Court in Session: The NFL’s new CBA prioritizes profit over players’ well-being

On March 15, the NFL Players Association voted to approve a new collective bargaining agreement proposed by NFL owners that will remain in effect for the next 10 years. Despite public objections to the initial terms that the Players Association secured in its negotiations with the NFL by a handful of high-profile players, enough rank-and-file NFLPA members supported the agreement to ensure its passage.

However, though the CBA will financially benefit players league-wide, it lacks the structural reforms needed to make the professional football business model sustainable for the long-term.

It is not difficult to discern why the majority of voting NFLPA members favored the labor agreement’s passage: The players voted in their short-term financial interest. The new agreement will bump the players’ share of the NFL’s revenue pie from 47% to 48% and will gradually increase the current minimum player salary of $510,000 to $1.065 million by 2030, including an immediate $100,000 raise for the 2020 season. It also contains player-friendly provisions narrowing the scope of the NFL’s drug-testing regime – eliminating suspensions for players who test positive for marijuana – and increasing retirees’ pensions.

But by putting the players – especially the roughly 60% of players who make the current minimum salary – in a position where they would not have benefited financially by opposing the CBA, the NFL got away with neglecting its obligation to ensure its players’ long-term safety and well-being.

Extensive research in the past two decades has shed light on the adverse long-term health effects of playing in the NFL, especially relating to the high incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in former NFL players. The new labor agreement is poised to exacerbate the stress imposed on players’ bodies and minds and gives NFL owners the opportunity to add a 17th regular-season game starting in 2021 — which they will welcome given the prospect of increased revenue. It also bumps the number of teams that make the playoffs from 12 to 14 each year, thus providing for two additional playoff games during Wild Card Weekend.

Adding an additional game for every team might seem insignificant, but it is bound to have detrimental effects on players whose bodies and brains are already pushed to the brink of permanent deterioration under the current schedule format.

In an article for Bleacher Report, former NFL player Ryan Riddle described the physical toll incurred by players during each NFL season.

“With every fall, every tackle, every forearm to the rib cage and helmet flying at you like a torpedo, the damage and physical stress you accumulate over time wear away at the body’s ability to combat such an onslaught of external forces,” Riddle said.

The physical impact of additional games will matter, even if it is only one to two more games for every team each season. Every added week of playing means more hits, leading to more brain trauma and more injuries as well as untold long-term pain.

The average NFL career is 2.5 years long, a statistic that demonstrates the value of one game on NFL players’ physical welfare. This figure is attributed in large part to the physical toll incurred by playing professional football. But even if NFL owners are more concerned about their own profit than players’ health, there is still reason to temper the league’s adverse physical impact on players rather than exacerbate it.

Owners don’t seem to care much about the growing perception of their league as exploitative and dangerous, but they should.

The new CBA is set to last 10 seasons, with no opt-out provisions for either side. That means the CBA’s provisions exacerbating the game’s physical toll on players – which have already been widely criticized for doing so – are locked into place for the next 10 years.

Illustrating the extent to which public opinion can evolve in 10 years is the issue of CTE. As of 2010, evolving academic research had identified the link between CTE and playing in the NFL. This, along with depictions of CTE in popular culture such as the 2015 film “Concussion” and the speculated role of CTE in tragedies like Junior Seau’s 2012 suicide and Aaron Hernandez’s 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd and his eventual death by suicide, the brain health of football players has become a hot-button issue in 2020. The NFL has adopted rules minimizing the number of helmet-to-helmet hits — which have been identified as the primary cause of brain trauma — but the new CBA seems to suggest that the NFL is backsliding on this issue.

Based on the trajectory at which CTE became a widely known, controversial issue, one can only guess the magnitude of controversy that the NFL will be subject to by the time its new CBA expires in 2030. Rather than making the difficult decisions necessary to protect players, NFL owners have decided to seek short-term profit at the expense of their players’ permanent health and the sport’s long-term success.

Jake Mequet is a junior writing about sports and law. His column, “Court in Session,” typically runs every other Monday.