It was fun while it lasted. ESPN’s Adam Schefter tweeted on Friday morning that the NFL informed all 32 teams in a memo that it prevailed in its grievance against the NFLPA and its “team report cards.”
An arbitrator determined that the NFLPA’s conduct violated the CBA and ordered it to stop making public any future report cards.
The report cards usually come out at the end of February. Last year, the San Francisco 49ers’ training staff ranked 25th, and its training room ranked 21st. Another year has passed, and the 49ers found themselves near the top of the list of starters lost due to injuries. Those numbers may have been worse in 2026.
The argument against the NFLPA, according to the memo, was that they were using “Union speech” that was one-sided:
However, at the hearing, the NFLPA’s witness and counsel characterized the Report Cards as “union speech” and admitted that (1) the union reviewed player responses and cherry-picked which topics and responses to include (or not) in the Team Report Cards; (2) players had no role in drafting the commentary included in the Report Cards which was written entirely by union staffers; (3) the union selected which anyonmous individual player quotations to include (or excluse entirely) to support its chosen narrative; and (4) the union determined the weight to give each topic and resulting impact on the alphabetical grades it assigned. In essence, the record established that the Report Cards were designed by the union to advance its interests under the guise of a scientific exercise.
Not letting the players—the ones who have been in the building over 300 days and know how the day-to-day goes, from nutrition to rehab to practice schedules, etc.—not have a voice in this exercise makes little sense. JJ Watt took it a step further:
Team Report cards felt like something that was for those outside of the building to look at, so it’s not surprising that they did away with them.
