Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The Man Who (Relentlessly) Sued the NFL Has Receipts: A Sitdown with DeMaurice Smith About this episode Secret salary caps. Accidental email attachments. Truth-serum texts from owners. Slide decks for ESPN. If anyone knows how to dork-out on billionaires taking your money — and documenting their greed — it's the former NFL Players Association boss who negotiated $100 billion for athletes... and sued the sh*t out of The Shield. With his union now plagued by scandal — and America as unregulated as ever — De Smith enters the studio in Gladiator Mode.
• Read "Turf Wars" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735685/turf-wars-by-demaurice-smith/ by DeMaurice Smith
Previously on PTFO:
• Part I: The NFL's Secret Collusion Case, Revealed https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUzMzJiMTItODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtN2I3OGMwY2IwMGRl
• Part II: We Sparked an NFL Union Crisis. Here's the Sequel. https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUzMjFjNjgtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtODcwNGEwMDY3MDgw
• Part III: We Followed the Money in the NFL Union Scandal. So Did the FBI. https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUzMzUyNzItODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtY2IzYmEzNzJkZjkw
• Part IV: We Investigated the Hollywood Cover-Up the NFLPA Ignored https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUyOTYzNjYtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtYmY2MjE1Y2U4MDUw
• Part V: The Silenced Top Cop and the Cabal of "Strip-Club Dreams" https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjliODRhZjY0MjY2YzliMWM3ODc1NTM2
• Plus: The State of the (NFL) Union, with Mike Florio https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjljMWFkZmYyMjdkNGVmNGExZmRlNGVk
• The Sporting Class: Are NFL Players Ready to Strike? https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjljNWIxODZiMjQ3YmEwZjE4ZmJmN2Q4
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 The story of sport is that management colludes.
0:12 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
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2:20 Speaker 01 Reading this again last night just reminded me of how much I hate the league.
2:29 Speaker 01 I had forgotten how, um, what's the word? Clinical.
2:35 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
2:38 Pablo Torre? You're mouthing the words, "Fuck them."
2:40 Speaker 01 Fuck them. I, I just, everybody has fallen into this trap, and I call it a death spiral, where you believe that in order to square your morality, you now talk like you are Johnny Private Equity.
2:59 Pablo Torre? How the billionaires who run sports, who run the NFL, talk about sports and the business is a big part of why I wanted to do this with you.
3:08 Speaker 01 We're living in a country right now where it is undeniable that a large swath of people are broke. So I'm not asking people out there to feel sorry for NFL players. They have it almost better than anyone else in the country. And that's because they have a labor union, right? They have a labor union. So NFL players get about 50 cents on every dollar of revenue that they generate.
3:35 Pablo Torre? It is a delight to be across the desk finally from Demaurice Smith as he has his marker and is muttering under his breath while going through a ruling, going through a collusion arbitration ruling.
3:47 Speaker 01 You see how quickly I can go back to Gladiator mode?
4:12 Pablo Torre? So it's important for me to point out up top here that I have been waiting to get Demaurice Smith in studio with us for a really long time. In fact, I had never communicated with Dee Smith until after we released part one of our investigation into the NFL Players Association, which had started last June when we published what multiple union sources have since characterized as the Holy Grail of confidential NFL documents. The 61-page arbitration ruling in a collusion lawsuit filed against the league by the union under the previous leadership of Demaurice Smith. You were the executive director of the NFLPA for how many years?
4:54 Speaker 01 Almost 15.
4:55 Pablo Torre? And so how many, if you were to just back of the envelope this, how many billions of dollars, how many collective bargaining agreements?
5:02 Speaker 01 Roughly, roughly two collective bargaining agreements with over $100 billion of money going to NFL players. 100 billion. Now, the owners are also getting their 100 billion. Fine. But the way that I like to frame it for the crowd out there is players get 50% of every dollar that they generate, and that's because they have a labor union. And I'm not asking anybody to feel sorry for them because not only is the money great, but there's strict limitations on their work rules, strict limitations on how long they can be on the field. So nobody needs to shed a tear for NFL players. You should be angry at the fact that you don't get 50 cents for every dollar.
5:47 Pablo Torre? Dee Smith, notably, left his post as executive director in 2023, and he recently wrote a fascinating book about his tenure called "Turf Wars", which basically serves as the prelude for what happened last summer, when the two top officers of the regime that succeeded him, Lloyd Howell and his chief strategy officer, J.C. Tretter, both resigned amid an ongoing corruption scandal, which involves an FBI investigation and strip club receipts, and also the union's insane decision to suppress that Holy Grail collusion ruling, which was itself about the suppression of guaranteed player contracts
6:29 Pablo Torre? as part of a secret agreement with the NFL itself. In other words, the players' union attempted to collude with the league to keep the league's attempt at collusion against the players' union a secret.
6:46 Pablo Torre? And even if no damages were granted to the union, as we'll explain, what we got was 61 pages of explosive texts and emails and slide decks and testimony. And yet, just last month, that same chief strategy officer who resigned, J.C. Treter, ran for D. Smith's old job, executive director.
7:10 Pablo Torre? And he won. Raising all sorts of new questions and new suspicions about not only the electoral process, in which Treter was the only former player deemed worthy of being one of three finalists, but also the plausibility of Treter's claim that he had nothing to do with the collusion rulings suppression in the first place, despite being Lloyd Howell's top lieutenant and chief strategy officer.
7:37 Speaker 01 Pablo Torre is going, by the way. We, he has courage to go.
7:42 Speaker 04 You said Pablo's got the courage to go. I'd challenge him to have the courage to be right, which he hasn't been for a very long time.
7:48 Speaker 01 Okay, all right, okay.
7:49 Speaker 04 So he's said a lot of things that factually just aren't true, kind of created this narrative that was very difficult to go through.
7:57 Pablo Torre? Which led me, finally, to the former prosecutor whose go-to strategy involved suing the NFL for colluding against the players in the first place. So the larger resonance for the average American, for the normal person out there who's not a professional athlete, not an NFL player, I do think this is news they can use.
8:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:20 Pablo Torre? Because all of this, as I like to say on this show, it turns out, quite a bit, all of this is both metaphor and reality.
8:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:26 Pablo Torre? These are texts, these are cases that have helped us figure out how America conceives of accountability.
8:34 Speaker 01 Sure.
8:35 Pablo Torre? And they're also-
8:35 Speaker 01 Responsibility, not cheating, making it fair.
8:38 Pablo Torre? Fair play, fair competition in an era increasingly of unregulation.
8:43 Speaker 01 Sure.
8:43 Pablo Torre? And also, these are juicy as [BLEEP].
8:45 Speaker 01 This year, the league will do $26 billion in revenue. $26 billion. Let's put it in a frame. There are no 10Ks. 10Ks are the annual reports that companies have to make under the penalty of perjury to the SEC to basically say that we are operating our business in a fiscally responsible, fair way to our employees.
9:13 Speaker 01 The NFL files no 10 Ks. The NFL files no 10 Qs. They make no reports to the SEC. They make no reports to the Department of Justice. There is no DOJ oversight. There is no SEC oversight. There is no state attorney general oversight. This is the largest and most successful socialistic system in America. Why? Because for mom and dad and the kids out there, they socialize their costs to you. You pay for their stadiums. You pay for their profit centers. You pay PSLs for the right to buy an NFL ticket.
9:57 Pablo Torre? Personal license.
9:58 Speaker 01 License. And then they take all of that money that comes from you and they push it into their pockets with their greedy little fingers. And they call it capitalism. No, that's profiteering socialism. So at the end of the day, just to pick out a place, if I were a Buffalo fan right now, that's going to end up costing Buffalo taxpayers about $1.4 billion for a stadium that generates profits for Terry Pagula, while he parks his $100 million yacht in the Hudson Yacht so he can watch his daughter play tennis.
10:41 Pablo Torre? And she's a really good tennis player.
10:43 Speaker 01 She's fantastic. My wife loves tennis. We root for her every time. I'm just saying, hey, man, while you're trying to make sure that you can send your kid to college or your kid goes to a public school in the Buffalo area, at some point, shouldn't you scratch your head to wonder, hey, man, should our taxpayer money go towards improving our schools? Or should it go to a guy who parks his $100 million yacht? And the reality is, New York and upstate New York, and again, I'm a fan of the Democratic governor, they made the choice that frankly does not benefit the taxpayers. That's just true.
11:23 Pablo Torre? Well, look, now we're at the point at which you've given us the landscape broadly of how hard it is for governmental oversight to factor in to the conversation around, can this be different? Can it change? And the recurring theme of your tenure as executive director, which is different, certainly in ways that I want to discuss from what has happened since you left, has been a familiar obsession with chasing documents.
11:54 Speaker 01 I spoke to a group of lawyers two weeks ago, and I opened up the speech by saying, let's just level set for all of us, we're dorks. We are. I mean, I was a homicide prosecutor, it was great, I had the swagger, but at the end of the day, we're just a group of dorks.
12:09 Pablo Torre? It's very clear, we walk into a locker room, which one the jock is.
12:12 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah, there was, yeah, and which one who's not. But, you know, look, we're lawyers, and we are trained to do what? What's the evidence? We might feel a certain way about something, we might want to bang the table about something, we might want to crawl into a bunker and pretend like something doesn't happen. But lawyers are trained to know and to look for evidence. And that's what we do. We want to hold people accountable.
12:41 Pablo Torre? Well, you want to figure out which is the tool, the instrument, that has some sort of edge to it, such that change might actually be enacted.
12:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:52 Pablo Torre? What I did not know until I got in the business of really reporting not only on the NFL, but also the NFLPA itself, is that the owners, these masters of the universe, They love to write stuff down.
13:08 Speaker 01 Man, they're, they have a absolute obsession with documenting their crimes, let's say.
13:17 Pablo Torre? It shocked me because one would assume that a key part of trying to get away with the things we are alleging and describing is you just wouldn't put it on paper. But that's the story of how I got in touch with you is that I got the thing that had all of this insane, mind-blowing level of candor.
13:35 Speaker 01 And again, I invite our fans, you can go online and you can find the case that I filed against the owners back in 2010. Once we thought that they had worked with the networks so that the networks would pay them $1 billion each in the event that there was no football as a result of the NFL lockout. It's written down, it's in the documents. And by the way, all of those documents, what, weirdly, because the NFL forgot to file a motion to seal, all of those are public now.
14:11 Pablo Torre? Oh, and I'm happy to say, we have them here today.
14:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable. Flow charts of how we're gonna leverage the TV networks because they're gonna pay us, it's gonna give us leverage over the union in bargaining.
14:24 Pablo Torre? I mean, and what you can't say about the owners is that they're not clever.
14:28 Speaker 01 They're diabolical.
14:29 Pablo Torre? They are strategic.
14:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:30 Pablo Torre? In, in all of this. And so what they had done was they had opted out of CBA.
14:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
14:37 Pablo Torre? By this point already.
14:38 Speaker 01 Before I got elected, yep.
14:39 Pablo Torre? The clock starts ticking and they go around to CBS, to Fox, to NBC, to ESPN, and they're trying to renegotiate the TV rights with a certain goal.
14:51 Speaker 01 The goal was, we're gonna renegotiate these rights, we've already opted out of the collective bargaining agreement, it's going to end on a certain date in March of 2011, we're gonna lock the players out because we want three things. We want the players to play a 17th and an 18th game for free. We want to take away their pensions and we want to cut 20% of their salaries. So the league knew that no one is going to walk into a negotiation room and go, hey, you know, that's the best deal I've ever heard. So what do they do? They go to the networks and they literally fund themselves so that in the event that there is no football.
15:32 Pablo Torre? No games.
15:33 Speaker 01 No games for the season of 2011, they will have $4 billion to service the debt on their stadiums. And let's take everybody a giant step back. Man, 2009 to 2011 was after the great recession. You couldn't borrow $4 million, let alone $4 billion. But they knew that they could leverage the networks in giving them the money because the networks need to have NFL football. And we talk about how clever they are. The only reason I started down this road and another lawyer from Latham and Watkins
16:10 Speaker 01 started down this road, because Jerry Jones bragged that they had $4 billion to lock the players out. Lehman Brothers is gone, Bear Stearns is gone. The world is on the verge of economic collapse and you're bragging about a $4 billion war chest in the future.
16:32 Pablo Torre? Right.
16:32 Speaker 01 That got us thinking, well, wait a minute, this couldn't be a loan from a bank. Where could it come from?
16:38 Pablo Torre? So the question of how we get to the documents that I'm gonna show here in a second, the, the case that is filed, for people who did not know this, because certainly it's very easy somehow for us, even the most diehard NFL fans, to not remember this.
16:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:53 Pablo Torre? Who are the plaintiffs?
16:54 Speaker 01 The plaintiffs in this case are all of the players of the National Football League. Because we have an agreement with the National Football League owners called a collective bargaining agreement. That's a contract between both parties that says, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna execute this contract in a fair way. And because it has to be fair, the NFL owners who negotiate those television contracts have a fiduciary duty to the players to maximize revenue. We made the argument to a judge that when the owners cut these deals with the networks, the argument was they obviously took less money for those contracts because they wanted
17:38 Speaker 01 future money in the bank. And the arbitrator ruled against us at the first instance, and then we filed an appeal of that case. A judge ruled that there was enough evidence to show that the league violated its fiduciary duty, that the league breached the collective bargaining agreement by cutting these secret deals with the networks and officially, effectively froze that $4 billion.
18:06 Pablo Torre? These are the receipts from those secret negotiations with the networks that emerge because you filed this collusion suit.
18:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, collusion.
18:17 Pablo Torre? Which is a word we will say a lot here today, I think.
18:20 Speaker 01 And people should know outside, when you file a lawsuit, you initiate something called discovery. And discovery simply means that we file a request for documents on the other side, and we basically say, you have an obligation to turn over all of the documents that are relevant to this proceeding. So discovery happens right after you file the lawsuit, and then you have a fight over what the documents mean.
18:44 Pablo Torre? And the discovery you make, I mean, here's a slide deck from the owners' meetings.
18:49 Speaker 01 This is my favorite document in 15 years. I mean, I'm not even kidding.
18:55 Pablo Torre? For those who aren't watching on YouTube or Apple Podcasts videos, D. Smith will help sort of narrate what we're looking at here.
19:02 Speaker 01 Sure, this is an internal document. You see the NFL logo at the bottom. This is a slide.
19:07 Pablo Torre? The shield.
19:08 Speaker 01 The shield. This is a slide that they created in order to basically walk through a decision tree.
19:14 Pablo Torre? It says decision tree in the top left.
19:15 Speaker 01 At the top. What do we do with respect to this upcoming fight with the players over the collective bargaining agreement? What decision should the League make and literally it's a yes or no.
19:26 Pablo Torre? You start with the left. There's one single circle. It says, should league move forward with deal?
19:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, with CBA deal.
19:32 Pablo Torre? And then it's a yes or no. There's a fork and you choose if it's no, you go up. If it's yes, you go down. And what do you learn as you follow the steps here from March 2009, this presentation?
19:44 Speaker 01 On the right, you will see a dot called season restructuring. And basically what they have walked through this entire document, along with key findings, strategic leverage, leverage over the union. When we talk about this idea that they wanted to make the players play two extra games for free. That bottom box means if we do these things, including the decision about changing the the structure of the TV deals, it will ultimately help us get season restructuring.
20:20 Pablo Torre? So the middle circle says, by the way.
20:22 Speaker 01 Oh, this is lovely.
20:23 Pablo Torre? Does deal completion advance CBA negotiating dynamics?
20:28 Speaker 01 I mean, come on, man. Just to put it in plain speak. If we do these, or if we restructure these television deals, does a renegotiated TV contract help us with CBA bargaining? And they actually do bullet points on how doing these deals in a favorable way to them gives them leverage over the NFLPA. And again, for the people at home, because there's always a yeah, but guy. Yeah, but Dee, I mean, they're strategic. They're just being smart. I mean, these are a group of billionaires. This is what they do.
21:10 Pablo Torre? Yeah, what's wrong with this? What's wrong with being strategic?
21:13 Speaker 01 All of this is a violation of our contract. I mean, the fact that you would take money from a deal where the players share in the money from that deal in order to give you an advantage in bargaining is a violation of our contract.
21:33 Pablo Torre? And we don't know about this.
21:35 Speaker 01 Correct.
21:36 Pablo Torre? Unless we sue. In this way.
21:40 Speaker 01 Yep.
21:40 Pablo Torre? Under the terms of.
21:41 Speaker 01 The collective bargaining agreement.
21:42 Pablo Torre? The CBA.
21:43 Speaker 01 And by the way, man, you know what you love if you're a, again, a lawyer who thinks like a prosecutor? Man, you just want people to write stuff down and please give me a decision tree. For why I should engage in a breach of contract. That's what this is. But this out of 15 years, this was always my favorite document. Because I was frankly stunned. At the extent to which someone would say, hey, we're going to create a slide deck. That demonstrates our deliberate effort to violate our contract. Man, nobody does that. Well, actually, somebody does.
22:26 Pablo Torre? Well, why did they do it?
22:29 Speaker 01 Um, you know, I always try to employ a certain amount of empathy towards them. And the, the, the result that you get when you try to step into their shoes, not sympathy, empathy. Why would they, they do this? Get into their brains. When you answer to no one. And you have never answered to no one. You never think that a document like this is going to reach the light of day. The league has never been audited and there's never been a dissent of SEC lawyers executing search warrants. They've never been in a world where they've had to turn things over, frankly. Unless it was a fight between another owner.
23:14 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
23:15 Speaker 01 I mean, just the historical context of all of this. There are no audited financial statements for the National Football League. They don't create them. They just don't. The only time a set of decent financial statements made the light of day was when Al Davis sued the league. When he wanted to move his team from Oakland to Los Angeles and the league prevented it. And you know what kind of case that Al Davis filed? He filed a collusion case, an antitrust case. And then the documents came to light and you know what happened? The league settled. Because this is also a league that does not want its secrets to become public.
23:59 Pablo Torre? The pressure points on a league that has a shield that is largely impervious to
24:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:05 Pablo Torre? the oversight you're describing. I mean, yeah, it explains why. Also, there's this slide.
24:10 Speaker 01 Current television packages, short-term extension alternative.
24:14 Pablo Torre? And just read the, it says again on the left.
24:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:17 Pablo Torre? Rationale, and on the right, the bullet point says.
24:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, concept and then rationale. Rationale. Shifts leverage in labor negotiations away from the union.
24:30 Pablo Torre? Capital U.
24:31 Speaker 01 Ability to pull money into a work stoppage year. So, once again, this is a public document. Some of it has been blacked out, and yes, you want to know it's always.
24:42 Pablo Torre? I would love to know the redactions.
24:43 Speaker 01 Me too, but you know what? I'll live, I'll live with the other stuff.
24:47 Pablo Torre? You sort of start with a hypothesis informed by, in many cases, and this is where it becomes familiar to me, it's a quote that you saw from Jerry Jones, it's a tip that you receive, it's something an NFL owner tells you. And so, I actually just want to skip ahead now in the timeline.
25:06 Speaker 01 Sure.
25:06 Pablo Torre? Because now we're in 2012.
25:08 Speaker 01 Yep.
25:08 Pablo Torre? And what you find out is that, oh, wait, there was a secret salary cap?
25:14 Speaker 01 Right.
25:15 Pablo Torre? So, a secret salary cap in 2010, and from whom do you find out about this?
25:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, so to set it up for the folks at home, the 2006 collective bargaining agreement basically had a poison pill in it. Something where if we reach expiration, bad things happen on each side. And that was designed by both Paul Tagliabue, the former commissioner, and Gene Upshaw, my predecessor, to basically urge both sides that we don't want to get to this fail-safe point because bad things happen. So, the bad thing that would happen at expiration for the owners by contract. By contract was that there would be no salary cap in 2010. And the idea there was it was designed to scare the owners to death. That all the high market teams would outspend the low market teams.
26:06 Speaker 01 There would be chaos. So the idea of no salary cap in 2010 was to urge owners to get a deal done before 2011. The bad thing on the player's side was that if we reach expiration, there will be no benefits paid to players.
26:23 Pablo Torre? Right.
26:24 Speaker 01 No 401ks, no healthcare benefits. All of the benefits packages were suspended in the uncapped year. And that's what we called it, the uncapped year. So we go through the uncapped year in 2010, and I've just been elected in 2009. We know we're gonna head into a lockout because Jerry Jones and everybody has said so.
26:45 Pablo Torre? I just like about the uncapped year, it just evokes the idea for the owners, like this is the purge.
26:50 Speaker 01 Oh, 100%.
26:50 Pablo Torre? It should be.
26:51 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:51 Pablo Torre? There are no laws, anything.
26:53 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, there's a target on everybody's.
26:55 Pablo Torre? Man and beast are nearly just.
26:57 Speaker 01 Are joined together for the ultimate showdown. Yeah, no, it was supposed to be an absolute epic, you know? And again, the salary cap is the core of the relationship between owners and players.
27:12 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
27:12 Speaker 01 You know, the first salary cap came into being in 1993.
27:16 Pablo Torre? A few things are as meaningfully and deliberately contested.
27:20 Speaker 01 Again, the salary cap was instituted, the formal salary cap as we know it, was instituted in 1993 as the result of a collusion case. So you fast forward, it's 2010. We audit revenue of the NFL, literally to the penny, almost every year. We also look at spending every year. So what do we see in 2010? There is no wild spending, for the most part, by the teams.
27:47 Pablo Torre? Right, it's actually not The Purge.
27:49 Speaker 01 It's not, and that's curious, but of course I have no facts. We do the deal in 2011, and literally, as the ink is still smudging.
28:00 Pablo Torre? On the CBA.
28:00 Speaker 01 On the CBA deal in 2011. This 10-year deal, this kumbaya moment, is ruptured. Because we are told that the union has to sign off on this deal by the owners to punish the then Redskins and the Cowboys for violating an agreement between the owners to keep the salary cap at a certain limit in 2010. Now, you don't have to be the smartest lawyer in the world. When you hear from the owners, "Oh hey, by the way, we need you to sign off on you agreeing to take money."
28:45 Speaker 01 Let's just talk about what this is. Take money away from the players on two teams. Because the owners, the owners violated the agreement.
28:54 Pablo Torre? And the owner in this case that I want to spotlight is the owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft. So, first, it's a phone call?
29:05 Speaker 01 It's two phone calls. First, it's a phone call from Roger saying that this is the deal that's on the table. And as you can imagine, given my personality, I do run a little hot.
29:14 Pablo Torre? I haven't noticed.
29:15 Speaker 01 I know, I know. It's something I'm trying to work on.
29:19 Pablo Torre? The jacket has been off the entire time, I was gonna say.
29:21 Speaker 01 Not, not. You know, when Roger made that call, I mean, I'll just tell you. I mean, it was one of the more exploitive laden calls. Because again, we'd gone through this torturous, just absolutely brutal, bloody war. We got some things that we needed to write the veto, an increase in any more games. We needed that as a group of players. They got what they wanted, some cost controls, fine. A bloody deal, both sides. Reach a deal that they're not thrilled about, but it's the one that you can live with. And literally almost an hour later, you get a call from the commissioner, you know, "Oh, indeed, we have to do this deal."
30:05 Speaker 01 I mean, my, my head exploded because, you know, by the time you reach a deal, you may not believe it, but all of us had, had taken enough bloodletting. And we had kind of reached this deal and, and Robert was instrumental in getting that 2011 deal done. I mean, he left, he left his wife who was dying at his house in order to get this deal done. And, and, and for that, I will always have a certain amount of, you know, love and respect for somebody who's willing to do that. But when my head explodes, the first person I pick up the phone is called Kraft because obviously he knows about this. Well, you know, when someone says that there's a piece of evidence that demonstrates that
30:50 Speaker 01 they have engaged in collusion, your ears perk up.
30:55 Pablo Torre? Noted.
30:56 Speaker 01 You don't cut off the, the conversation.
30:57 Pablo Torre? Never, never.
30:58 Speaker 01 You know, you just, that's not the moment to go, "Hey, I just need to go get myself, you know, maybe a, a nice latte." No, you, you just, you let people talk. And, and after that, he sent me an email.
31:12 Pablo Torre? I would love to have you read from the email as quoted.
31:17 Speaker 01 "I understand your concern," he wrote, "but believe me, we did the right thing for the integrity of the game long-term."
31:25 Pablo Torre? So that's in writing?
31:27 Speaker 01 That's in writing to me. And again, the context here is we're talking about this idea that, that we have to sign this deal in order to take money from the then Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys. But the context of why we have to agree to this deal is because those two teams did not go along with the collusion scheme.
31:50 Pablo Torre? Yes.
31:51 Speaker 01 So as we would say in good old prosecutor worlds, this is the smoking gun. Not only from the statement, but then there's an attachment to the email and it is a Excel spreadsheet. And it outlined that the owners had agreed to a $123 million cap ceiling.
32:14 Speaker 01 And Dallas, Washington, Oakland, and New Orleans had ignored it. Washington blew past the threshold by $102.8 million. And Dallas had overspent the agreement by $52.9 million. And then Kraft writes, "These teams got an unfair competitive advantage, which is not good for the game, in my opinion, in the long term."
32:43 Pablo Torre? Did he know what the meaning of this was, the implication was legally?
32:48 Speaker 01 I doubt it.
32:51 Pablo Torre? You could inject someone, a lawyer with truth serum, and you might not get it with this level of clarity.
32:57 Speaker 01 This was an admission with a chart. And so much so, that when this text came over, we filed a grievance. Based on that, the arbitrator ruled that when we did the deal in 2011, we explicitly agreed to eliminate any litigation that could be brought with respect to 2009 to 2011 season. And that was unfortunate, but that's, you know, those are deals that you have to make in the context. Now, I took that chart to the Justice Department, because, you know, the conservative estimate,
33:36 Speaker 01 if you take the average of what the Redskins overspent, and what the Dallas Cowboys overspent, you get to a rough number, let's just call it $50 million. And let's just say that every team in the league had made an equal decision to spend $50 million more than that secret salary cap. The way the Justice Department calculates a potential damages metric, is you just take 50 times 32. That's a crime. That's a theft from the players.
34:14 Pablo Torre? Look, I think the big picture context for all of this is that in general, the owners blow out the players in any contest of financial attrition.
34:26 Speaker 01 Sure.
34:27 Pablo Torre? And for all the reasons we've covered on this show exhaustively, that they hold the teams forever and pass it down to their kids versus the ever-spinning lobby doors of the NFL.
34:40 Speaker 01 The one we're about to see in a couple of days.
34:41 Pablo Torre? And so, in that way, the question becomes, as the leader of this union, the only real check on this league, how do you find the spots where you might actually be able to poke at a pressure point?
34:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:57 Pablo Torre? And what do you do when you identify one?
34:59 Speaker 01 It's two things. One, you're looking for a violation of the contract. The contract is predicated on no collusion. Look up Bill Radovich, you know, a guy who sues the National Football League in 1945 because the Detroit Lions owner blackballed him and doesn't allow him to leave the Lions, even though he's a free agency. You fast forward to Curt Flood, who sued for collusion and lost. You fast forward to Oscar Robertson in the NBA, who sued and won. John Mackey started the lawsuits for the NFL in 1971. It didn't end until collusion lawsuits took us to 1993.
35:40 Speaker 01 So, the story of sport is that management colludes. And so, you start as a lawyer with this idea that on the other side, they are going to cheat.
35:53 Pablo Torre? But, look, the mentality is, I'm gonna operate as if they're cheating.
35:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:58 Pablo Torre? The challenge is, how do I?
36:00 Speaker 01 How do you find it?
36:01 Pablo Torre? How do you find it?
36:01 Speaker 01 Well, you look for the tip. And sometimes you get the tip because, you know, Jerry Jones brags. Sometimes you get the tip because Steve Bisciotti. Says something like, I wouldn't have spent that much money on a guy like Deshaun Watson.
36:14 Pablo Torre? Right, this is the Ravens owner talking about-
36:15 Speaker 01 This is the Ravens owner talking about guaranteed contracts for, for, for quarterbacks. Or, or someone sends you an email with, you know, with a chart attached to it. But, so you, you start the process by A, you know, filing the lawsuit based upon a breach of your, your contract. But B, you also file it because that is the role of a sports labor union, protecting its players in the long term. And finding that collusion case not only helps you with the current matter that is on the table, it gives you leverage when you are later on moving into collective bargaining
36:57 Speaker 01 because you not only want to solve the immediate problem, but you want to use it for leverage in order to solve all of the other aggrieved issues that you have.
37:07 Pablo Torre? Which brings us to the document that we've been muttering over.
37:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:11 Pablo Torre? So let's, let's, it's time.
37:14 Speaker 01 It's time. Let's go.
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38:26 Speaker 03 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
38:58 Pablo Torre? So I want to preface this by saying, I didn't start talking to you until after I obtained and published what a number of union sources had called "The Holy Grail", a 61-page arbitration ruling that had been buried by the NFL and your successors at the NFLPA. And we published this over on Substack, Pablo.show, as well as, of course, here on our podcast with Mike Florio. And so this-
39:23 Speaker 01 Look, I gotta lay this out for you. I had taken a red eye from Los Angeles, and I landed at Dulles about, you know, 7:00 AM. I went to bed, you know? I mean, I stirred awake about, you know, 11 o'clock, 11:00 AM to, you know, what charitably could be called 750 text messages, saying, "OMG, you have to look at Pablo Torre. You gotta watch this. You gotta watch this. Oh my God." I mean, literally. And many of them came from people in labor world, not even sports labor. You know, when you're getting texts from people in the AFL-CIO who are saying, "Oh my God, this is why unions exist."
40:08 Speaker 01 I literally said to myself, "Holy [bleep]."
40:12 Pablo Torre? I just need to be, again, super blunt about this. I- Think that this collusion ruling remains so relatively under discussed. Given all of the drama we have also covered within the NFLPA with your successors.
40:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:29 Pablo Torre? And yet, I have been waiting to talk to you about it because you, as I think this whole lineage now makes clear, of course, you're the guy who filed it.
40:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I filed this case, was not around for the ruling, but I testified in this case.
40:46 Pablo Torre? Yeah, so for people who don't remember, I'll just speed run through some of this because we've talked about it so much on the show, but it centers around, the three protagonists are three star quarterbacks.
40:55 Speaker 01 Right.
40:55 Pablo Torre? Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, Russell Wilson. It expands in the course of the proceedings to examine also 594 players in totality. This had started with fully guaranteed contracts for those quarterbacks.
41:07 Speaker 01 Sure.
41:08 Pablo Torre? Then to partial guarantees for the almost 600 players in totality. And what comes back via this legal proceeding in this arbitration ruling is a treasure trove that contains documents that no one had ever seen from owners, from Roger Goodell himself, from his general counsel, to GMs, to the players included, to everybody.
41:34 Speaker 01 To everyone. You know, look, I filed this case as literally a rifle shot. We had a lot of things that led us to believe that the owners were colluding to avoid giving quarterbacks guaranteed contracts. I filed this case, I was gone. I mean, did I want to know the outcome of the case? You know, yes. You know, I had heard that there was no reported decision. I think either you or somebody else, you know, the while back had come out and said that there was a 51 or 61 page decision.
42:04 Pablo Torre? Florio had been really sounding the bell on where is this?
42:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and look, I had also heard, you know, through, you know, through various, you know, players who were still in the league that. That my successor, you know, had told the, the players that we lost the case.
42:23 Pablo Torre? So this is-
42:24 Speaker 01 That it was a, a waste of money.
42:26 Pablo Torre? And this is Lloyd Howell, who, again, we've exhaustively covered on this show, as well as his number two, his chief strategy officer, J.C. Treter. That's the administration at this time.
42:34 Speaker 01 Let's put it this way, given your reporting, I have nothing to say, to add to Lloyd Howell.
42:39 Pablo Torre? Well, they have both resigned. J.C. Treter got elected, which is so perfect for what I want to discuss here. But the point is, this holy grail, which includes all of the stuff that I want to just briefly recap, it was via confidentiality agreement with the NFL, buried.
43:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:03 Pablo Torre? And your reaction to hearing that, oh my God, here it is, and also, oh my God.
43:12 Speaker 01 Secret agreement.
43:13 Pablo Torre? The union and the league together buried it was what?
43:18 Speaker 01 I honestly didn't believe it. Through your reporting and others, you know, Don Van Natta and, and on others, that, that there was a secret agreement. I, I heard about the secret agreement first and read the document second. And again, for people who are listening and trying to figure out, you know, why I would react so viscerally against a, a, a secret agreement with respect to collusion. That's how important collusion is. It's not this weird sort of cute economic, you just being clever. No. Collusion means that you are treating people as a piece of property and absolutely stifling their freedom.
44:03 Speaker 01 A secret agreement to me is an anathema to that.
44:10 Speaker 01 It can't coexist in the same world as a union's duty to do everything to increase the freedom of the people who work.
44:24 Pablo Torre? Again, for those who don't know, we get slides. We're back to getting PowerPoint decks, the equivalent. We get Commissioner Roger Goodell emailing his general counsel, Jeff Pash, to give notes on this presentation to be given by the NFL's management council to owners at the NFL owners meetings.
44:42 Speaker 01 Yep.
44:43 Pablo Torre? And slide 17, as just one example says, quote, "If guarantees continue to grow in both amount and number of players, then there's a risk that they become the norm in contracts regardless of player quality."
44:53 Speaker 01 Let's do that one again. This is the general counsel saying, and paraphrasing, "If we continue to do this, we run the risk of giving players a lot of money even if their quality declines." And once again, you're sitting in the bar and there's the guy at the end of the bar and he says, "First of all, I would play this game for free, Dee, if I could." And my response to that was always, "You can't play." And, and the second thing is, well, well, why should we pay these guys, you know, and give them contracts, you know, if, if their quality might decline?
45:38 Speaker 01 And somebody always says, "Jomarcus Russell." I mean, always.
45:42 Pablo Torre? Any number of busts, but that's, that's, that's a go-to. That's a go-to example.
45:46 Speaker 01 And I always respond this way. My guys take a job where they are well-paid and they have a union that protects them. And yes, they get 50 cents on every dollar that they generate, but their job means that they're standing in oncoming traffic.
46:02 Speaker 01 And getting hit by cars and buses. And when they break their legs, or when they have concussions, or when they unfortunately might develop CTE, none of that is a [bleep] accident. It's a deliberate and necessary job consequence of their job duties. So would you want your son or daughter, if they made a decision that their job duties were to stand and get hit by oncoming traffic? What kind of contract would you want them to have? Would you want them to have a contract where, even though the player is taking all of the risk, the owner gets the reward? Or do you want them to have a contract
46:46 Speaker 01 that is commensurate with the risk that they are taking? Fast forward to Deshaun Watson. He gets a fully guaranteed contract. And then what happens? These three guys do not. First of all, everybody should now understand, if I had some evidence of collusion, I'm filing that for those three players. Collusion is so important. There is no scenario where I would have agreed to keep it secret.
47:20 Pablo Torre? I was gonna ask, so the stuff that's in the ruling. So you have the quotes-
47:27 Speaker 01 Is bananas, by the way.
47:28 Pablo Torre? You have the quote from Roger Goodell to Jeff Pash. You have the back and forth, actually, leading to the notes on that slide that got presented to all of the owners at the owners' meetings.
47:37 Speaker 01 At a meeting.
47:38 Pablo Torre? At a, again, in front of everybody, with the intent to shape the strategy of the entire league.
47:45 Speaker 01 Right.
47:46 Pablo Torre? You also get texts. You got text messages between Dean Spanos, the owner of the Chargers, and Michael Bidwell, the owner of the Cardinals. And this is just one of the great exchanges, I would say, in collusion and in Discovery Sports history. Dean Spanos says, "Congratulations on signing Murray." Bidwell says, "Again, these are competitors." Bidwell says-
48:07 Speaker 01 Supposed to be.
48:08 Pablo Torre? Thanks Dino. These QB deals are expensive, but we limited the fully guaranteed money and have some pretty good language. Thankfully, we have a QB that's worth paying. Spanos comes back. Your deal helps us for our QB next year. Bidwell comes back. I think many teams will be happy with it once they have a chance to review. Cleveland, employers, signers of Deshaun Watson, really screwed things up, but I was resolved to keep the guaranteed relatively, quote unquote, "low," period. And it goes on.
48:39 Speaker 01 It's two people talking about their willingness to engage in collusion. I have seen a lot of evidence, frankly, that that colloquy between the two of them is about the only thing I know of that can beat the NFL flowchart that we started this contract with. And so, again, there is no way on God's green earth that I would keep such a ruling from the players.
49:07 Pablo Torre? So I was gonna say, it's really important to point out that this was not merely a secret to the public and to not tell the plaintiffs, to not tell the quarterbacks or the rest of your membership.
49:20 Speaker 01 You have an obligation of a lawyer to tell your clients.
49:24 Pablo Torre? That one feels
49:25 Speaker 01 Kinda weird, right?
49:27 Pablo Torre? Truly insane.
49:28 Speaker 01 Look, it could be a matter for some bar association if they want.
49:31 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the arbitrator's quote here was, "The NFL MC, the NFL Management Council's message, was not purely educational and informational, as the NFL contends. It unmistakably encouraged the owners to reduce the trend of increasing player guarantees." End quote. The issue being that, yeah, how can you prove that harm as a direct result of that encouragement? And I want to set this up by saying, one of the hilarious things that happened after we published the ruling and after this whole news cycle is ignited, that tips over the dominoes that lead to the resignations of both Lloyd Howell and J.C. Tretter,
50:10 Pablo Torre? is the fact that, of course, the union, your successors, then decide it is time to appeal the ruling.
50:20 Speaker 01 Let's just say that the fact is, it was secret.
50:27 Speaker 01 It it became not a secret. And then the union appealed. Then, not not immediately after. Then, and and so they appeal that ruling. That ruling just recently came back.
50:44 Pablo Torre? And this is sitting in front of us today.
50:46 Speaker 01 And the three judge panel, which is an appellate panel that hears NFL appeals. They write, based largely on the foregoing, talking about all of the text, all of the presentations, everything that was said by both the owners to each other and from the general counsel to the owners, based largely on that foregoing. The arbitrator concluded that the management counsel, this is the board of directors of the NFL, that the NFL's board of directors' presentation contemplated and invited concerted action by the clubs.
51:25 Speaker 01 This presentation went well beyond presenting historical information and, quote, "unmistakenly encouraged the owners to reduce the trends of increasing guarantees," unquote. That is a finding.
51:44 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
51:45 Speaker 01 That is a conclusion by a group of arbitrators that we jointly pick. This is not D. Smith's language. This is not the union's language. This is not the NFL's language. This is a conclusion by the three judge panel, ruling consistently with the arbitrator who first heard the case. Even though he ruled that there was no proof of harm, what the arbitrator ruled and what this three judge panel ruled was that there was a deliberate encouragement to engage in collusions. And here's the most important thing. It doesn't say when it started.
52:28 Pablo Torre? So what it says, and I'll quote this further, is "we cannot fathom these sophisticated business people did not comprehend they were being encouraged to limit or reduce guaranteed contracts." But your brain, and so again, you're reading this, you're processing this. And the question I had was, let's say you were privy to this. Let's say you had the power.
52:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, still in the job.
52:51 Pablo Torre? You were still in charge.
52:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:52 Pablo Torre? What the [bleep] would you have done? Because we know what happened in this timeline. What happens in the other one?
52:59 Speaker 01 You know, the next move by, you know, my brain would be we, I would have asked our lawyers, based on this, do we have enough evidence to file a claim against the NFL dating back to when Kirk Cousins got his fully guaranteed contract?
53:20 Pablo Torre? You would have expanded the scope.
53:21 Speaker 01 Well, 100% because now we know that basically the reaction to Deshaun Watson's contract is all of this.
53:29 Pablo Torre? And you know the history of how-
53:30 Speaker 01 And you know the history of collusion. And you say to yourself, I want to know what their reaction was to the Kirk Cousins contract when the owners knew that at least four to five first ballot Hall of Famer quarterbacks were going to have renegotiations of their contracts within 18 to 24 months of Kirk Cousins breaking the, the glass ceiling of no guaranteed contracts in the National Football League.
54:02 Pablo Torre? Because those quarterbacks relatedly did not get those fully guaranteed contracts.
54:06 Speaker 01 No, and, and so I would say to myself, the owners probably are going to do whatever they can to make sure that Tom Brady doesn't get a fully guaranteed contract, that Aaron Rodgers doesn't get a fully guaranteed contract. And I'm going to sit there and say, you know what? If they reacted this way-
54:26 Pablo Torre? By the way, part of that reaction was, apparently-
54:31 Pablo Torre? Only a couple of teams expressing interest to the Ravens.
54:35 Speaker 01 Oh.
54:36 Pablo Torre? About Lamar Jackson.
54:38 Speaker 01 Two things happened in the Lamar Jackson case that, one, raises your ire about cheating, but also, you know, this history of collusion. He is the most electric quarterback in the National Football League.
54:52 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
54:52 Speaker 01 MVP. The Ravens give him a franchise tag, which means that other teams could come in and if they offered $1 more to him, they could have the best player in the National Football League. Not only did no team, not one, make an offer to Lamar Jackson, for the first time in my history, I watched league and team executives give press conferences. You know what? I'm not really interested in him. I mean, one of them was from the Washington team that is 30 miles to the south, that
55:37 Speaker 01 did not have an MVP quarterback.
55:39 Pablo Torre? The Falcons were saying this.
55:41 Speaker 01 People were saying, ah, I'm not interested in that guy. You know what? I don't care how much you believe in either the competence or the quote-unquote myth that all of these owners want to win equally. The fact that no one even made a call to say, hey, here's an extra dollar.
56:08 Pablo Torre? Which raises a question, I think, an operative question for me, which is, you're the guy who filed this thing.
56:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:13 Pablo Torre? Did anyone from the NFLPA, that regime, did they reach out to you to tell you to consult on this at any point?
56:24 Speaker 01 No.
56:25 Pablo Torre? Do you have any idea why, for instance, the Chief Strategy Officer, J.C. Tredor, let alone the Executive Director Lloyd Howell, why they did not push to make this a bigger case?
56:36 Speaker 01 No. No, I don't. Um, no.
56:41 Pablo Torre? I can sense the non-disparagement peeking out here.
56:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. I have a non-disparagement agreement, you know, against the union. Frankly, I'm not interested in...
56:53 Pablo Torre? But I just gotta ask also, do you have any idea why the Executive Committee of Players did not ask to read this once they were informed?
57:03 Speaker 01 No. I, no. I mean, all I can say is, is this. I, I can talk about the Executive Committees that I had, um, and the Presidents that I had, um, you know, Kevin Mawy, Dominique Foxworth, and Eric Winston would, if, if I had filed a, a collusion case, um, and, and the three of them certainly understood, you know, the importance of collusion, any one of those three people would have grabbed either one of my legs and made a wish if I had told them that there was a secret agreement and I couldn't tell them.
57:45 Speaker 01 This idea that this ruling existed from January until the day that you broke it, um, apparently with, without a group of players who are the player leadership, um, not asking to read it, and maybe they did, but all I can say is, I had, I had a group that would have demanded to read it. I can only tell you what I would do. It would be both barrels every day. Both barrels every day.
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1:00:12 Pablo Torre? The sort of like thought I have near the end here is that why should a fan really give a [BLEEP] about this? It's because, I don't know. If you believe that competition is a principle that we should enshrine in America, which is to say that we get better stuff, we get better products, we get better games, we get better sports when everyone is competing.
1:00:35 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:00:35 Pablo Torre? The question becomes, what are the mechanisms to make sure that competition is in fact being respected?
1:00:41 Speaker 01 I would have looked at this ruling in any case that we subsequently filed as leverage for a better collective bargaining agreement.
1:00:52 Speaker 01 And that's the last piece we haven't really talked about. That leverage piece.
1:00:55 Pablo Torre? Oh, right. There's a CBA coming up.
1:00:57 Speaker 01 Well, it's coming up in 2030. That's, that's an hour away. We started thinking about the 2020 deal seven years, six years before it came. And you're looking for leverage in that deal. And, and especially if one side or the other side is looking for an ability to do an early deal. The leverage dramatically shifts to the players. If there is this massive case pending dating back to when Kirk Cousins got his fully guaranteed contract.
1:01:36 Pablo Torre? That maybe the public might even care about.
1:01:38 Speaker 01 Well, because the leverage changes dramatically because now if you're the owner, again, think about it from a, from a financial standpoint. Think of the hundreds of players that could have had guaranteed contracts that didn't. Take the delta between whatever amount of money they signed for and the actual amount of money that they got. And that's a reasonable way to calculate damages. The damages calculation for a case like that is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And remember for an antitrust case, you're allowed to triple it.
1:02:18 Pablo Torre? Yeah. So. Triple damages.
1:02:21 Speaker 01 So think as an owner now, you're heading into an early deal. There's this huge potential calamitous money judgment that's coming against you. What does that do with your incentive to want to do a deal? Where you are now agreeing to a number of player terms on all sorts of other issues that you otherwise wouldn't want to agree to. And you know what? That's capitalism. Right? I mean, again, let's just.
1:02:57 Pablo Torre? Let's get the.
1:02:57 Speaker 01 Let's ground it back to Chili's and everywhere else.
1:03:00 Pablo Torre? The more you know shooting star graphic over and that's capitalism.
1:03:04 Speaker 01 And that's capitalism. Ding, ding, ding.
1:03:17 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
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