Tag: DeMaurice Smith

NFLPA Director DeMaurice Smith: NFL team doctors believe it’s safe to hold training camps

NFLPA director DeMaurice Smith said NFL team doctors told the player’s association they believe it’s safe to hold training camps

A conference call held on Friday between members of the Pro Football Writers of America and the leadership of the NFLPA covered many bases. One of the key takeaways I got from the call: the union got clearance from team doctors that it is safe to open training camps.

NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs George Atallah, and President JC Tretter repped the players’ association. Smith took the lead when the subject of reporting for training camp came up.

Smith stated that in a conference call with some NFL team doctors on Thursday, the message was that it will be safe to proceed with opening training camps as early as next week, per the doctors. He noted the doctors had “a couple reservations” about resuming work, but that their overall opinion is that there is no medical reason not to commence camps.

Both Smith and Tretter stated several times during the 90-minute call that “player safety comes first”, and Tretter expressed the concern of many players about traveling to camps. Rookies are set to report for the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans next weekend, with other teams set to follow in the subsequent week.

Earlier in the day, the Colorado Dept. of Health approved the Broncos plans for holding training camp and making accommodations for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Browns camp in Berea is subject to local pandemic jurisdiction, but as of now the state of Ohio has not barred the activities.

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What we learned from the NFLPA’s Friday conference call

Will the season start on time? Has the NFL established protocols to deal with the coronavirus pandemic? Here’s what we learned from the NFLPA.

On Friday, the NFLPA held a conference call with members of the Pro Football Writers of America to give the media a better idea of where the Players’ Association stands on discussions with the NFL as regards the safe start to a season, how a full season could possibly exist with spikes in coronavirus cases happening in multiple states, and where the two sides stand in the establishments of protocol.

NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs George Atallah, and President J.C. Tretter (who is also the center for the Cleveland Browns) were on the call representing the Players’ association, and Los Angeles Rams left tackle Andrew Whitworth also joined the call.

Here’s what we learned.

Many things are still held up in discussions between the NFL and the NFLPA.

As one might expect, communications between the NFL and the NFLPA are ongoing, and all kinds of things — from whether there will be a preseason or not (if you’re listening to the NFLPA side, bet against it) to the absolute safety protocols, to testing schedules, and all kinds of other things — are still up in the air as the two sides attempt to hammer everything out in an unprecedented environment. A fairly scary thought with training camp reporting dates coming up at the end of the month. As Smith repeatedly said, the idea is to avoid the quick answers in favor of the right answers. But given the number of things that need to be decided upon, and the timeframe as it stands, that’s going to require an inordinate amount of heavy lifting to start everything on time.

Some coaches are not taking coronavirus precautions seriously.

Early in the call, Tretter mentioned that there are a few coaches in the league whose responses have been that the protocols are too difficult to enforce, and implied that some coaches appear to believe in the herd immunity theory.

“We’ve had coaches say the protocols are too much to ask, coaches are coming forward and saying, ‘Everyone’s going to get sick, so we might as well all get sick together.’ Those attitudes can’t happen. There are consequences to getting sick.”

I asked Smith how teams and coaches would be audited regarding adherence to whatever protocols are put in place, and he told me that it could be similar to the 2011 season, when teams that didn’t follow the new rules regarding contact were penalized financially, or with reduced practices.

The NFL must do more than adhere to state and local guidelines.

Smith talked at one point about the need for team doctors to follow state and local guidelines regarding testing and other medical aspects of handling COVID-19, which could be a very dangerous thing for players in states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, where testing protocols have fallen far behind, and cases have increased as a result. There will be a joint task force to ostensibly hold teams accountable, but without an absolute set of rules in place, regardless of location, teams could wind up in a nightmare scenario in which players are testing positive, and local hospitals are already at capacity due to spikes in cases in the area.

“Close contagion” is the elephant in the room.

Tretter pointed out that as a center, he’s in the epicenter of the whole thing when it comes to contagion, and he brought up an specific scenario. Let’s say that one of his teammates on the offensive line tests positive. Tretter has been right next to that teammate, or one player over from that teammate, on rep after rep. And all of Tretter’s linemates have been blocking defensive linemen and linebackers rep after rep. Based on that, it doesn’t take much to envision an instance of massive positive tests — as Tretter said, from zero to 30 in a big hurry.

Andrew Whitworth already knows how contagious this can be.

During the call, Whitworth relayed a story in which a relative of his went to lunch with a friend and caught coronavirus without knowing. From there, Whitworth, his wife, and their children caught it. From there, Whitworth’s father-in-law caught it and had to be hospitalized.

“It was definitely a scary thing,” Whitworth said, “to realize how contagious this is.”

There is no absolute number of positive cases that could cause a team quarantine.

Peter King of NBC Sports, who has spoken with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Fauci, the director of the National Institutes for Health and the guy Donald Trump is supposed to be listening to when it comes to the pandemic.

Smith spoke about the potential for false positives and false negatives, and the potential for “over-quarantining” in cases like that. The importance is to test every player every day, so that doctors can determine how many people may have created a “viral load.” But there is no number of positive tests at this point that would automatically cause a total team quarantine.

“If you’re looking for heroes in this, you’ve found that guy,” Smith said of Fauci. But the lack of an absolute number is, like so many other things right now, caught up in discussions between the NFLPA and the NFL.

“What’s good for the country is good for sports.”

At the end of the call, Smith made a separate and overt statement, exhorting everyone in America to take the most obvious precaution.

“Going forward in this, we understand that we’re trying to make a lot of decisions in the best health and safety [interests] of our players. But I’ll tell you right now — we’re in a place where, very simply, what’s good for the country is good for sports. As simple as something like wearing a mask will have, probably, the most significant impact on whether sport returns in this country. And that’s not a political statement; that’s a common sense and scientific statement. And where I think our guys [the players] can be incredibly helpful in stepping out on a larger stage other than football is that nothing will bring fans back to our stadiums [more] than a simple decision across the country to wear a mask.”

Mr. Smith is preaching to the choir here at Touchdown Wire. As my colleague Mark Schofield recently and eloquently wrote, if you want football at all in 2020, wear a mask. It’s as simple as that.

As of now, no NFL players have decided to opt-out of the 2020 season

Despite the uncertainty of safety protocols, NFLPA’s DeMaurice Smith said no NFL players have yet decided to opt-out of the 2020 season.

The NFLPA leadership hosted a conference call with the media Friday morning to discuss the ongoing negotiations with the league regarding the start of training camps and the safety protocols teams will be required to have in place to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus, which is surging in numerous spots around the country.

The NFL and the players’ union are running out of time to agree on the specifics required to start the summer programs, including the exact number of preseason games to be played (if any), the size of the rosters, and the testing procedures for COVID-19.

But amidst all the uncertainty, Executive Director of the NFLPA DeMaurice Smith, said not a single player has yet elected to opt-out of the 2020 season.

Players could quickly change their minds over the next few weeks based on rising levels of the coronavirus in their locations and lack of confidence in the clubs’ plans to ensure safety.

The Texans and Chiefs rookies are scheduled to report to camp on Monday.

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DeMaurice Smith criticizes Russell Wilson and DK Metcalf for workout

NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith criticized NFL players for ignoring social distancing guidelines and working out together.

 

NFL quarterbacks Tom Brady and Russell Wilson recently made waves by practicing ahead of the 2020 season with teammates, even after NFLPA Medical Director Dr. Thom Mayer’s advice that players should refrain from group workouts due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Wilson posted a video to Twitter that displayed him practicing with wide receiver DK Metcalf in spite of Mayer’s warnings.

In response, NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith stated that the players participating in workouts with each other are being reckless by ignoring social distancing guidelines.

“Those practices are not in the best interest of our players’ safety,” Smith told USA TODAY. “They’re not in the best interest of protecting our players heading into training camp, and I don’t think they are in the best interest of us getting through an entire season.”

 

“All of the things that players may want to do during the offseason have a direct impact on how well we can negotiate protections for them once the season starts,” Smith said.

The Seattle Seahawks would do well to take heed of the risk of working out with teammates at this point in time and follow social distancing guidelines to the best of their ability.

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Chronology of NFL labor history from 1968-2020

The NFL has labor peace for the next 10 years. Another chapter in the book of labor agreements between the league and its players.

A chronology of NFL labor issues since the NFLPA was recognized by the league in 1968:

1968

Herb Weitman-USA TODAY Sports

In 1968 the National Football League Players Association was first recognized in writing by National Football League team owners. This occurred after the player members of the NFLPA voted to go on strike, intending to pressure owners to increase minimum salaries, pensions and other benefits for all players. In response, NFL team owners locked out the players who were on strike. After 11 days of work stoppage, the first CBA was reached between the NFL and the NFLPA. The agreement set a minimum salary of $9,000 per year for rookie players and $10,000 per year for veteran players. It also set aside $1.5 million of league revenue to be contributed to player pensions

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NFLPA’s DeMaurice Smith pens open letter after CBA vote window closes

An open letter from DeMaurice Smith explaining why he thinks the CBA proposal is the best chance for his constituency this round.

The NFL Player’s Association voted in new player rep officers this week. In the middle of the window to vote on the passing of the new CBA proposal from NFL owners, a new wave of representatives will steward the players executive committee, including new president J.C. Tretter of the Cleveland Browns. He replaced Eric Winston, who had been president since 2014 but was ineligible because he didn’t play in the league in 2019. In total, 11 new members were added to the committee.

It seems Tretter was elected due to his being moderate in the debate over whether the players as a whole should ratify the proposed bargaining agreement that was negotiated primarily by DeMaurice Smith, the NFLPA’s executive director. Smith, who worked on the current CBA as well, has been seen as the leader of sports least powerful union as the NFL shares the lowest amount of their revenue with its players compared to MLB and the NBA. The vote is largely seen as a referendum on his leadership. A passing will indicate most think he did the best for the players under the circumstances, a no vote saying he didn’t do enough.

A no vote will almost certainly result in a new executive director to move things forward in an effort to get a deal done prior to the 2021 season. That is when the current CBA expires and the first time the owners could lock the players out. An independent auditor has been tabulating the player’s votes and an announcement is expected sometime during Sunday morning. Before knowing his own fate, Smith decided to pen an open letter on his take on what he was able to accomplish in the negotiations, and released it via social media.

Smith paints the picture of what he thinks the CBA accomplishes and warns of potential economic downturns that might lead to less favorable deal options in the future, specifically invoking the current global pandemic that has halted sports games around the world.

The “other” Michael Thomas is up for NFLPA president

The NFLPA is voting on a new union president, which may be Giants safety Michael Thomas, not to be confused with the Saints wide receiver.

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Michael Thomas is a top candidate to be named president of the NFL Players Association, but it’s not the Michael Thomas that New Orleans Saints fans may be thinking of. The 30-year-old safety for the New York Giants made his first Pro Bowl appearance in 2018, and he’s received endorsements from prominent voices including Richard Sherman and Russell Okung.

The NFLPA counts 2,400-plus active players within its membership, with more than 8,700 former players relying on the labor union to negotiate benefits for them in retirement. Former Cincinnati Bengals offensive lineman Eric Winston has served as NFLPA president since his election back in 2014, replacing Dominique Foxworth; the union president works with executive director DeMaurice Smith to spread information and coordinate votes within the sprawling union membership.

Thomas has been nominated against three other candidates, including Okung, who withdrew his candidacy and stumped for Thomas. The remaining two options are Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker Sam Acho and Cleveland Browns center JC Tretter. If Thomas wins, expect some light confusion among fans mistaking him for the 27-year-old Saints wide receiver.

However, there shouldn’t be any immediate impacts on the in-progress NFLPA membership vote on a new collective bargaining agreement. The union’s board of representatives agreed to extend the voting deadline to 11:59 p.m. ET on Saturday, March 14, giving all players opportunity to make an educated decision before casting their ballot. Whether it’s Thomas, Acho, or Tretter in the president role, they’ll be charged with managing the transition to a new era should the CBA be ratified.

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NFL players should never agree to extra games, but owners will coerce them to anyway

The only sensible thing to do is play less football, unless you happen to own a football team.

The NFL and the union representing the league’s players appear to be nearing the end of negotiations — players will vote on the deal soon — for a new collective bargaining agreement that will determine how the business of the NFL is run for the foreseeable future.

As with most CBA negotiations — or anything complicated, really — you’ve probably tried to pick up just enough information to have a take on the matter. This is natural of course: a CBA negotiation of this sort is insanely complicated, and unfolds over the course of many years. To truly understand it you’d need to have some legal background and be a part of the process.

So we’re all sort of left grasping for “takeaways.” To know “what it all means.” Thankfully NFL owners made it easy this time around: Their primary goal was to add games — and therefore revenue — while conceding very little to the players who would have to play those games.

And frankly, the NFLPA should have never let it get this far. Adding games to the NFL schedule — the proposal agreed upon by the league and player reps, but not by the full body of around 2,000 players, adds a regular-season game and two additional playoff teams — is the wrong thing to do.  It’s the wrong thing to do for current players who will be asked to absorb more hits, and it’s the wrong thing to do for the sport of football moving forward.

Of course the idea of more games is great. Football is great! It allows for many different kinds of athletes — huge and powerful, small and slivery, pocket QBs and darting QBs (who can still throw it, like Lamar) — to come together to play at once our most complex and brutal sport.

But it is truly brutal. There are dozens upon dozens of families that have been torn apart by a former football player’s crippled memory, debilitating headaches and violent outbursts — all likely caused or exacerbated by brain injuries incurred while playing and practicing football.

The science surrounding CTE remains young. Perhaps someday we’ll have answers for why Aaron Hernandez’s 27-year-old brain was riddled with the degenerative disease when some former players show no signs of it. But we’re not there yet.

The sensible thing to do, then, is to safeguard the game by creating an environment where players take fewer brain-jarring hits. And to the NFL’s credit, it has taken steps in that direction. The game is less violent than it once was. New rules make off-season workouts and pre-season practices safer for players — and the proposed CBA would improve those conditions.

Those changes didn’t buy extra games, though. That should have been just the start; the NFL, if it really cared as much as it says it does about player safety, would be eliminating more pre-season games (the current proposals drops that number from 4 to 3) and adding bye weeks (the proposal adds none). It would be encouraging the banning of tackle football prior to the age of 14. It would be acknowledging that what we know about both the short- and long-term damage caused by football now is incongruent with the idea that it’s healthy or normal for the human body to be used to play football for even 16 weeks (plus camp and playoffs) a year (a lesson Andrew Luck and Luke Kuechly pointedly taught us recently.)

Adding games is the worst possible message … and it was also inevitable. NFL owners, under the leadership of Roger Goodell, have turned every part of the league into a money-making venture (admit it, you’re watching dudes run around in spandex as you read this.) Games, through television and stadium revenue, drive the most profits. So here we are.

Adam Schefter, an NFL-friendly reporter working for one of the league’s television partners, tried to frame the proposed CBA as a win by comparing it to deals in the country’s three other major pro leagues. His math and logic were both highly questionable, but also miss the broader point: football isn’t like those games. The rosters are much larger, meaning less per player, and the churn of bodies through the league creates a distinct caste system: there’s the few hundred players most fans know, who get to sign those big second contracts. And then there’s the majority of the league, guys who will be lucky to play three years and walk away with a few hundred thousand in the bank.

This deal is designed specifically to appeal to those players, who hold a majority of the vote. From the incomparable Jenny Vrentas of Sports Illustrated:

NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith told the media “an important goal for this CBA was to better serve the 60% of players who are employed on minimum-salary contracts. This deal would increase minimum salaries $100,000 in the first year, and NFL Network reported that they would rise past $1 million for all players by 2029.”

The NFL is betting here that it will continue to have a supply of young players willing to put their bodies on the line (17 games, sure!) to fill out rosters without any guarantee of a second contract, and that’s a rock-solid bet. The league is also gambling that most of its marquee players — many of whom (including Aaron Rodgers, JJ Watt and Richard Sherman) are against the deal — will ultimately give up the fight and focus on preparing for another season. Also a safe bet.

We won’t ever be able to pinpoint what the impact of adding games is on players. It’s not like we can look at Junior Seau’s or Dave Duerson’s or Andre Waters’ careers and identify when they’d had too much. There’s no table to tell us when they started the slide from high-functioning athletes toward disabled men so lost and angry and depressed that they would opt to take their own lives.

Revenue, though, is easy for an owner to calculate out, and it is there to be earned right now, and so it will be.

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NFLPA head seeks unity as expanded schedule, playoffs reach forefront of CBA talks

The head of the players’ union warns that “a two-year strike” may be required for NFL players to get what they want from owners.

The enormity of the NFL empire is never more obvious than Super Bowl Week. But buried within the star-studded parties and celebratory events hyping Sunday’s big game in Miami, there is a meeting scheduled that could have serious repercussions on the future of the sport, possibly bringing it all to an abrupt halt with a total shutdown of the league.

Player representatives are set to meet with NFL Players Association leaders on Thursday for an update on the union’s efforts to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement with league owners. According to an ESPN report from Dan Graziano, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith says he is planning to tell players that “if they want to dig in their heels on any one issue — including the owners’ push for an expanded, 17-game regular season — they have to be willing to take it all the way.”

That could very well mean an NFL strike before the 2021 season.

“People need to understand that it’s really easy to call for a work stoppage; it’s really hard to win one,” Smith told reporters in Miami. “So that’s why I started notifying players four years ago about saving their checks, making changes to their debt structure, and the reality is that if we want to hold out and get everything we want, that’s probably going to mean a two-year strike.”

While the owners’ desire for a 17-game regular season will be a significant item on the docket in a new CBA, expanded playoffs and a shortened preseason are also up for debate. Further topics to be hashed out likely include changes to the league’s drug and discipline policies, improved benefits for current and retired players, changes to training camp rules, and ultimately, the percentage of revenue players would agree to receive.

Smith will meet this week with player reps from the 30 teams not playing in Super Bowl LIV. The meeting is not expected to feature a vote on any issues, but as Graziano points out, “the union hopes that everyone comes out of it with some idea of where things stand and what kind of action the players want to take going forward.”

Both sides know that “a two-year strike,” as referenced by Smith, would be catastrophic to the league and permanently alienate scores of advertisers, broadcasters, and fans worldwide.

The next key moment for movement will be the NFLPA’s anual meeting, held in Florida in March. Cornerback Byron Jones is the Cowboys’ current representative; offensive lineman Joe Looney is the alternate. Both are free agents this offseason.

The current CBA expires in March 2021; ongoing negotiations would not affect the next NFL season or postseason. But, Graziano says, “there are portions of the new deal that would benefit the players if they were in place in time for the 2020 season.”

There is still plenty of time for the two sides to come to an agreement that benefits everyone, and the pomp and circumstance surrounding Sunday’s Super Bowl- the culmination of the league’s centennial anniversary- should serve as good reminders to both players and owners that the NFL pie is plenty big enough for everyone to get a fair slice.

But it’s Smith’s job to remind players that they also need to be prepared to get up and leave the table- for the first time since 1987- if it comes to that.

“The job of the union is to engage in good-faith negotiations, make sure that our players are informed, but at no time take it for granted that what is really needed is the ability of players to withstand a work stoppage and win it so that they come out of it better than before they went into it,” Smith said. “And if we are prepared to do that, and the players vote to take that action, we’ll be fine. But anything less than being fully prepared is wishful thinking, and perhaps cheap and dangerous talk.”

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