NFLPA responds to Eric Reid, calls his claim against new CBA ‘completely false’
The NFL Players Association responded to free agent safety Eric Reid’s claims about the new collective bargaining agreement in a letter to players on Wednesday, calling them “completely false,” according to ESPN.
Reid officially challenged the newly approved CBA agreement on Monday, posting a letter to Twitter that he and his attorneys sent to the NFLPA. He also demanded an investigation and a re-vote.
His biggest issue with the CBA was that language was changed from a March 5 version that was circulated to players to the final version on March 15 when it was approved.
The NFLPA admitted in the letter on Wednesday that certain language was changed, however didn’t agree that it warranted a new vote or an investigation. In its eyes, it says the same thing.
“Yes, the NFLPA fixed a cross-reference in the final version of the new CBA,” the NFLPA said in the letter, via ESPN. “No, that cross-reference reflects no substantive difference whatsoever from what players were told about the proposed CBA and what the players voted to approve.”
NFLPA responds to Eric Reid, says change to final CBA document “reflects no substantive difference whatsoever.” pic.twitter.com/BJoQO1Fopb
— Dan Graziano (@DanGrazianoESPN) April 2, 2020
Players approved the CBA on March 15 by a 60-vote margin. A simple majority was required for it to pass.
The language Reid called into question had to do with the league’s disability plan and benefits for retired players.
“Thus, the new language … states players agreed to reduce benefits to a much larger population of disabled retired players than found in the terms presented during the recent vote,” Reid said in the letter on Monday. “The new language will reduce the benefits of potentially hundreds of families who were not negatively impacted in this way, by the terms found in the March 5 CBA version.”
The former Carolina Panthers safety publicly lobbied against the CBA before it was passed, too, and called it “a bigger disaster than we could have imagined.”
The NFLPA said that it had its attorneys review Reed’s claims and compare the language in the two documents. They said, however, that the change simply represented “a cross-reference” and not any substantive change in the agreement, via ESPN.
"It is correct that the final version of the 456-page CBA includes an additional subparagraph with a cross-reference to a section of the Disability Plan that the parties had inadvertently omitted in an earlier version," the NFLPA said in the letter, via ESPN. "The final CBA corrected the omissioner, as the bargaining parties were required to do based on their agreement that 'if any typographical errors or incorrect cross-references are found in the 2020-2030 Agreement, the parties will act in good faith to correct them' (just as similarly agreed when finalizing the 2011 CBA). This correction did not, however, change what had been agreed to with the NFL, what information had been provided to players, or what players had voted upon."
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