NFLPA President JC Tretter: ‘This Is A Contact Disease And We Play A Contact Sport’

Leave it to Cleveland Browns center JC Tretter, the new president of the NFL Players Association, to crystalize the quandary the league finds itself in as it began opening team facilities Tuesday, facilities that had been closed for nearly two months due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is a contact disease and we play a contact sport,” Tretter said.

Normally at this time of year, NFL teams begin to assemble and start preparation for the season, which is still months away. This year, however, teams will try to prepare for a season unlike any other.

“We have to fit football into this world of coronavirus. And not get caught up trying to fit coronavirus inside this world,” Tretter said. “The way coronavirus has changed how every industry is working, you can’t just expect to throw football back in and expect the virus is going to kneel down to almighty football. You’ve got to look for different ways of making sure people stay healthy.”

As president of the NFLPA, Tretter will be on the front lines of that battle, a battle he didn’t know he’d be fighting when he made the decision to throw his helmet into the ring by seeking that presidency.

“I’ve always wanted to get more involved in this. I studied it in college (Cornell),” he said. “As I got more comfortable with my day job of being a pro football player, as I’ve gotten older, I got more interested in getting involved in it. I made the decision to run for president right after (last) season. I put a lot of time in, researching, and making sure I knew all about the topics and issues. Then we had elections at the player reps’ meetings. You give a 5-to-10-minute speech, then you go around to five or six rooms and get 20 minutes to answer questions with all the different teams in each room, and then they vote. It was a really cool experience. It’s an honor to be elected by your peers for anything, but this is a role I’m passionate about, and being able to help look out for the current players as well as the guys who come after us, and guys who came before us.”

Tretter’s first big issue as president: dealing with the coronavirus, and all the issues involved in trying to get the NFL back up and running – safely.

It’s a complicated issue for the owners and the players, one that will require plenty of negotiating on both sides, involving the myriad of issues that must be addressed before football returns.

“There needs to be a plan, with a lot of questions to be answered,” Tretter said. “Every time you come up with an answer, five or six questions pop up from that answer. It’s kind of an ever-evolving conversation.”

It’s more than just trying to make the playing of the games safe. Health issues impact every aspect of a pro football player’s life.

“There’s not just a short list where we say ‘we need these five things,’” Tretter said. “The way this thing passes along is through contact, and that’s what we do for a living. The way we interact with each other, at the facility, at practice, at weight lifting, at the meal room. It’s shoulder-to-shoulder, standing by each other, passing things around. So there is a long list of ideas we need to come up with on how to make this environment safe for us.”

Tretter said that unlike Major League Baseball and the NBA, whose seasons should be going on now, the NFL has a little more leeway.

“We still have time as far as when our season is projected to start,” he said. “A lot of the other leagues are trying to figure things out right now, and piece it together. We still have time.”

Still, at this point, the only thing that is certain is the uncertainty surrounding all sports.

Tretter says he’s been living his life in two-week increments, “because the information has been changing and evolving. This disease is constantly changing so you can’t really look that far ahead. There’s no reason to live in a lot of different hypotheticals because then you can get paralyzed in those hypotheticals, where you keep going down different rabbit holes and lose track of the now.”

Even the now can be complicated, such as how do the sports minimize the risk that will come with the start-up of the games? Tretter said some risk is unavoidable.

“There’s a level of risk in everything,” he said. “You’re facing a level of risk going to the grocery store. I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point where there’s no risk of exposure. Coming into contact with people is a risk of exposure. That’s never going to be down to zero. Our job is to get it to as close to zero as possible. That’s why you have to look at everything.”