When JC Tretter became the NFL Players Association’s new executive director, there was no press conference. Before today, there had been no interview.
Tretter has selected Mike Jones of _The Athletic_ for Tretter’s initial Q&A as executive director. The full item [can be reviewed here](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7143346/2026/03/24/jc-tretter-interview-nflpa-executive-director/).
The biggest question, in our view, is how Tretter went from having “no interest” in being the NFLPA executive director to pursuing, and landing, the job in less than eight months.
When it became clear last June that the NFLPA had hidden from its members an arbitration ruling that the league office invited the NFL’s teams to collude as to fully-guaranteed contracts after the Deshaun Watson deal, Tretter became the subject of reporting and speculation regarding his role in the situation. And for good reason; Tretter was the “chief strategy officer.” To the extent a “strategy” had been developed for reacting to the landmark finding that the NFL instructed teams to collude (the arbitrator found — incorrectly, we believe — that the teams did not follow the league’s advice), Tretter would have been the union official most suited to devising that strategy.
At the time, the NFLPA had nothing to say in response to multiple inquiries from Pablo Torre and PFT regarding the strategy for hiding the collusion ruling from union members. Some believed the ruling was concealed because it included reference to Tretter speaking ill of quarterback Russell Wilson. Others believed the NFLPA opted to “play nice” with the league, in furtherance of the broader goal of going along to get along. Still others suspected that former executive director Lloyd Howell didn’t want his predecessor, DeMaurice Smith, to get credit for successfully catching the league with its hand in the collusion cookie jar.
In the absence of someone/anyone explaining why the collusion ruling had been buried for more than five months, those of us who spend our time applying common sense to the available facts did the things we normally do: We applied common sense to the available facts.
Tretter now claims he said nothing after the hidden collusion ruling came to light because the NFLPA’s lawyers “muzzled” him. He told the lawyers, per Jones, “Hiding something against the players is so against what I’ve always represented. I would like to just correct the record.”
Tretter says the lawyers still told him he shouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, share his side of the story.
“They said that it would be better for the organization if I didn’t, and that’s when I needed to resign, and that’s when I felt like it had gone too far, and I was in a bad place, and I needed help, and I wasn’t getting it, and I wasn’t able to defend myself,” Tretter told Jones. “I wasn’t asking for anybody to defend me. I just wanted to tell the truth, and I left.”
Basically, then, Tretter quit as chief strategy officer because he objected to the legal advice he was being given. The biggest flaw in this argument is that the lawyers work for the union, not the other way around. Tretter could have, and arguably should have, taken his concerns higher on the organizational chart before storming out and publicly declaring that he has no interest in returning.
He was surely mad at folks like Pablo Torre and yours truly, because we were reporting and otherwise saying things that Tretter believed to be factually inaccurate but couldn’t rebut. Again, we tried to get the NFLPA to answer our questions. We reported the facts we had developed, and we drew reasonable conclusions based on the overall facts and circumstances. With nothing from the union’s perspective to guide our analysis of the situation and/or to correct actual or perceived errors, what else could we have done?
After he resigned, Tretter still felt resentment regarding the way the events had transpired.
“I sacrificed my reputation like they asked me to,” Tretter told Jones. “And then when I left, I said I didn’t want to sacrifice the truth anymore. And unfortunately, what I realized after I left is I lost the \[fight for\] truth a long time ago. . . . When it goes for that long, there’s no stopping the story after, even if you tell the truth now, it’s so, ‘It is what it is.’ And I learned that the harder I said, ‘This is what actually happened,’ no one cared about the correction of the record.”
Correction: The _NFLPA’s lawyers_ didn’t care about correcting the record. The _NFLPA’s lawyers_ didn’t care about telling the truth, given the version of the truth Tretter is now telling.
Tretter quit because he was muzzled by the lawyers. He arguably should have quit the moment he realized the lawyers hid a powerful weapon from the players, and that they agreed with the NFL to keep it hidden.
Again, the lawyers work for the union. The fact that the chief strategy officer wasn’t immediately told about the outcome of the collusion case and directly involved in coming up with a — wait for it — strategy for maximizing its value to the players should have been the tree trunk that shattered the camel’s back.
But now he’s back. And Tretter presumably will be dealing with some of the same lawyers who told him he couldn’t defend himself last July. In a nod to the Bard, the former Browns center should probably be saying to his constituents, “The first thing we do, let’s fire all the lawyers.”
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