous sludge of mock drafts and combine results.
But the owners went to court to suppress the union's annual public release of the findings because they didn't want to be embarrassed by what that survey revealed about their general working practices. It is instructive, for example, to learn that New York Jets owner Woody Johnson was the owner most publicly unhappy with the union releasing their findings each year. This is in keeping with his general regard for quality control in the workplace, but makes something of a contradiction given that he's apparently fine with the league releasing its weekly results and standings. The owners won a grievance against the union over releasing the survey results to the league's general customer base, and yet it took remarkably little time for Comrade Kahler to get and print a summary of the results, proving if nothing else that nobody listens to Woody Johnson even in those rare instances when he is found to hold a legally defensible position.
And therein lies the survey's true value. It makes rich people momentarily uncomfortable and in some cases (we see you, Mikey Bidwill) look downright ridiculous, and on that alone it advances the general view that all publicity is good publicity. The NFL became a 365-day-a-year enterprise despite having only one-sixth as many game days, indicating if nothing else that they generally subscribe to that notion, at least as long as it isn't the employees offering feedback. After all, if they wanted constructive criticism from their workers, they would have fired them and gotten different workers. What do you think the draft is?
This creates the impetus for the other reason the leak of the survey is so deeply satisfying—namely, that you can't hide the news when you parade the rest of your business in public. The owners won the right for the survey results to be maintained in house, but that becomes a de facto conspiracy of about 2,000 people, and when you have a conspiracy of 2,000 people, what you actually have a news release wearing an Inspector Gadget trench coat. The union has the necessary deniability to satisfy the courts, while the owners still feel their shorts riding up their trousers. And who doesn't think that is valuable video fodder even in these tenuously pre-fascist times?
We just need to temper our appreciation for the survey itself while enjoying the fact that it is no more private than it was before. Video evidence is the best method of exposure, and in that light there is nothing quite as instructive as seeing the look on a young fellow's face on draft night when his name is called and connected to the Las Vegas Raiders. That brief flicker of quickly muted despair is worth a thousand player surveys, no matter how much Mark Davis or his current proxy Tom Brady may tout the quality of their practice fields or the sublime trout almondine on Thursdays. Fernando Mendoza may say all the right things and pull all the right faces on April 23, but the fun will be in looking to see if his joyful facade is at any moment broken by the realization that his career will be defined in large part by the frightful burden of being a Raider. It goes on like this, to Arvell Reese to the Jets with the second pick, or Francis Mauigoa to the Cardinals at three or Rueben Bain to the Titans at four, and so on down the rich litany of future knee injuries and unnecessarily contentious free agent negotiations. It all adds up to a rich reminder of the central reality of working at factory floor level in the NFL—surveys aside, you can hide but you can't run.
