CORNWELL OUT OF NFLPA SEARCH

Though we don’t know who the three or four finalists for the NFLPA Executive Director position will be, we do know that lawyer David Cornwell isn’t one of them. Per a source with knowledge of the selection process, David Cornwell has not made the cut after two days of interviews in Dallas. Though we’ll refrain from sharing our opinions on the exclusion of Cornwell until we know who the finalists are, it’s hard for us to envision at this point a better candidate. Cornwell is a lawyer, he has worked for the league, and he has represented players in various settings. He knows the league’s policies and procedures, and he’s far more equipped to preside over the upcoming CBA discussions than any former player who doesn’t share the same degree of experience and training. Moreover, Cornwell was instrumental in laying the foundation for the rare courtroom loss suffered by the NFL in the StarCaps case. Specifically, Cornwell’s thorough research and aggressive questioning harvested admissions that the league knew StarCaps had been tainted with a prescription drug, and that the league did nothing to warn the players of this. The exclusion of Cornwell tends to support the notion that the folks who’ll be behind the scenes at the newly-configured NFLPA (including Richard Berthelsen and Jeffrey Kessler, who came off sufficiently horribly during Tuesday night’s Real Sports story regarding the retired players’ class action) hope to install a former player who’ll possibly become their puppet. Of course, that won’t happen if the winner is former player Troy Vincent. But whether Berthelsen and/or Kessler were able to keep Vincent out remains to be seen. Our guess? The finalists will be Trace Armstrong, Mike Kenn, and Roderick West. And then the question will become whether the player representatives will stage at the annual meeting in March an uprising aimed at installing Vincent as the new Executive Director. Though we’d greatly admire such moxie, they might want to consider whether such a revolt would be better directed to installing Cornwell instead.