NFLPA SHOULD RE-START SEARCH

On Wednesday night, former Vikings running back Robert Smith accused me of supporting Troy Vincent’s candidacy for the position of Executive Director of the NFL Players Association.
Through a series of exchanges, some of which are set forth in appropriate detail by the fine folks at Deadspin, Robert and I eventually resolved our differences.
For the record, PFT supports no one’s candidacy for the position of Executive Director. Though we’ve expressed concerns regarding the qualifications of DeMaurice Smith, a lawyer who neither played in the NFL nor has experience with labor law issues, it’s possible that he’s the best of the three remaining candidates to lead the union.
The problem is that we simply don’t know.
The process utilized by the union to narrow the field from infinity to 25 to 14 to eight to five to three has, in our view, provided the rank-and-file with little or no voice in the process -- and little or no information on which to ultimately make a decision.
And so we believe that, ideally, the NFLPA should scrap the current process, and start over again.
The obvious response to such a suggestion is that it’s simply not practical to re-start the search, since a new Executive Director will be elected next month in Hawaii. But what’s the rush? It’s not as if negotiations on a new labor agreement will begin in April.
The consensus seems to be that the deadline for getting a deal done is the start of the uncapped year, in early 2010. So there’s plenty of time to take a step back and ensure that the next Executive Director is picked in a manner that the players will regard as sufficiently thorough and transparent.
As it now stands, the players don’t know whom to support, because they generally know nothing about the platforms of the candidates. As one agent told me on Thursday, “Maybe Trace [Armstrong] is the guy, maybe Troy [Vincent] is the guy. I couldn’t tell you because I don’t know.”
And so when the agent-source’s clients ask him whether to support Armstrong or Vincent, the agent-source says, “I just don’t know, because I don’t know what either one stands for.”
In the end, the views of the players won’t really mean all that much, because the Board of Player Representatives will ultimately make the decision. And they’ll convene to do so more than two months after the end of the regular season, which means that they won’t have the benefit of recent input from their collective teammates.
If, of course, their collective teammates were ever in position to provide any meaningful input.
That’s why the process needs to unfold more like a traditional election, with the voters having a say every step of the way. In this case, the NFLPA Executive Committee conducted the primary process behind closed doors, with the players and the Board of Player Representatives having little or no say over the process, and receiving little or not information about the plans that each of the candidates have for the challenges the union faces.
Though an open process might scare away some candidates who prefer that their ultimate failure to progress into a finalist position not be generally known, the interests of the players will be better served if the candidates make their plans, their views, and their goals known and scrutinized.
That way, the decision won’t turn solely on reputations or relationships or other superficial factors.
Even if the union doesn’t scrap the current process and start over (and we’re fairly certain that the union won’t), it’s critical that the process moving forward ensure that the players and the Board of Player Representatives be in position to obtain full information about the platforms of the remaining candidates.
And the Board of Player Representatives need to be fully aware of their rights. Under Section 4.04 of the NFLPA Constitution, it appears that three of more members of the Board of Player Representatives may insert additional finalists into the mix by providing a written endorsement of said finalists at least ten days before the election in March. This means that any three duly-elected player representatives may come together and inject additional candidates beyond the three reported finalists -- Vincent, Armstrong, and DeMaurice Smith.
Again, the identity of the next Executive Director doesn’t matter to us. As Robert Smith told A.J. Daulerio of Deadspin, “We should let the players use the information they have to make the the best possible decision.”
We generally agree, but we also think that they need to have the best possible information in order to make the best possible decision.
And we think that anyone who cares about the best interests of the players should want them to have at their disposal the best possible information. To date, we don’t believe that this has occurred. But it’s not too late for the current leadership of the union to remedy the situation.