"If he failed, their process failed": Inside the NFLPA meltdown

ON FRIDAY NIGHT, less than a day after Lloyd Howell Jr. abruptly resigned as the embattled boss of the NFL Players Association, dozens of union representatives and alternates met during a two-hour Zoom call to try to make sense of what had just happened and find a pathway to fresh leadership.

Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs' MVP quarterback and second alternate player rep, spoke up to rally a group that was grappling with the worst crisis in the NFLPA's 68-year history.

"We need to get our choice for leader right," Mahomes said, according to four people briefed on his comments.

Mahomes' words came during a chaotic four days for the NFLPA, including nightly conference calls of up to four hours long.

Sources familiar with the calls told ESPN that player reps expressed fear, frustration and worry about the NFLPA's future. Those concerns deepened when JC Tretter, a retired Cleveland Browns offensive lineman and ex-NFLPA president, resigned Sunday as director of strategy. And the player reps struggled to agree on an appropriate process to find a leader qualified to navigate a crisis that includes an outside legal inquiry and an FBI investigation.

But as expressed by Mahomes, the players' biggest priority was a need to learn from the mistakes that led them to this moment.

Howell had won his job on a platform promising greater transparency, but his hiring followed the union's most secretive election. And his tenure was marked by a failure, again and again, to level with players, even in Howell's final hours as executive director, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge who spoke to ESPN on the condition of anonymity.

During a conference call Thursday night, Howell announced his resignation to the executive committee, days after ESPN reports that he was working as a consultant for a private equity firm seeking to invest in NFL franchises and that he also had struck a confidentiality agreement with the NFL to hide the details of a January collusion arbitration decision.

Executive committee members were stunned by Howell's resignation and nearly unanimous in their reaction.

"The EC said, 'No, you're f---ing not,'" a player with knowledge of the call told ESPN. Since elevating Howell to be a finalist for the job in 2023, the executive committee had stood by him throughout the series of revelations about his conduct and side jobs. Less than 24 hours before Howell resigned, one executive committee member had said, "We felt great about the process. We back Lloyd 100 percent."

Committee members repeatedly pressed Howell to remain as their leader, three sources with firsthand knowledge said. "They tried to talk him out of it for three hours," one of the sources said. "Howell repeatedly said no."

During the call, Howell mentioned he had visited strip clubs while on the job but offered no details, saying he had paid for car service to a club with his own money, several of the sources said.

But Howell never wavered about his decision to resign. At 10:38 p.m., he released a public statement announcing he had become "a distraction" to the union's work and was quitting.

The next day, the sources said, executive committee members were astonished to read the strip club details, as reported by ESPN. The report cited internal union documents showing Howell charged the union $738.82 for transportation to a Miami strip club and $2,426 for an Atlanta strip club visit with two employees during a union retreat in February.

Some of the executive committee members concluded that Howell had not told them the whole truth.

"The guys were very disappointed," one of the sources said. "They backed Howell through everything ... If he failed, their process failed, and they didn't want to face that."

Howell has not responded to multiple attempts by ESPN to reach him over the past several weeks.

A senior union executive said Tuesday night that Howell's "failings were human failings and errors of judgment."

"Lloyd is a good man. He's not a villain," the executive said. "He is culpable for the things he's culpable for. From the beginning, he was never accepted in the office nor did he really make an effort to build some important relationships that could have been useful.

"If he was guilty of anything, he was not as discerning as he should have been."

UNION LEADERS NOW left to reckon with the crisis are focused on the 16-month process that led them to Howell as a replacement for DeMaurice Smith, who headed the union from 2009 until he stepped aside in 2023.

The union paid about $500,000 to search firm Russell Reynolds Associates to work with the executive committee in vetting dozens of hopefuls, but the committee wanted to select only two finalists to present to the player reps. All the candidate names would remain secret.

Tretter, at that time the NFLPA president, told ESPN on Monday he made confidentiality a priority when selecting finalists because candidates' names had leaked to the media in past elections.

"The previous two versions of the search process were gross," said Tretter, who spearheaded changes to the bylaws to implement election confidentiality. "They were far below the level that our union should be operating at."

Multiple players who spoke to ESPN agreed that if the union wanted to recruit the best candidates from outside, it needed to promise and safeguard secrecy.

But some of the candidates themselves felt otherwise. Former quarterback Matt Schaub, Hall of Famer Kellen Winslow and Domonique Foxworth, a former player and ESPN commentator who was the NFLPA president from 2012 to 2014, were among those interviewed for the position in early 2023. Even though Russell Reynolds Associates told the candidates it wanted a union or business person and a former athlete among the finalists, no ex-player made it to the final six. Gene Upshaw, the Raiders' legend who died in 2008, was the last former player to lead the NFLPA.

Schaub, a former player rep, said he was disappointed he didn't make it past his first 90-minute interview with a Russell Reynolds representative. But even more, he was frustrated that he was not allowed to make his case directly to the executive committee or the player reps.

"When you go to NFL locker rooms and ask guys about union leadership, they want to hear from someone who was in their shoes and played the game," Schaub said. "The fact that not a single player even got to the semifinals of a process that wasn't transparent is a slap in the face of every player rep who might like to hear a final argument from someone who wore a helmet."

Foxworth was granted two interviews with the executive committee, but Tretter called him in February 2023 to say he wouldn't make it to the next round or get a chance to address player reps.

"I was stunned," Foxworth said. "I had been spending quite a bit of my free time perfecting the finer points of plans and options for the players. I was upset and disappointed."

Of the final six, at least three were veteran union insiders, and one was an ex-player, multiple union sources said. They included George Atallah, the longtime chief external affairs officer who left the NFLPA in 2024 after 15 years. The other two -- chief player officer Don Davis, who had an 11-year career as an NFL linebacker, and chief operating officer Teri Patterson Smith -- remain at the union today and are among the candidates for interim executive director. The identity of one finalist remains unknown.

The last two of the final six were David White, former head of SAG-AFTRA, the union for screen actors and others in the entertainment industry, and Howell, who told a senior union executive that he was recruited by Russell Reynolds and applied "on a whim."

Howell had six months earlier resigned from a 34-year executive career at consulting firm Booz Allen, which at the time faced whistleblower allegations of overbilling the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars.

The complaint was among the red flags found by Russell Reynolds in Howell's background check, multiple union sources told ESPN. Two executive committee members said the search firm told them about the case and also that Howell had been sued for sexual discrimination and retaliation by a Booz Allen subordinate in 2011, a complaint settled for an undisclosed sum in 2015.

Overwhelmingly, the committee favored White, and two members said no major issues arose in White's background.

But in hours of interviews, Howell persuaded the committee members to consider him. As for his departure from Booz Allen, one recalled Howell said he "wanted a new challenge."

"To be clear, no one told us, hey, [Howell] is good, you can let him through the doors now," a veteran player on the executive committee told ESPN. "We as a group made that decision, and we did our due diligence."

ON JUNE 27, 2023, player reps gathered at the Salamander Resort in Middleburg, Virginia, and learned the identities of the two finalists: Howell and White. Not lost on some union officials was the irony that Tretter's secretive election process was ostensibly to protect the candidates' anonymity in their current corporate roles, but neither White nor Howell was employed at the time.

Over the course of two days, the player reps quizzed the two candidates in full session and in smaller groups. White emphasized his long history running a 160,000-person union. Howell, meanwhile, argued that his lack of union experience was an asset. One player rep said he told them, "I have been the guy fighting against unions for the corporation. So, I know exactly how they think and how they do things."

Players who supported Howell said they became convinced his financial acumen was what they needed.

During the election session with the player reps, Howell fielded pointed questions about his Booz Allen tenure. Tretter, who in interviews referred to his notes from the meetings, said he asked Howell: "Earlier in your career... you were involved in a [sexual] discrimination suit. Can you tell us more about that situation and the outcome?" Tretter said he doesn't remember how Howell responded.

Two members of the executive committee backed up Tretter's account that Howell was asked about the suit during the session, but two player reps told ESPN the subject never came up before they voted.

Player reps interviewed by ESPN said they were far more impressed by Howell's presentation and answers and that they could see him going toe-to-toe with NFL owners across a bargaining table, with billions at stake.

"We're not looking for a mom-and-pop guy to run our union," one executive committee member told ESPN. "We're looking for a top, top guy. Owners and people on the league side are on prestigious boards. We don't want a guy who is not in those types of boardrooms."

Tretter said the players elected Howell by a wide margin on June 28.

JUST THREE WEEKS later, Howell's ex-employer Booz Allen struck a settlement with the U.S. government on the whistleblower complaint. Prosecutors announced that the $377 million agreement was one of the largest ever for that type of fraud case.

In August 2023, The Washington Post profiled the Booz Allen whistleblower, who was quoted saying she had raised the firm's alleged overbilling with Howell, who rejected her concerns.

A senior union lawyer read these accounts and asked Tom DePaso, the union general counsel, to inform the 32 player reps about Howell's alleged ties to the Booz Allen overbilling case, sources with firsthand knowledge told ESPN.

DePaso said the players were aware of the Booz Allen matter when they considered Howell's election so there was no need to raise it again, a union source said, but union lawyers were angry that the players were not told about Howell's failure to act on the whistleblower's complaints.

"It was a bad precedent," a former union employee with firsthand knowledge of the matter said.

Additionally, a former union employee said that shortly after Howell's election, women staffers were surprised to learn that their new executive director had been sued for sexual discrimination and retaliation by a female former employee in 2011 while at Booz Allen.

"We just couldn't believe it," the former employee said. "If you are running for a head of a union, you should be blemish-free."

One player said the membership liked Howell because he got them to think of the union as "a cooperative business" with the NFL instead of "a thorn in the side" of ownership.

"'How can we get more money for everyone? Instead of, oh, we want to practice less and smoke more weed, let's get into [revenue] percentage points,'" the player said. "That's where [Howell] earned a lot of good respect from players."

A year into the job, Howell, who was paid $3.6 million in 2024, was sounding to some like the cooperative business partner he had told players he wanted to be with the league.

In 2024, Howell said the union and the league had discussions "at a very high level" about commissioner Roger Goodell's public desire for the NFL to expand to an 18-game regular season.

"It sounds attractive," Howell told The Athletic in July 2024. "Who doesn't want to see more football -- myself included?"

In the months afterward, two NFL owners independently told ESPN they believed 18 games was a near certainty.

But at the NFLPA's Super Bowl news conference this year in New Orleans, Howell reversed course.

"Right now when I have talked to players over the last two seasons, no one wants to play an 18th game," he said. "No one. Seventeen games, for many of the guys, is too long."

During that same news conference, Howell mentioned in passing he was moonlighting at The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. Last August, the NFL named a handful of firms, including Carlyle, to a list of approved funds that can invest in minority franchise stakes not to exceed 10%.

"I am an operating executive," Howell said about his role. "I do understand enough to be dangerous when it comes to private equity. It is intriguing that today's professional football player has more of an equity mindset. They want to put their money to work."

At the time, the comments made no news.

However, current union employees were angered by other comments Howell made that day, including that recent staff turnover was because he and other leaders were looking for "a level of sophistication that they felt they weren't getting."

Recent buyouts he had offered, Howell said, were "to make room for these highly in-demand capabilities that we don't currently have."

As one former union employee said, "That riled a lot of people up."

According to multiple employees, Howell also engendered ire through some of his behavior at the union's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Multiple union employees talked openly about how little they'd seen Howell in the office -- sometimes only two or three days in a month -- and that he often didn't respond to calls and texts as pressing matters loomed.

Howell ordered the union facilities department to merge two spaces in the parking garage to avoid door dings on his Porsche Cayenne Turbo, the sources said. He asked workers to change the number of the two spaces, 10 and 11, to 32, as an homage to the jersey number worn by O.J. Simpson, according to Craig Jones, the union's longtime director of security. A second source familiar with the matter confirmed the Simpson inspiration.

"I don't know why O.J.," Jones said. "Everyone has their preferences, perhaps."

ON JAN. 14, an arbitrator ruled on the union's 2-year-old collusion grievance, filed when three quarterbacks failed to get fully guaranteed contracts with their teams after Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson received a record $230 million deal.

The NFLPA, still led by Smith, alleged in the October 2022 grievance that team owners were colluding to restrict guaranteed contracts.

Arbitrator Christopher Droney ruled there wasn't sufficient evidence of collusion by owners, and he awarded no damages. But he did find the union had proved that the league's management council, "with the blessing of commissioner Roger Goodell," encouraged owners to reduce guaranteed money in veterans' contracts.

Again, Howell and union lawyers chose confidentiality over transparency. ESPN reported last month that the union had struck a confidentiality agreement with the league to hide details of the ruling from the executive committee and the player reps. The ruling itself was shared only with a select group of union and league executives.

Howell told top player leaders only that the union had lost the grievance case and blamed Smith, his predecessor, for wasting union time and money on a lost cause, sources with knowledge of the call said.

Even Tretter, the union's chief strategy officer, said he did not receive a copy of the grievance decision. He also insisted he had no knowledge of the confidentiality agreement until a meeting this summer.

On June 24, the "Pablo Torre Finds Out" podcast published the 61-page arbitration decision. In the wake of the release and ESPN reporting on the confidentiality agreement, Howell and the union said they would appeal the decision.

A cascade of revelations about Howell followed, including his Carlyle work and his strip club expenses. ESPN also had reported in May that the FBI is investigating financial dealings involving OneTeam Partners, a $2 billion group-licensing firm co-founded by the NFLPA and the Major League Baseball Players Association in 2019. Howell and MLBPA head Tony Clark held board seats at OneTeam.

Union sources told ESPN that as Howell tried to find a pathway to remain at the union, he tendered his resignation to The Carlyle Group. But he changed his mind and withdrew his Carlyle resignation after discovering ESPN was preparing a story about his strip club expenditures, the sources said.

At that point, a close friend of Howell's told ESPN, he decided to quit the union and "spend more time with his family."

"He's worth nine figures," the friend said. "He wanted to just move on."

IN THE FALLOUT from his union departure, Howell also resigned from his part-time role with The Carlyle Group and his board seat at ratings firm Moody's Corp., which said in a government filing his departure "was not a result of any disagreement with the company's operations, policies or practices."

The union's leadership vacuum is now being navigated by a handful of veteran union lawyers and the 32 player representatives, who must select an interim director, perhaps as early as this week.

Multiple people working at the union and former executives said it could take months or longer to repair a broken NFLPA.

"The NFLPA takes seriously the concerns raised in recent reports and is committed to the values it was founded on, including transparency and progress," a union spokesperson said in a statement to ESPN. "Our union is holding firm to those pillars going forward as we do the necessary work in the best interest of our player members."

In a separate statement, NFLPA president Jalen Reeves-Maybin said, "While our union has been tested of late, we remain committed to the values of integrity, accountability, and progress in serving the best interests of our membership. ... I am in close contact with the NFLPA Executive Leadership Team to ensure good governance practices and continued union business until an interim executive director is elected."

White, who lost the finalist vote to Howell in 2023, told ESPN he is rooting for the union.

"What I want is for these men to be protected in one of the most exploitative industries on Earth, and my hope is that whoever they choose has the experience and the strategic wisdom to accomplish that," said White, who is now the CEO of executive coaching firm 3CG Ventures.

Cyrus Mehri, a civil rights lawyer who failed to unseat Smith as NFLPA executive director in 2017, said he feels bad for the players who were failed both by Howell and a lack of transparency that has "become part of the union's culture -- deny the players' choices, deny them information."

"Guess what happens when you close off the process to them? You don't get diversity of ideas ... And then you get caught up with a guy like Lloyd Howell, who has never spent one day in his life helping workers."

Foxworth said he is more optimistic than ever that the leadership crisis will lead players to get it right this time.

"This obviously was embarrassing, but it got everybody's attention, and the players are more engaged," Foxworth said. "This is not a business. It's a union. The strength of the union doesn't come from some fast-talking lawyers or CFOs. It comes from an engaged and activated body."