Tuesday was an interesting day. More interesting days could be coming.
After the NFL and NFL Players Association managed to hide the 61-page ruling in a landmark collusion arbitration for more than five months, the cat is out of the bag. And some players are paying attention.
Multiple individuals who routinely interact with players tell PFT that multiple players have begun to inquire regarding their rights, and regarding their options both as to the league and as to the union.
As one source with knowledge of the collusion grievance told PFT, Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert would be the perfect plaintiff against either entity. The exchange between Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill shows coordination (i.e., collusion) between two owners regarding the contracts given to Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert and Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray.
The threshold question becomes whether Herbert is within the additional 594 veteran players for whom damages were sought in the collusion grievance, beyond Murray, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, and Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson. There’s a still-hidden list of 594 names that was attached as an exhibit to the 61-page ruling. The league would argue that, as to those players, the issue has been concluded.
The counter would be that discovery was taken only as to the three quarterbacks. From Herbert’s perspective, there could be a treasure trove of communications within the Chargers organization regarding whether Herbert will (or did) want a fully-guaranteed deal, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Deshaun Watson fully-guaranteed contract.
The other 593 players (if Herbert’s name is on the list) could make the same argument. They would ask, essentially, how did my rights get caught up in and extinguished by the three-quarterback collusion case when I never had a chance to prove that the clear effort to encourage collusion resulted in a specific effort by my team to restrict guarantees in my deal?
The union faces a different problem. The claim by the specific members of the NFLPA would fall under the federal duty of fair representation. And there would be at least two different potential avenues, as we see it.
For the 594 players whose rights were tied up in (and extinguished by) the existing case, they would (or at least could) argue that the union failed to properly develop and investigate their grievances by simply lumping them in with the three main claimants and without fully investigating the claims. For all anyone knows, there are internal smoking-gun texts or emails as to any, some, or all of the 594 players that would say, for example, “I know [Player X] wants a fully-guaranteed contract, but the Management Council told all teams to limit guarantees. We need to comply.”
For the players not within the group of 594 who were added (presumably unbeknownst to them) to the case, there’s a different issue. Because the union hid the outcome from them (and everyone else) for more than five months, their 50-day window under the Collective Bargaining Agreement for filing a non-injury grievance based on the key finding of the collusion case has expired.
This assumes that the NFL and NFLPA didn’t enter into a tolling agreement that would acknowledge their mutual effort to keep the collusion decision secret and give any other players who choose to proceed a fresh 50 days from whenever the decision sees the light of day. Neither the NFL nor the NFLPA responded to the question of whether a tolling agreement exists.
Our guess is that there’s no such agreement, and that the NFLPA has — in their effort for whatever reason to hide the outcome of the case — hampered if not defeated the effort of any other player who signed a contract before today from using the collusion ruling as the starting point for a grievance of their own.
So what will happen next? It’s up to the players. And it will be up to whether any lawyers out there see the merit in litigation against the NFL and/or the NFLPA and choose to pursue it on behalf of the players.
Until that happens, the NFL and NFLPA will (or should) be sweating out the potential ramifications of the players finally knowing about the thing that was inexplicably hidden from them.
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