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The NFL continues to stay in the spotlight after news broke in June about alleged collusion between the league and the NFLPA. Both sides appeared to cover up collusion following Deshaun Watson’s fully guaranteed contract in 2022. Now one of the NFLPA’s leaders is coming under fire with accusations of a conflict of interest.
NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell Jr. is working as as paid, part-time consultant for The Carlyle Group, per ESPN’s Don Van Natta J.r and Kalyn Kahler. This is significant because The Carlyle Group is a league-approved private equity firm that is seeking minority ownership in NFL franchises. As a result, it is a major conflict of interest.
Former NFLPA lead outside counsel Jim Quinn said that neither of Howell’s predecessors was allowed to be paid for outside work.
“As far as I knew, they never had the ability to earn outside income,” Quinn said. “That wasn’t their job. Their job was to represent the players.”
Quinn explained how Howell’s connection with The Carlyle Group is a huge conflict of interest as a leader in the NFLPA.
“It would be an outrageous conflict for the head of a labor union to have an interest in a third party that is aligned with the NFL,” Quinn told ESPN. “The relationship between a labor organization and the employer organization is adversarial by definition, and as a result, as a leader, you have to be absolutely clear and clean as to having no even appearance of conflict.”
Ideally Howell will step down from his position at The Carlyle Group before this becomes a larger issue.
More news emerged on Wednesday on why the NFL and NFLPA kept the collusion finds a secret.
Reports indicate that both sides had a confidentiality agreement in place. That agreement meant that both sides agreed to not shared the findings with NFL players.
“The NFL and senior leaders of the NFL Players Association struck an unusual confidentiality agreement that hid the details of an arbitration decision from players, including a finding that league executives had urged team owners to reduce guaranteed player compensation, multiple sources told ESPN,” Van Natta Jr. and Kahler wrote.
Everything stems back to the smoking gun from arbitrator Christopher Droney. He wrote in his arbitration ruling that the NFLPA showed “by a clear preponderance of the evidence” that commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s general counsel, Jeff Pash, had urged owners to restrict guaranteed money in player contracts.”
It seems inevitable that more information will come to light now that there is attention on this story.
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