Larry Kennan Says That Unionization Of Assistant Coaches Is Possible

In a Saturday appearance with Ralph Vacchiano and Dean Dalton on Sirius NFL Radio’s The Weekend Kickoff, the Executive Director of the NFL Coaches Association addressed the ongoing controversy regarding changes to the league’s pension system for non-players.
And Kennan didn’t close the door on the possible unionization of assistant coaches.
“I think at some point in time maybe it is [an option],” Kennan said. “We’ve talked about it over the course of time.”
But the league seems to be prepared for this specific potential fight.
“The NFL owners say that there’s no way we could become a union because we’re managers and supervisors, which is one of the definitions of people who can’t become a part of a union,” Kennan said. “But if we’re managers and supervisors, why aren’t they keeping us in the loop on all these changes that [has been made to] the pension and all that stuff? Why don’t they talk to us about it beforehand? They obviously haven’t done that so we aren’t supervisors or managers.”
It’s an interesting question -- is it enough to manage or supervise players, or are coaches exempt from unionization only if they manage or supervise other coaches?
Regardless of whether the assistants ever try to organize, Kennan seems to think that many of them will decide that working at the college level is preferred.
"[C]ollege coaching is a much better quality of life in terms of hours spent and living conditions and all that than the NFL is,” Kennan said. “There’s going to be a number of coaches over the next two or three years who leave the NFL to coach in college because of this pension issue.”
Kennan also shared his views on whether it was necessary to make changes to the pension system.
“All the information we have says that the owners are making huge amounts of profit,” Kennan said. “And for them to do this, particularly with no advance warning, it makes no sense. It leads me to believe that it was maybe a knee-jerk reaction to the economy and also maybe it was a strategy to deal with the negotiations they’re getting ready to do with the players and the lockout that the owners are talking about.”
As to the recent retirement of Colts assistants Howard Mudd and Tom Moore, Kennan tried to suggest that the moves arose solely from the pension issue. But Kennan’s words continue to make us think that Mudd wasn’t facing the kind of immediate threat to his money that has been described in some media accounts.
“They are retiring strictly because of the underfunding of the pension and the changes in the pension,” Kennan said. “What Howard said to me was, ‘I can’t trust the NFL to not do something again next year. I need to get my money and get out of the league.’”
This seems to imply that, for this year, Mudd and Moore wouldn’t have suffered any adverse consequences.
Regardless of whether and to what extent the issue will cause actual financial hardship in 2009, enough of the assistant coaches are upset to indicate that it will continue to be a source of friction -- and it could mean that college programs will be able to beef up their staffs during the next hiring cycle.