The NFL Players Association has elected JC Tretter as its new executive director, ending an eight-month stretch of interim leadership for the union.
Tretter prevailed over interim executive director David White and American Conference commissioner Tim Pernetti in a vote at the union’s annual meetings in San Diego earlier this week. A center with the Green Pay Backers and Cleveland Browns from 2013 to 2021, Tretter served two terms as the NFLPA’s president, having studied labor relations at Cornell University.
His retirement from the league made him ineligible for a third term, but Tretter returned to the union as its chief strategy officer in 2024. The 35-year-old resigned from that post last year and took his name out of the running for interim executive director when the job opened, after amid public criticism from several of his peers.
Tretter inherits the position from Lloyd Howell Jr., who resigned from his two-year tenure as the NFLPA’s leader in July in the wake of multiple scandals. The scrutiny began in May, when ESPN reported that federal prosecutors and the FBI were investigating the NFLPA’s financial dealings with group-licensing firm OneTeam Partners. Howell previously served on the company’s board of directors.
To make matters worse, in June, podcaster Pablo Torre disclosed the contents of an arbitration ruling stemming from a 2022 NFLPA collusion lawsuit that had been kept secret from the players and public. An ESPN story from July revealed that Howell and the union struck a confidentiality agreement with the NFL that kept the details of the arbitration report hidden. Howell also was a part-time consultant for The Carlyle Group, an investment management company that was approved as one of the private equity firms allowed to purchase up to a 10% minority stake in NFL teams. He resigned the post in July.
But the questionable decisions didn’t end there. Howell used union funds to fund two trips to strip clubs, according to expense reports and receipts obtained by ESPN. In 2023, he spent $738.82 on a car service that took him from the Fort Lauderdale International Airport to a Miami Gardens address, which eventually made another stop at his luxury condominium. A union finance worker, who flagged the unusual expense, later discovered the trip was to Tootsie’s Cabaret, a 76,000-square-foot establishment that bills itself as the “largest strip club in the world” on its website.
Howell made a similar visit a year later, accompanying two other union employees to the Magic City strip club in Atlanta. The group racked up $2,426 in charges from a club ATM and used two “VIP rooms.” Howell earned $3.34 million in his first full year at the NFLPA, which covered the fiscal year ending last February.
With his new chair barely even warm, Tretter, who according to Spotrac earned $46 million in his NFL career, has his work cut out for him. The league could further discussions about adding an 18th game to the regular season schedule. Rank and file players have generally been against the idea.
Historically, the union leadership has gone back and forth on the issue, with Howell once saying, “Who doesn’t want more football?” White, in his role as interim executive director, said the prospect of expanding the regular season is “a point of negotiation.”