National Football League

The NFL players' union needs a shakeup before it's too late

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:27 p.m. ET

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Of course they gave in — at this juncture, to do anything else would be futile.

There was talk that they wouldn't, but that was just talk. Actually, wishful thinking might be the better term. Because, sure enough, Clay Matthews, Julius Peppers, and James Harrison will abide by the NFL’s request to interview them in relation to the league’s investigation into performance-enhancing drug use as presented by an Al Jazeera America report.

The NFL had threatened to suspend the three players and a fourth, free agent Mike Neal, on Aug. 26 if the players — who were named in the report — did not submit to an in-person interview.

The NFL Players’ Association believed such interviews weren't necessary and were out of line with the league’s protocol when it came to investigating PED use — its argument was sound and likely would have held up under scrutiny.

The NFL didn’t care. Emboldened by two massive wins in court this summer, first over Tom Brady and the NFLPA and the second over Adrian Peterson and the NFLPA, the league flexed its muscle. Using the broad powers granted by the collective bargaining agreement’s Article 46 — powers that the league spent the last 18 months defending in those aforementioned court cases — the NFL was making a point.

It’s hard to say that the PED allegations were substantiated. Peyton Manning, who was also named in the report, was cleared of wrongdoing last month. Perhaps believing that Manning’s “acquittal” was enough to clear the four other players named in the report, the NFLPA didn’t get ahead of the issue and allowed it to fester. Had it dealt with the allegations, in their full scope when they first surfaced last winter, these three active players wouldn’t have this distraction on their plate — and we know that the worst possible thing to have in the NFL is a “distraction.” Instead, they hoped that the NFL would forget about it, despite the fact that the league has never been more powerful. It didn't.

So instead of doing right by its players, the NFLPA has handed the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell another victory — one that will probably prove decisive.

The NFLPA's short-sighted approach to CBA negotiations handed the league the head of the axe in 2011, the court cases this summer gave them a long handle to attach, and at no point in the last five years did the union do anything to protect its forest. If there were a fence, the NFLPA left the gate open with its latest move. Now Goodell and the league can chop down trees without remorse.

It’s going to be this way for the next five years — the CBA runs until the end of the 2021 season. If executive director Demaurice Smith is still in charge of the NFLPA by then, it’s likely that the lopsided battle between the league’s owners and their consigliere, Goodell, and the players will continue to dramatically tilt toward the old rich guys.

The NFLPA had a case to make for Harrison, Peppers and Matthews. The league went overboard in its demands, breaking a tight protocol seemingly to see how far it could push the boundaries of Article 46.

No one wants to deal with something like this just before a season, but because the problem wasn’t handled early, all this came to pass. There are two ways to look at it from the players’ perspectives: If they are guilty, they would certainly not want to be interviewed, and they would fight any investigation. But if they are innocent, the same result could come about — they’d have nothing to hide, sure, but their innocence would also make it easier to battle the NFL and its aggressive expansion of executive power.

But the NFLPA didn’t opt to fight — it decided to give into the league’s out-of-bounds demands. Brady and Peterson took their cases against the league all the way to the second-highest courts in the land — the best fight the NFLPA put up following those losses was making the NFL wait for two days, sending off a stern letter and then scheduling Harrison’s meeting on Aug. 29, four days after the league’s ultimatum.

That’ll show ‘em.

Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith

NFL players need their union more than any other professional group of athletes. The lack of guaranteed contracts, the artificially capped salaries, the short length of careers and the immense health issues that stem directly from playing the sport give the NFL’s players far more serious issues to handle compared to their compatriots, who might only need to deal with one or two of those issues and probably on a level that’s not even close to the NFL’s standard.

Yet the NFLPA is arguably the weakest players’ union of the four major North American sports. The MLBPA has immense power — lest we forget they went on a strike in 1994 — and the NBAPA’s power is strong enough that an owner lockout is looming; they want to gain back some of that power they’ve lost. The NFLPA and NHLPA are fairly similar, but for the union in the $13 billion sport to have the same sort of leverage as one in a sport whose revenue is a quarter of that doesn’t say much.

And given the precedents that have been set over the last few months, there’s little reason to think any of this is going to change in the next five years.

Sports aren’t about winners and losers on the field anymore — these are billion-dollar industries, and the real wins and losses are determined in boardrooms and courtrooms. That’s why Goodell’s power has expanded over the last half decade while he’s been attacked from every angle imaginable — he gets the job the owners hired him to do done. Pardon the tautology, but the bottom line is the bottom line.

And the league is building these wins with on the backs of the players. They deserve a better shake, but they have to fight for it.

If the players don’t stand up, shake up their union and start to push back with some real gusto and gain back some ground over the next five years, this bad situation is only going to get worse.