The NFL Players Association has hired a new interim executive director, as the embattled union continues to deal with the fallout from recent scandals.
Veteran labor executive David White, who was the runner-up for the full-time executive director role in 2023, is temporarily taking over for Lloyd Howell Jr., who resigned last month after several damning reports came to light.
White is the former head of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which is essentially Hollywood’s version of the NFLPA. He served as national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA from 2009 to 2021.
More recently, White has served as the CEO of 3CG Ventures, an executive coaching and consulting firm he founded in 2022. However, he is pausing all of his client work related to 3CG Ventures and resigning his board service, including at consulting firm RGP, the NFLPA told Front Office Sports.
NFLPA president Jalen Reeves-Maybin, in a statement, said a “comprehensive, player-led process” led to White’s hiring, which multiple reports said occurred after a vote among the 32 player representatives of each franchise Sunday night.
Reeves-Maybin also said the union will soon commence another player-led “thorough search process” for a permanent executive director, who will be tasked with several multibillion-dollar decisions around the next collective bargaining agreement.
Dominoes Keep Falling
The NFLPA has been in flux since late June, when Pablo Torre and Mike Florio revealed findings from a collusion grievance that the NFLPA had brought against the NFL. Originally filed in 2022, the case’s arbitrator made his ruling in January, but that was kept private for nearly six months.
Shortly after Howell resigned, NFLPA chief strategy officer JC Tretter stepped down, too. Tretter, a former union president during his playing career, was linked to having an interest in becoming NFLPA executive director, although he denied those claims.
