Cleveland Browns’ veteran center JC Tretter was officially elected as the NFL Players Association president by the board of player representatives during union meetings on Tuesday, and with the proposed CBA vote still up in the air, Tretter is focusing on educating players of the details of the proposed CBA so that they can make an informed decision, according to ESPN’s Cameron Wolfe.
“You have to be able to look at it from both sides, and be able to interpret everything and not look at it just through one set of eyes. There are positives and there are negatives,” Tretter said, per the report. “It’s the negotiations, and that’s how it’s gonna always be. You’re not gonna get everything you want, so there’s gonna be things in there you don’t want. And I’ve just wanted to try to explain both sides — the stuff we’re getting, the stuff we’re losing — and that way, guys can make the determination for themselves of what they want, and what they want us to fight for.”
Tretter, 29, was elected mainly due to his diplomatic approach to the ongoing negotiations between NFL team owners and NFL players on a collective bargaining agreement, and was seemingly moderate during times when others were making a stance one way or the other.
“We’re prepared either way,” Tretter said. “So if our membership decides as a group that we’re gonna pass it, then we move forward with that; if they decide that we need to do more, then we’ve been preparing for that and we’re gonna move forward with that idea. We know what we need to do, we know that we need to stick together; and I think that we’ll all be on board with whatever our membership decides.”
“There’s been a lot of misinformation out there, and it’s caused some kinds of division and some kinda of questioning. But I think when everybody’s able to communicate and talk about the same issues, the facts, I think people get on the same page pretty quickly. So I think that’s gonna be the process, is getting everybody on the same page with the facts.”
“Going into it, our goal was to help core players, and help minimum-salary players,” Tretter said. “And those jumps in minimum salary are big for us, ’cause I think that’s something we needed to correct from the previous deal, helping those guys. And that’s something we’ve set out for a while now to fix. So I think that’s the main win, is helping those guys. And it’s a big group of them — 60, 65 percent of our league is minimum-salary players. To make a big jump in salary like that, is a huge benefit.”
Players have until Saturday at 11:59 p.m. ET to put in their “yes” or “no” vote on the proposed CBA, which includes a 17-game schedule starting in 2021 at the earliest, and the proposed CBA can officially pass if it receives 50% plus one vote, otherwise known as a simply majority.