When it comes to the collusion ruling that came to light this week, no current players have said a word. Most former players have kept quiet, too.
On Friday, one prominent former player had something to say.
Chris Long, who entered as the second pick in the draft and exited as the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year (and won a couple of Super Bowls along the way), hosts the Green Light Podcast. His latest episode features Pablo Torre, who unearthed the 61-page ruling in the collusion case.
In it, Long bluntly spoke his mind regarding the NFL Players Association’s failure to use the partial victory as leverage, potentially in order to protect former NFLPA president J.C. Tretter from internal or external scrutiny over his criticism of quarterback Russell Wilson for failing to get a fully-guaranteed contract in 2022.
“After I say this, somebody’s gonna reach out to me and say, ‘Well, you don’t know the whole story’ or ‘yada, yada, yada’ or ‘You might wanna take a beat,’” Long said. “But if I found out that a major bargaining chip in us getting what we want is being buried to protect one person, I’d say, ‘Get this guy the fuck out of here.’
“And I got plenty of money. You know, I made my money. But for me, the thing that makes me upset is — and I understand why owners don’t want to give guaranteed money. You know, we’re like rally cars, bro. We’re all gonna break. And, you know, the product, you don’t want to pay guaranteed money for a product that you know that is gonna break and be sitting on the sideline. I get all that from a business standpoint, but this is what we want, and we’re not gonna get it, it seems like, ever, because now you’ve got a smoking gun that says, ‘Hey, they did collude.’ And the arbiter can’t even — the arbiter’s gaslighting us. The NFLPA is kind of looking the other way.”
Long also addressed the obvious imbalance between the owners and the players. The owners will shut the game down without blinking. The players will not.
“We’re never gonna have leverage,” Long said, “because a year of our earning potential and playing potential is too valuable to the person trying to leverage that year in relation to owners, who are just doing business and will continue doing business and have been doing business before you were fucking in high school playing football. Like, to them, a year is nothing. To them, a game is nothing. We, as a population in pro sports, we are probably the people with the least leverage, because there’s the most players on teams, it’s harder to get everybody mobilized and on the same page.”
Can it ever change?
Said Long: “The only way this changes, in my opinion, is if a high-profile quarterback . . . would have to say, ‘I ain’t fucking playing.’”
Good luck with that. High-profile quarterbacks are usually far closer to company men than instigators. But if one of them would want to defy that reality, there would be no complaining from the tiny little corner of the Internet.
Don’t count on it happening. Long was in Las Vegas at the Sack Summit. When he asked current players for their reaction to the collusion ruling, they hadn’t heard about it.
That’s the biggest problem. Player apathy. The owners use it against the players. More recently, their union has been using it against them, too.
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