J.C. Tretter
speaker
75 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Mar
J.C. Tretter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That was one where I had to reach out to several people to make sure I was hearing it correctly of like, wait, I just want to make sure like for the fourth time, is this true?
Because that is so preposterous in a job where what you fuel your body with is so important to almost push them out of the building, to push them to fast food, to push them to poor nutrition is such like a backwards way of looking at our industry. It was crazy. And why do you think those teams do it? Is it just it's the way it was always done? Are they really trying to save money? I don't know.
It was one team. It was the Arizona Cardinals who made people pay. There are three other teams that didn't provide it. And I don't think the cost they were charging would pay for the meals anyways. It's almost like the control factor of it, of, hey, just know your place.
Yeah, from a union perspective, we're negotiating for the same things that any union is. Better wages, better benefits, better working conditions. But there is a level of control that's always being fought after. And the league, there's a piece of them that just wants to make sure that we know that they have control of us. From individual teams, like you said, we are just workers.
And some coaches and some bosses are better at working with their employees. about different changes that need to be made, whether it's scheduling, whether it's technique, whether it's how they operate. And some aren't good. I sometimes get frustrated when we're defined too much as just players because I think it takes us away out of the real world and puts us in the football world.
And we are workers and we're fighting for the same things. And I think that's one of our struggles as a union because of our short lifespan where somebody comes into a union job And they can make sacrifices and bargain a certain way because they have the opportunity to be in that job for 30, 40 years. So sacrificing for today, they're going to see the fruits of that labor.
That's not always true for us. So the sacrifices one group makes, they're probably never seeing the benefits of those sacrifices. But when it comes to the negotiating, there is a pie out there. And I think your job as an individual or as a union is to get the biggest share possible. I have to say, you can really sound like an old-fashioned union agitator when you need to.
The top three teams... all have brand new facilities. When we talk about facilities, I think sometimes the fans don't understand how different franchises work. So everybody thinks of their stadium. So like the Rams and the Chargers were poorly ranked. And you heard a lot of questions of like, whoa, SoFi Stadium's brand new. They put billions of dollars into it. How is it poorly ranked?
That's not where players spend their days. That's where they play for one day a week. But their facilities are usually located elsewhere.
Yeah, if teams do get new facilities, right? Like some of these teams have had old facilities forever. So who are the top three teams in the Players Union survey? Top three teams are Minnesota was number one, Miami was number two, and Las Vegas was number three.
No, and that's the thing. Like, having a star quarterback like Patrick Mahomes is the ultimate deodorant, whether it's talent around him or facilities or coaching. He's going to make everybody look good because he is that freaking good as a quarterback. But that doesn't mean the offerings shouldn't be up to snuff. It shouldn't be, hey...
come here to play with Patrick Mahomes and potentially win a Super Bowl, but also the facilities are going to be old and dilapidated and you have to deal with that, that shouldn't be the trade-off. Just pay for better facilities. If you're making so much money, the idea of making it a choice of one or the other when you could just provide both doesn't make much sense to me.
We ask the players, do they think their owner is willing to invest money to make the facilities better? And I think the teams at the bottom, that number tracked being down there. You don't have to knock down walls, but it's, are you willing to invest money the money necessary to make the changes necessary to fix the issues you have.
Like for Cincinnati, to rewire the locker room to make sure there's outlets there is not that costly. For Washington, there was complaints that there's poor drainage in the showers. So the guys are literally standing in The water that's been run off from the guy next to him who's showering the dirt and the blood and the sweat like these aren't knock the walls down and build a new facility.
Let's get a plumber in there and fix it.
And when they're making these decisions about where they're going to spend potentially the rest of their career, they should know what they're getting into. I talked to a lot of guys as we did this survey, and I said like, hey, you know, your team's one of the worst graded teams. Did you know that before you signed? And they're like, no, and I got here and now I feel trapped.
The quality of care is poor and the facilities are poor and I'm stuck here.
Yeah, and again, most of our guys aren't making that. So you start looking for differentiators. And those guys, those minimum salary guys are the lunch pail hard hat guys of your team, the special teams guys, the offensive linemen, the backups that make the team work. Those guys are looking at it and saying, like, hold on, I'm going to get the same dollar amount from every team.
What are the other variables I can look at? And before it was, what do I think of the area, like the city, like how close is it to my family? And now it's like, hold on, I'm not going to go to a team that has weight room floors peeling up and charges me for dinner. I'm going to go someplace else.
My wife, my mom, my sister, my dad, they didn't come to games to tailgate and booze it up and cheer for the Cleveland Browns. They came to the game to make sure I walked off the field at the end. That, again, is J.C. Tretter, former president of the NFL Players Union. I understand the guys on the field are making a lot of money. Even the guys making minimum salary are making a lot of money.
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