A bombshell report from the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast on Wednesday offers smoking-gun evidence that NFL owners are colluding among themselves to depress guaranteed money in player contracts.
The episode, featuring Pablo Torre and longtime NFL legal analyst Mike Florio, reveals conversations within the league and the players’ union aimed at maintaining a status quo that harms players’ financial interests. Despite the existence of this extensive judicial ruling and clearly defined examples of its impact on NFL athletes, Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb believes it is nothing more than a failed “gotcha” from Torre, whom he called “exhausting” on his radio show Wednesday.
Despite significant evidence — uncovered by genuinely impactful reporting — that in a different court of law or under a different labor agreement could certainly qualify as collusion, Gottlieb gave the news nothing more than an eyeroll. The longtime radio host believes Torre is intentionally being unclear in delivering this breaking news, either being “disingenuous’ or “misusing the idea of collusion.”
“Pablo Torre as a guest is amazing. Pablo Torre, as a host, at times, can be a little exhausting. And I’ll tell you why,” Gottlieb said. “He’s way too smart to be talking about sports, and he’s searching so bad for that, ‘Ah-ha, gotcha,’ that I think he’s being disingenuous or he’s frankly misusing the idea of collusion.”
The ruling, released earlier this year, stems from a grievance filed by the NFL Players’ Association, which accused league owners of collusion. A judge dismissed the grievance because it did not meet the high bar laid out in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which, according to the Washington Post, requires the union to “provide proof of an improper conspiracy” in order for the league to be in legal jeopardy.
That gave Gottlieb all he needed to not only side with NFL owners, perhaps the most powerful group of people in American sports, but also to accuse Torre of journalistic impropriety. Gottlieb believes his understanding of collusion trumps that of Torre’s, Florio’s, or the NFLPA’s lawyers.
“Collusion between NFL owners would be, ‘Hey guys, let’s everybody keep the guarantees low. Don’t tell anybody. But let’s make it look like the guarantees are high, but let’s make it look like the guarantees high or make it look like we just don’t have the money,” Gottlieb explained.
“They didn’t do that.”
By way of example, Gottlieb described conversations between himself and other NCAA head basketball coaches over hiring assistants and signing players. From contract length for staff to NIL and scholarships with players, Gottlieb believes this chatter is comparable to what the judicial ruling shows NFL owners have done with Lamar Jackson and Kyler Murray.
“Working together to keep prices down, if it’s not illegal, is not frowned upon,” he said. “It happens in business every single day.”
Any conversation about labor law or antitrust law is always a matter of degree. And the judge did not rule in favor of the NFLPA.
Still, Doug Gottlieb misses several key points in his effort to rip Torre. It is, in fact, often considered illegal for competing employers to collude to keep wages down, just as it is for multiple corporations in an industry to inflate prices. Gottlieb appears to be hung up on the element of secrecy, but private conversations between owners lauding one another for minimizing guarantees could certainly be considered a conspiracy.
Torre continues to ruffle feathers across traditional sports media, an indication that he is at least challenging commonly held perceptions — if not yet changing hearts and minds.