Dave Pear's Blog

Golden football but no golden parachute...

Remember Troy Vincent? He was the one player inside the NFLPA who chose to question Gene Upshaw in his final year at the NFLPA. As President of the NFLPA for four years, he actually believed that he could bring up the idea of a succession plan for Gene Upshaw. And it cost him dearly. Although Vincent eventually ended up in the final run for the NFLPA Executive Director position after Upshaw’s untimely departure, his earlier tangles with many in the Upshaw regime left him at a severe disadvantage; DeMaurice Smith was subsequently appointed as the new chief of the NFLPA last year. But Troy was back on his feet once again after being appointed the new VP of Player Development for the NFL earlier this year.

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Moran vs. NFLPA and NFL Players Inc.

Does the NFLPA think the same way about you?

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Valerie Thomas

Former NFLPA Director of Human Resources Mary Moran is at WAR against the NFLPA and she is taking no prisoners. In August 2009 Moran filed a $4 million lawsuit that claimed sex discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination of her employment in violation of public policy because she participated in a DOL Office of Labor Fraud and Racketeering investigation of the NFLPA. Moran claimed that the actions of NFLPA management created serious and troubling ethical concerns for her. General Counsel Richard Berthelsen called Mary Moran “a necessary casualty.”

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But Moran is not a victim. She’s a perpetrator. She is GUILTY of doing to me what she now claims that NFLPA management has done to her. Moran doesn’t deserve to get a penny. Whether you do a good deed or a bad deed, always remember: “What goes around comes around.”

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A Necessary Casualty: Valerie Thomas? – In 1988, I cooperated with an internal investigation by NFLPA President George Martin and VP Mike Davis and then I was subsequently fired. I filed a complaint at EEOC regarding race/sex discrimination and prevailed when the NFLPA was found guilty of retaliation.

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In January 2009, four Congressmen signed and sent a letter to the Department of Labor about concerns of the integrity of the NFLPA election process. At the behest of his daughter Mary, Congressman Jim Moran looked into the matter.

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Getting our hands on the NFLPA’s 2007 LM-2 financial report to the US Dept. of Labor was as close as we can get to a forensic audit of how the Union spent (or misspent) everyone’s money (read that post from last February about 2007′s LM-2 HERE). And once again, it took a while to find it and even longer to download (crashed my browser a few times) and save as a PDF file (crashed a couple of times again!). But now we have all 810 pages of this file and it was around 5 Meg of data. Then we also had to break it up into smaller sections so the special document viewer wouldn’t choke on it. So at last, here it is!

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It’s been all over the media this past week that the candidate list for NFLPA Executive Director  has been narrowed down to three choices: Troy Vincent, Trace Armstrong and DeMaurice Smith. Other than the fluffy short bios that nothing more than standard NFLPA Press Releases, what do the majority of the players really know about these finalists? So far, all most people really know about these three finalists is that Troy Vincent had managed to fall out of favor with Gene Upshaw by bringing up the idea of a succession plan to replace Upshaw. Then there was the recent drama of NFLPA Director of Human Resources Mary Moran calling her Daddy Congressman Jim Moran to “investigate” Vincent’s alleged communications with several other Congressmen about the convoluted process of selecting a new Executive Director. Apparently, a lot of well-paid Upshaw insiders are really worried about keeping their cushy jobs so the choice is going to be very important for them (but shouldn’t be any of their business). But other than the drama and internal office politics, there’s little else that seems to have been made public about the process and the candidates themselves.

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This just in: It’s now getting out that Congressman Jim Moran (D – Va) was the person responsible for outing Troy Vincent as the source that kicked off that recent Congressional inquiry into the Executive Director search process.

“According to Liz Mullen and Daniel Kaplan of SportsBusiness Journal, Vincent spoke with at least two of the four Congressmen who sent a letter to former U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

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