Inside the NFL’s Grievance Against the NFLPA’s Player Report Cards

The NFL’s decision to file a grievance against the NFLPA over the union’s recent practice of conducting and publishing team report cards In this story. But the complaint, which will go to a neutral arbitrator, was hardly the beginning of the league’s fight on this particular subject.

The league office is, in fact, now three seasons in on pushing back against the PA’s player-driven accountability checks on its 32 teams.

On three different occasions since the report cards were instituted in 2023, the NFL sent now ex-NFLPA president JC Tretter cease and desist letters in attempts to curtail the process, Cheap Rs-flyfishing Jordan Outlet has learned. Then, on Aug. 19, the NFL took the next step in filing the grievance, alleging that the union was in violation of the collective bargaining agreement.

The first letter was sent after the first set of report cards became public in 2023. Tretter had fielded inquiries from a few teams about their grades, and decided to send a formal letter to all 32 clubs in response, inviting them to reach out to him if they wanted more feedback, which the league alleged was in violation of the CBA.

The second came in the second year of the report cards, 2024, when, again, employees from individual clubs reached out to Tretter directly. This time, it was trainers, strength coaches and others down the line asking about the results in their particular areas, trying to make improvements in how they handled players. That cease and desist letter said that such improvements had to be bargained, and endeavored to bar Tretter from discussing results with teams any further.

The third came after Tretter’s presidency ended, and he’d become a PA consultant. At that point, teams had logged complaints with the union on the report cards, saying it was hard to address issues when they didn’t know what questions were being asked. So teams reached out to Tretter, and Tretter told them he was open to hearing any questions the clubs suggested the union include. The NFL claimed, again, that Tretter was overstepping his bounds.

So, the logical conclusion is obvious: A lot of owners aren’t interested in the union’s exercise, one that can make their teams better in the long run, because of the public flogging they’re taking. They also believe it violates the CBA because it denigrates the owners and teams.

The grievance from August cites article 51, section 6 of the CBA, which says the union has a duty to “use reasonable efforts to curtail public comments by … players which express criticism of any club, its coach, or its operation and policy, or which tend to cast discredit upon a club.” It also questioned the veracity of the report cards, saying, “The NFLPA has repeatedly refused to disclose any support for its alleged ‘findings.’” 

That said, the report cards have been a tangible difference-maker. In the most recent poll, five owners received D-or-worse grades, and two of them (Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill) are spending tens of millions to build brand-new practice facilities, while a third (Pittsburgh’s Art Rooney II) has renovations at an existing facility underway.

Meanwhile, the Raiders actually included their NFLPA report card grades in materials they used to recruit undrafted free agents last April. (It’s fair to guess the Vikings and Dolphins didn’t hate the union’s exercise, either.)

Now, part of the NFL’s response says they already have a mechanism in the CBA to do these sorts of reviews once every three years. But the last one was done in 2015. So if it were that important to the owners to get player feedback, you can surmise they’d have conducted reviews in 2018 and ’21.

The grievance alleges that the NFL tried to conduct a survey in 2024, through the National Opinion Research Center, but that the NORC advised the league that the existence of the NFLPA survey would have too big an impact on its own results, so it was scrapped. By then, two sets of NFLPA report cards had already been published, making it easy to reason that the league tried to go back to running the survey after a nine-year lapse because owners were embarrassed by the results of the union survey.

The NFLPA has maintained that it’s going through with the survey for this year, with plans again to make the results public. Typically, the union releases the results during the scouting combine in early March.

More NFL From Sports Illustrated