After a 16-month search, the NFL Players Association selected Lloyd Howell Jr. as its new executive director. He is the fourth since the 1970 merger of the league and will replace DeMaurice Smith.
The players’ union representatives chose Howell, most recently the chief financial officer of consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, after a deliberately opaque process to fill one of the most powerful jobs. in sports.
Like his predecessor, Howell entered the job with no experience in labor relations or professional sports. While Smith was a seasoned attorney before joining the union, Howell spent more than three decades working as a management consultant, where he says one of his greatest assets is his ability to bring in consensus groups.
“Over the course of my career, not everybody agrees, not everybody is on the same page,” Howell said at his introductory news conference Wednesday afternoon. “I am a service agent for the players and I look forward to getting to know the players, finding out what their interests are, what their priorities are, and building a stronger team.”
Howell takes over a union that has been operating in an era of labor peace, but seeks to push NFL team owners on safety issues, disciplinary procedures and expanded benefits for retirees. player. He declined to give specific thoughts on priorities.
The league’s collective bargaining agreement with the union doesn’t expire for seven more seasons, and team owners and players are getting richer thanks to media contracts worth more than $100 billion.
Smith led the union for 14 years, but his leadership was severely tested during the 2019 and 2020 collective bargaining negotiations, a contentious process that led to the addition of a 17th game to the NFL’s regular season. starting in 2021. Under the current CBA, the players’ share of the league’s income has increased to between 48 and 48.5 percent, an amount lower than their share in the 2006 agreement. The value of NFL teams has also grown at a faster rate than player salaries.
“De shows the level of strategic thinking you want a lawyer to have,” said Brad Sohn, who has sued the NFL on behalf of players and is also seeking the executive director job. “I may not always agree with his vision, but he’s clearly a very savvy and skilled litigator who brings that to the table.”
Seeking a new term in 2021, Smith survived what amounted to a vote of no confidence to keep the job of executive director. That is the reason to find his replacement.
It’s unclear if Howell will lead the union in a different direction. He worked for 34 years at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest management consultancies, before retiring last year as the company’s chief financial officer.
Howell, who holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard, initially joined Booz Allen Hamilton to support Department of Defense programs. He later worked at Goldman Sachs before returning to the firm in 1995.
By tapping an executive with a deep business background instead of a former player or a labor leader, the union leadership is signaling its interest in maximizing revenue opportunities. As the NFL’s business grew more complex, expanding into sports betting and emerging media platforms, the union’s for-profit marketing arm tried to cash in on players’ images and images.
“I’m not surprised that this pick is so out of the box,” said Robert Boland, a former player agent who teaches sports law at Seton Hall University. “Looking at what the challenges are for a labor union signing a 10-year CBA and looking for revenues from the game, maybe that’s the hook.”
The union board kept the search confidential, limiting the vetting process to the NFLPA’s 11-member executive committee, which is made up of current and former players. The players’ union representatives learned the names of the finalists in recent days before voting on Wednesday and only 48 of the 128 voted.
Several former players, including Matt Schaub and Hall of Fame tight end Kellen Winslow Sr., said they applied and were rejected months ago by the search committee.
In a news conference on Wednesday, JC Tretter, the president of the union, said that the player representatives voted unanimously for the executive committee to run a private search as a reaction to the previous elections, when leaked names of candidates prevent top prospects from applying for the job and complicate the search committee.
“I am proud that our player leadership is running a professional, confidential search for the players, by the players,” Tretter said. “I know Lloyd will lead our union in the future.”
This finding is a stark contrast to Smith’s first election to the executive director role in 2009, a period of intense turmoil for the union. Gene Upshaw, the Hall of Fame offensive lineman who was the union’s executive director for a quarter century, died of pancreatic cancer in August 2008 days after being diagnosed. In May 2008, the team’s owners opted for a two-year labor contract, which they felt gave the players a very large share of the league’s income.
Three NFL insiders, including Troy Vincent, who became union president, publicly lobbied to fill Upshaw’s seat before Smith. elected in March 2009.
Smith, a former prosecutor and litigator in Washington, DC, was supposed to mobilize a negotiating team before the agreement expired in March 2011.
When the two sides failed to reach an agreement before the deadline, the owners locked out the players. The union responded by decertifying and filing an antitrust lawsuit against the league, a gamble that failed in court.
Before the start of training camp, the two sides agreed to a new agreement that reduced the players’ share of income by several percentage points. The agreement is for 10 years, not the usual five, which gives owners the flexibility they want to negotiate similar long-term television contracts.
In 2019, the owners again pushed for an 18-game schedule, which Smith and high-profile players publicly opposed. Yet weeks before the deal was to expire, Smith revealed proposals that included extending the regular season by one more game, to 17, in return for the players getting a percentage point in the shared we are in the league. Many players were outraged by what they saw as an about-face and the deal was approved by just 60 votes.