“After I say this, somebody’s gonna reach out to me and say, ‘Well, you don’t know the whole story’ or ‘yada, yada, yada’ or ‘You might wanna take a beat,’” Long said. “But if I found out that a major bargaining chip in us getting what we want is being buried to protect one person, I’d say, ‘Get this guy the f*ck out of here.’
“And I got plenty of money. You know, I made my money. But for me, the thing that makes me upset is — and I understand why owners don’t want to give guaranteed money. You know, we’re like rally cars, bro. We’re all gonna break. And, you know, the product, you don’t want to pay guaranteed money for a product that you know that is gonna break and be sitting on the sideline. I get all that from a business standpoint, but this is what we want, and we’re not gonna get it, it seems like, ever, because now you’ve got a smoking gun that says, ‘Hey, they did collude.’ And the arbiter can’t even — the arbiter’s gaslighting us. The NFLPA is kind of looking the other way.”
Long also addressed the obvious imbalance between the owners and the players. The owners will shut the game down without blinking. The players will not.
“We’re never gonna have leverage,” Long said, “because a year of our earning potential and playing potential is too valuable to the person trying to leverage that year in relation to owners, who are just doing business and will continue doing business and have been doing business before you were f*cking in high school playing football. Like, to them, a year is nothing. To them, a game is nothing. We, as a population in pro sports, we are probably the people with the least leverage, because there’s the most players on teams, it’s harder to get everybody mobilized and on the same page.”
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