The NFLPA’s grievance aimed at proving NFL owners colluded to prevent other teams from matching the Browns’ fully guaranteed Deshaun Watson extension did not produce a win. A ruling by an independent arbitrator earlier this year did not find sufficient evidence to determine collusion definitively occurred.
But an investigation from veteran reporter Pablo Torre revealed a trove of information regarding some recent quarterback negotiations and the fallout they produced. The Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast’s report addresses the Cardinals’ 2022 Kyler Murray talks and the Ravens’ first wave of Lamar Jackson negotiations. It also delves into the Broncos’ seminal discussions with their then-hopeful long-term QB solution.
While the NFLPA could not ultimately prove collusion, the investigation featured System Arbitrator Christopher Droney concluding (via Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio), “There is little question that the NFL Management Council, with the blessing of the Commissioner, encouraged the 32 NFL Clubs to reduce guarantees in veterans’ contracts at the March 2022 annual owners’ meeting.”
Based on the blowback Jimmy and Dee Haslam received from owners upon agreeing to an ultimately disastrous Watson extension (five years, $230MM fully guaranteed), little doubt existed about owners’ desire to prevent such a deal from happening again. A key chapter in this saga occurred in Denver during Russell Wilson‘s summer 2022 extension talks.
Wilson arrived in Denver as the franchise’s biggest swing during a near-decade-long effort to find a long-term Peyton Manning replacement. The Broncos had tried free agents (Case Keenum), early-round draft choices (Paxton Lynch, Drew Lock) and lower-level trade acquisitions (Joe Flacco, Teddy Bridgewater) but did not see any of them become the primary starter for more than a season. Former seventh-rounder Trevor Siemian made the most starts for the team between its Super Bowl 50 victory and the conclusion of the 2021 season. Enter Wilson, whose trade to Denver emerged hours after Aaron Rodgers — a multiyear Broncos target after the future Hall of Famer had listed the team as an acceptable destination amid a standoff with Packers management — agreed to stay in Green Bay.
Through Torre and Florio’s pursuit, the NFLPA’s collusion case is now public (via Florio). A notable section of the case covers Wilson testimony indicating he requested a fully guaranteed seven-year extension from the Broncos that covered around $50MM per year. That would have covered around $350MM and reminded of a baseball contract. Wilson’s agent, Mark Rodgers, has otherwise repped MLB talent. The camp also drove hard bargains in Seattle during 2015 and 2019 negotiations; the Seahawks not wanting to partake in another round of re-up talks helped influence the trade.
Rodgers had just moved the QB market to $50MM per year via his March 2022 Packers extension, but that complex deal had been, as it turned out, designed to be traded rather than fully bringing the market to the $50MM-AAV place. It took until Jalen Hurts‘ April 2023 extension to move the barrier beyond $50MM on a long-term deal, as the Broncos and Wilson agreed on an accord just south of that place.
Wilson and the Broncos agreed on a five-year, $245MM pact in September 2022. The team’s ownership change, approved in August 2022, delayed an extension from becoming final. Wilson viewed the Broncos as “getting cold feet” regarding a fully guaranteed deal after acquiring him.
Communication uncovered via the investigation indicate Rich Hurtado, the Broncos’ VP of football administration and chief negotiator, emailed GM George Paton a series of talking points ahead of the latter’s meeting with incoming CEO Greg Penner. In the email, Hurtado said he believed the Broncos held leverage in Wilson talks and that he could not foresee another team going to the fully guaranteed well the Browns did with Watson.
Watson held unique leverage due to four finalists (the Browns, Falcons, Panthers and Saints) having agreed on trade terms with the Texans. Cleveland won out, after previously being eliminated, due to the whopping guarantee proposal. Wilson was tied to one team, and the Broncos — via the QB’s Seahawks deal (four years, $140MM) — had their new centerpiece player signed through the 2023 season. The franchise tag, which has been a key tool in efforts to limit players during its three-plus-decade history, also served as a tool the Broncos could have used down the line.
Another notable nugget from the Wilson sector of the report involves a Penner handwritten note questioning why the Broncos needed to force the issue with Wilson in 2022. The incoming boss cited the two years remaining on the Seahawks-constructed deal as a reason the Broncos did not need to extend him immediately. Paton had also informed Wilson’s agent a Watson-level guarantee was a “nonstarter.”
In an email sent from Penner to two other members of the Broncos’ ownership group, Penner said Paton informed him the Broncos’ final proposal, regarding guarantees, was “far less than Watson,” and addressed the “benchmark” it set for the rest of the NFL regarding future negotiations. Penner also stated, when forwarding one of the Broncos’ Wilson offers to some in the Broncos ownership ranks, nothing in the deal “other owners would consider off market.”
At the time, the Broncos were believed to want to beat the QB market to the punch by extending Wilson in 2022. Wilson’s concerning play that season made that a poor decision. Wilson received $124MM fully guaranteed — a number still relevant to the Broncos due to the $84MM-plus dead money bloodbath that ensued because of the declining QB’s March 2024 release — but that number checking in so far south of Watson’s $230MM irked then-NFLPA president J.C. Tretter.
In texts with former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith on July 8, 2024, Tretter lampooned Wilson (via Torre) for not pushing harder for a fully guaranteed Broncos deal. “Instead of being the guy that made guaranteed contracts the norm, he’s the guy that ruined it for everyone,” Tretter said.
This exchange came after Tretter’s time as NFLPA president had ended; the union elected linebacker Jalen Reeves-Maybin as its new leader on March 8, 2024. Lloyd Howell succeeded Smith on June 28, 2023. It is not exactly shocking to learn a former NFLPA boss was upset at a player not setting an impactful precedent — one that could have given other marquee players a gateway to land NBA- or MLB-style fully guaranteed contract structures — but Torre reports one of the texts referred to Wilson as a “wuss” for failing to do move his effort past the goal line.
Leadership referring to one of its players as such is obviously notable due to the responsibility the union holds. Part of the reason this document did not surface until now stemmed from Tretter not wanting this text exchange to be made public, Torre reports, citing NFLPA sources. This text exchange also impacted the collusion case as a whole, as Torre adds owners used Tretter’s Wilson remarks as evidence no ownership collusion took place.
Wilson did not live up to the trade return the Broncos sent the Seahawks, but the potential Hall of Fame passer has done incredibly well regardless of that two-year stint or failing to land a fully guaranteed Denver deal. Wilson has earned more than $313MM in his 13-year career. The Broncos are still carrying $32MM in dead money from Wilson’s post-June 1 cut, which came after he and the team feuded over a failed Paton effort to move his guarantee vesting date from 2024 to 2025. Wilson did step up in a precedent-setting effort on this front, a move that also protected him from potentially losing money.
Denver has moved on, via its Bo Nix draft investment, while Wilson signed with the Giants in late March. The Broncos would have tumbled into in a Browns-like abyss had they agreed on the QB’s short-lived full guarantee quest. Had the early Wilson momentum for a fully guaranteed extension — amid a desperate period for the Broncos at quarterback — succeeded, Nix probably is elsewhere. Like the Browns with Watson, the Broncos would have been unable to realistically move on due to the dead money consequences on a fully guaranteed deal.
The AFC West franchise succeeding in not matching the Browns’ guarantee structure for Wilson also helped future teams avoid such commitments, as a host of $50MM-per-year (and one $60MM AAV, via Dallas) contracts have been agreed to without coming close to Watson’s guarantee number since the Wilson-Broncos talks wrapped.
Apparently it never occurred to NFLPA morons like Tretter that players getting $124MM guaranteed really have no need for a union.
Union responsibilities and negotiations are much more complex than simply the topic of guaranteed vs. non-guaranteed contracts.
Lemon, aside from the things unions do that affect all players, who do you think got players the ability to earn free agency and contracts that big in the first place? I really wouldn’t go calling other people morons if I made comments like you do.
seriously. owners would. be rocking $20m payrolls if it wasn’t for the union. Anti-union working class people are a strange breed.
It doesn’t take collusion for 31 teams to not be as stupid as the Browns. This is a non-story by the usual NFL excrement rakers looking for attention.
The arbitrator’s decision- and the actual facts of the case- are a pretty big story about how the NFL has bureaucratically insulated itself in such a way that they can collude without consequences. But the author framing the entire topic as merely a story about how Wilson irked some people by not going for a fully guaranteed contract reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of its scope.
Wrong. No collusion. /story
The arbitrator literally found evidence of collusion. You should read some of the reports and *especially* the unearthed docs. You can get a rare peek at the slime beneath the NFL rocks link to sports.yahoo.com
The commissioner talking to owners is not collusion. Collusion is a group of people illegally agreeing yo something. A person, say Roger goodell, only encouraged them to pay less guarantees. No owners have a greed on anything that we know of, so there’s no collusion. However, RG is still scum for that
LOL they’re not going to get together at a meeting and take a hand vote on whether to collude or not. Jerry Jones isn’t going to stand up and shout LET’S COLLUDE!!!
The commissioner works for the owners. He’s not some independent entity meant to balance power between owners and players. The commissioner is there to protect the owners from each other. Don’t pretend like Goodell is some sort of outside agency taking a neutral position while innocently advising the owners of a course of action.
Sports owners have been proven guilty in the past of collusion in different sports. They’re learning how to push the envelope. The owners have a bunch of very good lawyers who have advised them exactly what they need to do to have plausible deniability and legal protection from the consequences of collusion while facilitating an avenue for them to actually collude. They were literally colluding, but have the ability to tell the legal system that, technically, they’re not. The idea that the owners aren’t actually colluding here is ludicrous.
Clearly Cleveland didn’t collude with anyone when they gave Watson that fully guaranteed contract. That shocked the league. Of course they’re going to get upset at that. It’s a WTF are you doing moment. So now other QBs want a fully guaranteed contract like Watson’s, and no one was willing to go 100% guaranteed, it’s collusion? They can cite Lamar Jackson not getting any other offers when he had his stand off with Baltimore, but it wasn’t realistic to think he was ever leaving. Why would any owner entertain that? Players game the market to get higher contracts, thats no secret.
Veteran players know the guarantees in their 2nd contracts are what they most likely will get, not the full dollar amount. If we were seeing a rash of veteran players signing below market contracts, that should raise red flags, but we aren’t. For the NFLPA to charge up the Watson hill wasnt a good idea.
Tretter is–and always has been–an idiot.
It’s not collusion when the other 31 teams all coincidentally and correctly happen to think that you’re idiots.
Spanos and Bidwell celebrating holding salaries down like they won the Super Bowl says it all.
Does it, though? Or is it just 2 semi-competent owners of marginal pro football teams talking shop? I’m not siding with the owners by any means, just playing devil’s advocate. Now if they had that conversation while Murray contract talks were still going on, that’s a different story…
What is the congratulations for from one owner to the other, if it wasn’t for keeping salary guarantees low now, and in the future, and then making the correlation that one deal is saving money on the next. It’s either free enterprise and bargaining or it isn’t.
That and calling Spanos and Bidwell “semi-competent” while the contents of their collusion are being made for public consumption of all things….
No topic brings out the truly obstinate on this website than the players union. I am always shocked but the number of owner brown-noses and bootlickers that appear in every thread about this subject.
The players get a fixed percentage of revenues so this discussion has always seemed a bit silly. Any extra money going to Russell Wilson came from the pockets of other players, not the owners.
A good percentage of a roster is made up of players on rookie contracts who can’t get raises. Another chunk are bottom of the roster players who won’t make much. The salary cap has already gone up 34% since Wilson signed that contract. It’s OK for veteran players to fight for their money and it’s generally good for other players to gain contract advances.
This is the part that confuses me as well. Though I suppose not all teams consistently spend to the cap currently?
They do not. A team has to meet something like 90% of the cap over any four year period.
NFLPA is the worst union in sports history. Only major sports league not to have guaranteed contracts.
Fix that and almost all of the off-season news of “X player holding out” go away.