Sporticast 423: ‘The NFL Should Have Pulled That Deal off the Table’

https://sports.yahoo.com/sporticast-423-nfl-pulled-deal-105500011.html

On the latest Sporticast episode, hosts Scott Soshnick and Eben Novy-Williams speak with DeMaurice Smith, former executive director of the NFLPA, about his time running the union, Donald Trump’s relationship with the world’s richest sports league, and the inside story of how he negotiated a new labor accord at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Smith ran the NFLPA for 14 years up until 2023. In that time he presided over multiple new labor accords, constantly facing off against commissioner Roger Goodell and the 31 owners on everything from social issues to player health and season length. He just wrote a book about the experience, which will come out later this year.

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The trio discusses some fundamentals about the NFL’s business that many fans don’t understand. Principal among them, risk transfer. “If you cannot buy insurance for something, it does not occur,” he says. To illustrate his point, he discusses the concussion threat to football. The NFL cannot publicly discuss the sport’s inherent dangers, he says, because it has negotiated for decades with insurance companies under the argument that the sport is not dangerous. Saying the opposite in any forum would permanently harm the league’s position in those talks.

Next they talk about the COVID pandemic. The sports world began shutting down in March 2020, right as the NFL and its players were in the final stages of negotiating a new CBA. Smith recalls the fraught final stages of those talks, including a potential mistake the NFL owners made by not tearing up the deal before it was approved. He describes the contentious conversations with NFL owners, a phone call with Goodell that he was nervous to make, and also an argument between two star quarterbacks—one a future first-ballot Hall of Fame candidate—that almost scuttled the deal.

He also talks about President Donald Trump’s fraught relationship with football. Trump owned a USFL team in the 1980s and tried unsuccessfully to buy into the NFL on multiple occasions. Then, as a candidate and holder of the Oval Office from 2016-2020, Trump frequently criticized the league and its players. Smith imparts why he thinks NFL owners deferred to Trump so quickly on social justice issues, and also gives his opinion on whether Trump poses any sort of threat to the business of the world’s richest sports league.

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