JC Tretter admits one of his greatest strengths is his ability to accept being disliked. Defensive linemen did not like him on the field. NFL team owners likely did not care much for him in negotiations.
To hear him and others inside the NFL Players Association tell it, plenty of people within the union weren’t big fans of his, either. That was fine with him until this weekend. Now, he’s had enough.
The former NFLPA president, who has served as chief strategy officer for the players’ union since October, told CBS Sports on Sunday that he will not only be excluding himself from the running as interim executive director of the union, he will no longer remain with the NFLPA as of this week.
“Over the last couple days, it has gotten very, very hard for my family. And that’s something I can’t deal with,” Tretter said. “So, the short bullet points are: I have no interest in being [executive director]. I have no interest in being considered; I’ve let the executive committee know that. I’m also going to leave the NFLPA in the coming days because I don’t have anything left to give the organization.
“I want to get my story out there, and I don’t want it to look like this was sour grapes or I didn’t get the job and I wanted the job. All I want to do is tell my story and then go be with my family.”
Lloyd Howell resigned as NFLPA executive director late Thursday night. Howell had been installed two years ago as a leader who would hopefully see the union through its next collective bargaining agreement. Tretter was a leader in that hiring search. Howell’s resignation came amid numerous controversies that began with a leaked collusion grievance, continued with a potential conflict of interest and concluded — at least for now — with filed expense reports for two strip club trips.
Members of the NFLPA’s executive committee had interest in Tretter taking over as interim executive director for the next several months. Some in the media speculated Tretter always wanted that job, and it is possible that he was mere days from getting it. However, he insists there was never a Machiavellian plot to take over the union and run it as he saw fit.
“I love the guys, and that’s why I’ve done what I’ve done for the last six years is because I love what they do and who they are and the mission of the organization,” Tretter said. “And I think what I realized this morning when I woke up — after finally getting more than like two hours of sleep — is that I fell in love with the idea of what this place could be. And over the last six weeks, I’ve realized what this place is, and the delta between those two things.
“And I can’t walk into the building anymore, seeing and understanding what I see and understand now.”
In an exclusive, hour-long conversation with CBS Sports, Tretter sought to address what he considers to be “mistruths” about him and his motivations during his years with the union. After being quiet for weeks, Tretter wanted his side of the story out there as he leaves a union he spent his adult life working to make better.
To this day, Tretter defends the process that led to Howell’s June 2023 election as executive director. As NFLPA president, Tretter believed the previous process for electing an executive director had its flaws. There were leaks of conversations and hours of time wasted on unqualified candidates. He wanted to streamline the process, which took a level of privatization that had not been done before.
Prior executive director DeMaurice Smith had lost the faith of players following the the ratification of the last CBA in 2020. The next year, in 2021, he was elected to a final term that served more as a bridge so the players could run a thorough process to find his replacement.
Tretter enacted changes (voted upon by players) that would make the executive committee — a group of about a dozen players — run the process with the help of a search firm. The executive committee would do the overwhelming amount of legwork on the candidates, and then it would present two to four candidates to the board of representatives — players from all 32 teams. The committee would not vote on the finalists, leaving that to the larger group.
The board voted for Howell over former SAG-AFTRA director David White, a lawyer and Rhodes scholar. Tretter says, without a doubt, Howell performed better in his interviews with the board.
For the first time, Tretter now reveals that Howell was not the executive committee’s top choice. In a straw poll conducted prior to the candidates being presented, the committee voted 10-1 in favor of White over Howell. Members of the committee did not share their preference with the board.
“We said, ‘OK, what do we want to do with this information?’ And we said, ‘Listen, if this is the best candidate, the board will see that. They’ll agree,'” Tretter recalled. “‘But we’re not going to put our thumb on the scale. We’re not going to push them. We’re not going to go in there after doing all this work and make it look like we jammed in the person that we would’ve picked after this moment. So we’re going to let both people interview and we’re going to let the board make the decision.”
Count Tretter among the 10 individuals who voted for White. Tretter, a labor and industrial relations major from Cornell, says his archetypal leader for the NFLPA is someone with a union background. Howell came from the financial world.
“So the idea that I was jamming anybody through was false,” Tretter said.
Russell Reynolds, a renowned search firm in the sports executive world, was responsible for vetting the candidates. Tretter says Howell’s involvement in two lawsuits at his prior company — one for sexual discrimination and another involving a whistleblower — were known and addressed.
Howell had been questioned by his previous employer about strip-club expenses that resulted in one of his coworkers being fired and Howell being reprimanded, ESPN reported Friday. Tretter says that did not come up during the election process, and he only found out about it within the past few days.
The group that had the most exposure to the candidates almost unanimously preferred the other finalist to Howell.
“Maybe [the executive committee] should have given them a recommendation instead of giving the board a binder of information that they won’t read, while they golf and drink, to make a decision,” said one union source.
Tretter expects changes to the process in the next year as a search for the permanent executive director gets underway.
“We did hundreds of hours of work, and we did multiple rounds of interviews. We had people flying into D.C. regularly to meet candidates in person. I don’t think it’s feasible to do that for everybody,” he explained. “… The executive committee is in the day-to-day of it. The board has the approval rights.
“It’s a fair question. I think that’s something that the board and the [executive committee] and the players need to wrestle with as they launch the next search is like, ‘How is it set up?’ I’m not saying we did everything right. I think we made decisions based off what we had done historically and wanted to do something different and thought what we were doing was the best option. We’ve learned more since then. There are probably going to be changes. There should be changes. They should do something that they feel confident in and they should learn from every experience they have.”
When the Denver Broncos traded for quarterback Russell Wilson in March 2022, Tretter believed the players had their best shot at achieving more fully guaranteed contracts. The Broncos had given up multiple first-round picks for the former Super Bowl champion, and soon, the team would be owned by folks with Walmart money. If someone could build off Deshaun Watson‘s fully guaranteed deal, it would be Wilson, Tretter believed.
When Wilson signed a typical QB contract — high-paying but far from fully guaranteed — Tretter texted Smith calling Wilson a “wuss.” Three years later, that text was revealed in a 61-page document leaked from the NFLPA’s collusion grievance filing against the NFL.
“So, the day the news broke, I sent an angry text to De calling him a ‘f—ing loser.’ I did that,” Tretter stated plainly. “That was before the idea of collusion had even come up; months later is when we launched the collusion grievance where we got word — or De got word — there could be some collusion going on. And that’s why I said in my deposition: If he was colluded against, I would not have said that. I would’ve apologized because I didn’t know he was working against other factors. Sorry. My expectation was I didn’t just naturally think the NFL was breaking the CBA.”
Tretter vehemently denies having access to that collusion grievance or any involvement in the confidentially agreement struck by Howell with the NFL to keep those findings secret.
Another grievance was recently leaked to journalist Pablo Torre, one that directly involved Tretter.
Tretter suggested players upset with their contract situation could fake injuries while on a podcast in 2023. The NFL filed a grievance with the union, and arbitrator Sidney Moreland ruled in favor of the league in large part because there was no denying what Tretter stated on camera.
“I knew at the moment I said it; it was a dumb tongue-in-cheek remark that I shouldn’t have said,” Tretter admitted.
Last week, with myriad controversies swirling around the union, the NFLPA fired Moreland as a jointly appointed arbitrator. It’s the union’s right to do so, but Tretter says he was not involved in the decision and only learned about it “in real time.”
“I had nothing to do with it. Like, literally I got called from Liz [Allen, NFLPA chief external affairs officer], and was like, ‘Did you see that we fired the arbitrator?’ And I said, ‘What the f—?’
“So, no, not part of my job, not involved in those discussions. I think, optically, it looks terrible, but like, that wasn’t me. I wasn’t involved in it, didn’t know about it until it was reported publicly.”
Tretter has been thinking about one specific scene from “Game of Thrones” over the last few weeks. Tyrion Lannister is on trial for killing his nephew, King Joffrey, and though he didn’t commit the murder, he says that he wished he had.
“I wish I was the monster you think I am,” Lannister says at his trial.
“I felt a lot of that over the last six weeks,” Tretter said Sunday. “I’m being accused of being this all-controlling, all-powerful person, and I’m not. And I f—ing wish I was because I don’t think we’d be in the same place we are now if I was.
Tretter has established that Howell wasn’t his top choice. He says he didn’t sway the board of representatives to select Howell. Yet there has been a strong sentiment in league circles the past year that Tretter got the position of chief strategy officer — a rolecreated specifically for him — as a quid pro quo for getting Howell elected.
Here’s how that job was created, according to Tretter: In the fall of 2023, Tretter was done playing and had a few months left as NFLPA president. He accompanied Howell on several visits to teams aiming to help the new executive director get a lay of the land while answering questions from players as to how Howell was elected. It was on a trip to Arizona that Tretter says Howell first mentioned bringing Tretter back after his presidency was scheduled to end the following March.
At that March 2024 board meeting, Tretter says players spoke to Howell about his value within the organization and suggested Tretter remain with the NFLPA. “Lloyd was like, ‘I got it. I hear you,'” Tretter said. By May, Tretter was a part-time consultant for the union working about 20 hours a week. And in October, he was hired full time for the chief strategy officer role.
Without question, one of Tretter’s greatest successes in his four years as president was the creation of NFLPA report cards. Beginning in 2023, the union surveyed players across the league on various topics within their organizations: food in the cafeteria, treatment of families, the weight room, team travel and more.
Many within the NFL despise the report cards. There is no doubt they have been effective. Many team owners have been shamed into improving several aspects of their team facilities, spending millions on upgrades after being publicly embarrassed.
Tretter refined that survey to be heavily data focused, and he planned to do the same for future CBA planning. No more guesswork or random anecdotes. He got 1,800 players to send in their exact priorities so that the union could be best prepared for the next round of negotiations, which will take place before the March 2031 expiration of the agreement.
“We were gonna build off that year over year over year leading into the CBA where we start getting more and more granular about how much they care, what’s their no-go topics and just do really data backed stuff,” Tretter says.
Today, the union is in a weakened position amid Howell’s resignation. Tretter did not badmouth Howell, however, during his conversation with CBS Sports.
Tretter credited Howell for visiting the star quarterbacks and personally getting them to buy back into the union, which is “something we hadn’t had in a while.” He says, up until the recent controversies, he believed players “felt better about the PA the last two years” than before. But the recent drama will have ripple effects “for a while,” he says.
Howell’s two expense reports related to trips at two different strip clubs were detailed in an ESPN report published Friday. Tretter says he only learned about those tripes the day before the story was published, which was about nine hours before Howell publicly resigned his post.
“It’s a poor decision. It can’t be done,” Tretter said. “And I think he left that day for a reason.”
The executive committee had released a statement days earlier supporting Howell. Sources tell CBS Sports that no one forced Howell to resign.
If Tretter wanted to be the interim executive director, he had his opening. The union was weak, and he was the former player with a labor background in position to lead them for at least several months.
Instead, three days later, he has decided to walk away entirely from the organization.
“I don’t have any proof of this,” Tretter said. “I think a lot of the attacks on me came from inside the building over the last six weeks. And I don’t want to walk inside that building anymore.”
Only once in his conversation with CBS Sports did Tretter truly get emotional. He relayed a story from Saturday night when his iPhone flashed a picture of his daughter from when she started school this past year.
If the players asked him to be the interim executive director, it would mean missing out on a year of being with his son and daughter. Could he sacrifice that for his family, especially after these last few weeks?
“I understood I would have been walking into a buzzsaw of, ‘This was JC’s grandiose, master plan,’ but I would have done it for the guys,” Tretter said. “And I will always be there for the guys. If they need anything from me, they will always have me available. But I just officially reached a point this morning where I don’t think I personally have any more to give in this moment. And that’s why I have to step away.”
By no means does Tretter beleive the entire NFLPA staff hates him. He insists that he specifically name four people at the union — Liz Allen, Anamika Gupta, Matt Curtin and Chris Fawal — who he called “tremendously good people” that players can put their faith in.
Since Howell’s resignation, some of the staff’s feelings toward Tretter have been made clear. Craig Jones, lead security officer for the union, wrote in an email to staff: “… and what of JC Tretter? He is the progenitor of this whole tawdry episode of poseurs, 30 pieces of silver, player leadership manqué and avarice. What of him? God bless the NFLPA so that it may return to its hallowed annals.”
Asked for his thoughts on the email, Tretter said: “Other than I needed to buy a thesaurus? I know the staff doesn’t like me, at least pockets of the staff. And that’s been obvious from my presidency.”
In the coming days, the NFLPA executive committee will determine who will serve in that interim capacity. Perhaps 11-year linebacker Don Davis will get the role after his 15 years with the union. Zamir Cobb, another former player, has been with the union since 2013; he is also being considered for the role, per sources.
But this is the end for Tretter and the NFLPA. He has wanted to speak publicly since the day the collusion grievance was leaked, he says, but he had been advised to stay quiet.
“I’m not resigning because what I’ve been accused of is true. … I’m not resigning in disgrace. I’m resigning because this has gone too far for me and my family, and I’ve sucked it up for six weeks. And I felt like I’ve been kind of left in the wind taking shots for the best of the organization,” he said.
“… I got to the point this morning where I woke up and I realized, like, I am going to keep dying on this f—ing sword forever of, I’ll never, ever be able to do what’s best for me. And I will always pick what’s best for the organization. And in the end, what’s the organization done for me? Like, nothing.
“I’ve been a bullet shield for six weeks for them where everything that’s been controversial, it just all dumps down on me, and I’ve had nothing to f—ing do with it. And that’s when I was like, I’m done taking bullets for the [organization] on stuff I wasn’t a part of and did not do.”
So, after studying labor relations at an Ivy League school, serving as a team representative for the union for two years, presiding as union president for four years and being a chief officer for a year, Tretter is moving on from the NFLPA.
“I just feel like the PA needs to find their way without JC Tretter, and JC Tretter needs to find his way without the PA,” he said. “I think that’s the moment we’re in.”
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Author: Jonathan Jones
July 20, 2025 | 5:01 pm
