In recent years, the NFLPA report cards make for one of the most entertaining parts of the end of the NFL season. The report cards give letter grades to every team in the NFL on a variety of subjects, from quality of locker room to whether child care is offered on gameday, based on anonymous survey answers from players around the league. It serves as both a fascinating glimpse into the life of an NFL player for fans and an open challenge to the owners who oversee every aspect of the report card to improve how the team operates in order to better serve the players.
It would seem the NFL is not a fan of the last aspect. On Thursday, ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham reported the league was taking legal action against the Players Association in an effort to kill the report cards. This is the third time the NFL has asked the union to stop the report cards—once in 2024 and once in June of this year.
ESPN reports the NFL filed a grievance against the union over the report cards, claiming it violates a clause in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that the owners and the union must “use reasonable efforts to curtail public comments by club personnel or players which express criticism of any club, its coach, or its operation and policy.” The NFL also claims the issues the report card addresses are already covered by a joint survey required by the CBA that polls players on similar subjects every three years. ESPN reports the last survey of that type was conducted in 2015.
In a letter to its members concerning the grievance acquired by ESPN, the union indicated it plans to go ahead with the report cards this year.
“We have responded to the grievance with our intention to fight against this action and continue what's clearly become an effective tool for comparing workplace standards across the league and equipping you to make informed career decisions," the NFLPA wrote.
It seems the issue lies primarily with the owners. Sources told ESPN the grades could be helpful but the general nature of the feedback makes it difficult to address specific issue and as it stands the report card stands only to “embarrass people.”
Jets owner Woody Johnson publicly criticized the report cards back in March during an owners meeting after he was ranked the worst owner in the NFL by the survey.
"My first read is I think it is totally bogus,” Johnson said. “I thought this whole setup, the way it was done is all...that's enough said on that. But we want to get better every day, in every category. I want to be No. 1 in everything. All of our people do. We want to be No. 1, like we are in girls flag football. We're No. 1 or 2 in the country and that's where we want to be in everything, including on the field but also off the field in all of our philanthropy. So if there's areas we can improve, and there's always areas we can improve—not because of this bogus report—we are going to do it.
“The whole thing [is bogus]. How they collected the information, who they collected it from, it's supposed to be a process where we have representatives and they have representatives so we know it's an honest survey. And that was violated in my opinion. So I'll leave it at that. But there's a lot of owners that looked at this survey and said this is not fair, not balanced, it's not every player, it's not even representative of the players."
But not all of Johnson’s colleagues feel that way. One anonymous owner told ESPN that “the only owners who don't care for [the report cards] are the ones who get the subpar grades."
The NFL reportedly hopes to have the issue resolved by February 2026 and aim to have an arbitrator hear the issue in December. The report cards have been released annually by the union since 2023.
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