The Draw Play

Last week I gave Pablo Torre some shit for his weird TMZ reporting about Jordon Hudson. This week, I must give him his commendation.

His recent episode features himself and PFT’s Mike Florio going over a very interesting document. It’s a must-watch if you care about this sorta thing. A quick summary: The NFL owners worked with each other to make sure nobody gave out fully guaranteed contracts in the wake of the Watson deal. No one else would get such high guarantees. This had an instant effect on Lamar Jackson’s contract negotiations as well as Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson. The players union obviously had an issue with that and claimed the NFL owners were colluding with each other to never offer such fully guaranteed contracts to prevent it from becoming a labor precedent. The NFLPA brought this case before an independent judicial arbitrator to get it sorted out. Despite mountains of what seems like clear evidence of collusion, there is no justice in this world and the NFL won the arbitration. For some reason, the NFLPA has kept the document recording this case under wraps, despite it offering massive leverage even in spite of the ruling. Why? Still not sure. Some speculate that it’s because the document reveals NFLPA leader JC Tretter insulted Russell Wilson and he didn’t want Wilson to know.

I don’t want to spend this post just repeating everything Torre and Florio go over. I’m not a lawyer and a lot of it is legal technical definitions I’m no good at explaining, you are better off just listening to the episode.

The one thing I find the most amusing in all of this is the fact that the Watson contract was so monumentally stupid it almost came around to doing some good. We were this close to Jimmy Haslam being such a moron that he closed his team’s first good window in 40 years to give a rapist the worst contract in NFL history, which backfired tremendously after Watson sucked, Baker left and got better, and the league almost lost massive damages because they had to collude to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Jimmy almost blew up the league as badly as he blew up his own team. I’m so mad the judge failed us. Of course the NFL gets off on lame technicalities. Never any justice.

Of course, now the document is out in the open. The case might have already been lost, but that’s still leverage. Maybe it wasn’t a waste. At the very least it should jettison JC Tretter’s career into the sun. The NFLPA deserves actual good leadership. They are already a pathetic union.

Genuinely very curious to see if Russ/Kyler/Lamar or anyone else takes action on this. We could have some backroom shakeups. We probably wont see much publicly, but you have to imagine agents and players are fuming behind closed doors right now.