Thursday night’s news that NFL Players Association executive director Lloyd Howell has resigned isn’t necessarily the end. It’s possibly the beginning of a two-step process that will result in the NFLPA severing ties with the man most identified with the hiring of Howell in the first place.
The next obvious question is (or should be) whether the NFLPA will sever ties with chief strategy officer JC Tretter.
Tretter was the NFLPA president when Howell arrived. And the hire happened through a top-secret process that felt like an effort by someone (perhaps Tretter) to land a hand-picked candidate. In Thursday’s item regarding whether the player representatives who voted on Howell knew about a 2011 gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit targeting Howell’s alleged conduct during his time with Booz Allen Hamilton, ESPN reported that the other person who made a presentation to the reps was former SAG-AFTRA chief David P. White.
That was it. Two candidates, narrowed down by a process that Tretter, as union president, ultimately controlled. And it was Tretter who publicly defended a process that entailed no transparency and that seemed from the outside to be engineered with the end result in mind.
Howell’s resignation amid a haze of controversies, multiple of which date back to his vetting, sticks to Tretter. Indeed, Tretter would otherwise not even be employed by the NFLPA if Howell hadn’t hired him into the newly-created position of chief strategy officer — in what seemed at the time seemed to be the back end of a quid pro quo. (That term has been used often enough lately to perhaps become the name of your fantasy team, about which no one cares.)
Other things will, or at least should, cling to Tretter in his role as the union’s chief strategy officer. For instance: (1) the partial win in the collusion ruling that was inexplicably hidden; (2) the comments made about Russell Wilson in the collusion ruling that was inexplicably hidden; (3) the fake-injury grievance loss resulting from Tretter’s ill-advised comments about faking injuries; and (4) the apparent quid pro quo with the league based on the union not using the collusion ruling to its full benefit in exchange for the NFL not doing a victory lap over the ruling arising from Tretter’s fake-injury remarks.
Not using the partial win in the collusion ruling should be enough, frankly, to get the NFLPA executive committee to dismiss the person who, based on his job title of chief strategy officer, devised or signed off on the (wait for it) strategy.
As Tretter himself said just before making the wink-nod suggestion that disgruntled running backs should fake injuries, “You need to try and create as much leverage as you possibly can in any situation. . . . [Y]ou have to find creative ways to build leverage.”
It’s impossible to reconcile “you need to create all the leverage you can” with “let’s hide this thing that can be used to create all sorts of leverage.”
Even though the NFL technically won, the NFLPA caught the league trying to collude. And the circumstantial evidence of actual collusion (like the text messages between Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill) could have been trumpeted as proof that the arbitrator got it wrong.
And if the best strategy was somehow to do nothing at all, why did the union decide to appeal the ruling only after Pablo Torre and yours truly put a Coldplay-bright spotlight on whatever the NFL and NFLPA were hiding?
In our conversations regarding this situation, Pablo and I have from time to time wondered whether and when the interests of Howell and Tretter will diverge. Perhaps they did sharply on Thursday, with Tretter concluding that Howell’s departure could preserve Tretter’s current employment and possible aspiration to become the executive director, at some point.
At a time when it appears that the players could be in the process of taking back control of their union, the next move will help shed light on whether that’s the case — or whether Tretter sacrificed Howell in a last-ditch effort to save himself.
It also remains to be seen whether anyone else focuses on Tretter’s role in the events that contributed to Howell’s resignation. For all of the excellent reporting ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler have done over the past 10 days on these issues, none of their stories mention Tretter’s name a single time.
Including, most recently, their Friday morning item about Howell’s departure.
And so, back to the question. Will the NFLPA keep Tretter, now that the guy who hired him is gone?