PFT’s Mike Florio reports the NFL Management Council, with the blessing of the Commissioner, encouraged the 32 NFL Clubs to reduce guarantees in veterans’ contracts at the March 2022 annual owners’ meeting.

27 June 2025

PFT’s Mike Florio and Pablo Torre worked together to unearth the system arbitrator’s January 14, 2025 ruling, which both the NFL and the NFL Players Association refused to release. Florio reminds us that the owners’ meeting in question happened only days after the Browns gave a five-year, fully-guaranteed, $230 million contract to quarterback Deshaun Watson and only two years after the NFLPA tried, again, to make all player contracts fully guaranteed via the new Collective Bargaining Agreement. Following Watson’s deal, the league didn’t want to concede full guarantees on a piecemeal basis, with one team at a time giving players fully-guaranteed deals until they became the norm. Ultimately, and perhaps surprisingly, the arbitrator ruled that he did not find a “‘clear preponderance’ of the evidence” that NFL teams accepted and acted on said encouragement.