May 17, 2021
Veterans are hitting the field now, and that’s where we’ll start this week’s column …
Manny Millan/Sports Illustrated (Jordan); Douglas DeFelice/USA TODAY Sports (Armstead); Brad Mills/USA TODAY Sports (Kerrigan)
• In my morning column, we took you through the latest in the NFL-NFLPA fight over the offseason program, and there was a quote in there where we had union president and Browns center J.C. Tretter explaining how, really, it’s not just now during the nine-week offseason program that players are exposed to risk working out under the NFI rules it’s the full run of the 29-week offseason. And in reaction to that, I had an agent who knows this stuff well point out to me how the NBA’s union got protection for its guys. It actually dates back decades, and links to the old “Love of the Game” clause that Michael Jordan had put in his Bulls contracts. The romanticized story was that it was in there so Jordan could crush people in pickup. The function