I’m down in Indy for the combine, taking it all in, talking to folks, watching all the interviews, reading all the quotes. But, it’s lying season and you should only believe half of what you read and none of what you hear anyway.

On Monday, I’ll have some thoughts on the overall combine and what we may have learned from some of the results, quotes, and notable no-shows. Today I wanted to dive into the report cards that popped up the other day.

Sometimes it’s lost on us as viewers and fans, but the players are a group of co-workers with a union who have a job and deal with all sorts of day-to-day BS just like the rest of us. Getting to be on football cards and collect multi-million dollar checks is a nice bonus, but they’re folks just like us.

I read through all 32 reports and the note penned by the NFLPA president, JC Tretter explaining why they do this, how it’s done, and what they’ve done to improve the process. The broad strokes/TLDR:

The participation: “This year, we had 1,706 active NFL players complete the survey in full, which nets out to more than a 77% response rate”

The improvement: The NFLPA hired a survey firm to help, and added new categories, & additional questions to get a better picture of the state of each team as a workplace.

The mission: back to the original point, the NFL is a workplace, and progress and improvements will be much slower without a solid look at how the membership of the union feels about important workplace issues. It feels like the smart owners will take these reports seriously and use them to improve.

Hell, if this is all going to be public, why wouldn’t you want to spend a little bit of money on the things that matter, get the best grades, and give yourself that extra little bit of an edge when key free agents are making that tough final decision?

How we decided to give out the hilarious F- to some teams:

If you want to see the FULL report, including tidbits on each team:

READ THE WHOLE THING

I knew not all teams were equal when it came down to this, but I cannot believe some of the shit I read.

• “The players say the locker room is not clean, constantly smelly, and has a persistent bug issue in the showers. “ (Tampa)

• “Players also mention issues with cleanliness, citing multiple sewage leaks this season” (Washington)

• “The players just want a real weight room. It has been a temporary weight room taking up 15 -20 yards of the already small indoor field for the last four years.” (Cleveland)

• “The players reported that half of the showers in their locker room don’t function properly, lacking either warm water or sufficient water pressure. They also mention persistent plumbing issues, leaving them with only five functioning toilets for the entire team.” (Cincinnati)

Some of the main complaints and issues you saw as you dove through them:

Travel

SEVEN teams still make players bunk with a roommate when they travel for away games! If you read more into it, some of the teams only make “some” of the players double up on rooms. I don’t know if that means rookies, special teams guys, or what, they didn’t elaborate a ton.

Some of the complaints would sound petty coming from you or me, but when it comes to optimizing the physical and mental well-being of those 53 men to win football games at the highest level, it’s different. A complaint from Chargers’ players: “The players’ ratings of their travel schedule position them as the fourth worst in the league. The team refuses to send an equipment truck ahead of time, causing them to sit on the tarmac waiting for the plane to be loaded and unloaded.”

Training

There were plenty of complaints about the weight room facilities, strength coaches, and strength and training programs. “A majority of Falcons believe their facility is no better than offsite locations where they could train. Only five other teams in the league have similarly poor impressions of their own weight room. The players have a long list of equipment that they feel any weight room should have that this weight room does not.”

Nutrition

It was a bit surprising to read that some teams weren’t offering meals on certain days or lacked a good nutrition program. Most jobs aren’t going to feed you, but that feels like a dumb spot to cut corners for your players. Cincinnati’s game plan:

Ownership

There were a handful of complaints about ownership not wanting to invest, including some very bad marks for the owners of successful franchises like Kansas City, New England, and Pittsburgh.

One that stuck out was in Carolina: “When asked this season, 100% of the player respondents in Carolina said that they would prefer to play on grass than turf. It is a major frustration within the locker room feeling like they are being forced to play on a surface that is not as safe, simply because it is cheaper to maintain.”

Players are the product!

I struggle to understand how some teams are surely undermining themselves by not doing all the little things they can to get the most out of the players to maximize them as individuals and as a team. We know that not every owner prioritizes winning the same, this makes it painfully apparent who they are.

Still, teams agonize over scouting, send envoys to the combine, and tirelessly negotiate to acquire the best players in free agency and via trades, all in what would seem to be an effort to put together the best possible team and reach the ultimate goal. But then they do things like making the players fly coach while coaches are in first class, force them to bunk with a roommate, offer sub-par training facilities and coaches, and skimp on the nutritional demands of these world-class athletes while they're at the facility. You don’t get the Ferarri and fill it with the cheapest gas.

I don’t think I’m off base to see it as silly to half-ass it on the things that the players have identified as problems in these reports. This isn’t college football where there are massive gaps between the haves and have-nots, parity is real. A very real and low-friction way to separate yourself from the other 31 teams would seem to be through stacking lots of marginal gains.

I will include an article that points to one of my favorite examples of this being a successful strategy in sports

READ:

Head Coach Ratings

One final thing kind of stuck out, and it was looking at the coaches’ grading.

Your Coach of the Year winner, Kevin Stefanski, received a B-, good in the grand scheme of the grading scale, but compared to other teams, he ranked 28th in the league. It was the lowest grade among the 12 coaches to appear on the Coach of the Year ballots last year. I honestly don’t know what to make of that but would love to hear some theories.

The top five head coaches by grades: Andy Reid, Dan Campbell, Kevin O’Connell, Sean McDermott, & Mike Tomlin.

Bottom Five: Josh McDaniels, Ron Rivera, Arthur Smith, Todd Bowles and Kevin Stefanski

Again, I’d encourage you to take a peek at the full rankings if you want to check out how your team is stacking up. I left out the positives because that’s not nearly as fun, but the reports did do a good job of pointing out spots where teams improved from last year. Hopefully, something that we continue to see each spring.