A Quick Note

First I'd like to thank each of you who made my birthday extra special by making a donation to Advocacy for Fairness in Sports. Donations had been very skimpy over the last few months and I feared that I'd have to scale back the work due to budgetary concerns. Your kindness and generosity has made it possible to keep going full throttle. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!

In case you missed it, here's some of the best coverage from the past few days, chronicling the latest developments in our quest.

In the works: Ray and Ben are coordinating with some of the ladies in the group to do another Town Hall, focused on the challenges for wives of disabled retired NFL players, and Dom Cosentino of The Score is working on a story profiling some of the families affected.

This is an essential part of our strategy. We need to make people aware of both the difficulties that disabled NFL retirees and their families deal with, bust the millionaire myths, and create understanding of what the NFL and NFLPA are callously doing to the disabled men who built the game, in addition with the loose handling of rules and the NFLPA's corruption and complicity in all of this. Please take a few minutes to fill out the form linked below. That way we have a profile of everyone in our group who is willing to take a stand to fight this injustice. Even if you're only willing to speak anonymously, please fill out the form and note ANONYMOUS in the comments section.

We need to keep up our Twitter campaign also. I realize it can be tiring but we're all in isolation and while we may be competing with the coronavirus for attention we do have a very capitve audience. If you're new to Twitter, check in with Kelly Majkowski or Scott Shanle for tips and questions, and don't forget to continue targeting the NFL's sponsors. I'd suggest going to their Twitter accounts and replying to one of their tweets that's getting comments. Whether you tweet a reply that's short and sweet or perhaps create a thread telling what the NFL is doing, keep relentless pressure on these sponsors and use some of the articles above to help tell the story. QUESTION THEIR AFFILIATION WITH AN ORGANIZATION THAT IS SO INDIFFERENT AND CALLOUS TO DISABLED EX-NFLers THAT THEY DAMAGED.

Here's a statistic that will help to get the point across. The SSDI checks the NFL wants to take cumulatively come to about $12 per year. Last year's NFL revenues are estimated at between $16 and $17 BILLION. All of the owners are billionaires. Jerry Jones, one of the owners demanding the offsets is worth $8.1 billion. If he were to foot the bill alone it would only come to 0.14% of his wealth. But there are 32 owners who pay into the benefits. The offset only comes to $375,000 divided 32 ways. For Jones, it comes to a measly 0.004681% of his wealth. For those who argue the cap, it comes out to $225 per player per year. It ought to be worth at least that much to them.

I've been told that certain owners are behind the push for all the Disability changes. They are Jones (Cowboys), Kraft (Patriots), Brown (Bengals), Hunt (Chiefs), Mara (Giants) and Rooney (Steelers). Tony Dungy might be especially interested in the Rooney connection. At any rate I've created a graphic for your use to help get the message across. Just save or copy it and add to whatever tweets you wish.

Just one more thing....and this is the alert I wrote of in the header line. I received a question from the wife of a player. She asked if the offset would only be the player's SSDI benefit of if it would include the supplementary SSDI checks received by the wife and two children.

The CBA is quite vague in this regard and merely refers to the player. I have learned however that the CAN offset these checks if they choose to do so. For people outside the NFL who are on a long-term disability insurance plan, some carriers elect to take all checks, whereas others take only the primary beneficiary's check. I've been told that the NFL/NFLPA may not even be aware of the supplemental dependent benefits, so it would seem prudent not to call their attention to them in my opinion. My suggestion in this regard would be to keep discussion limited to private conversations and outside of social media posts, as not to give them any ideas. Hopefully, we'll beat this before anyone is subject to the offsets but, I tend to err on the side of caution in case this takes longer than anticipated.

I also ask everyone not to forward any of the CBA/Disability group newsletters. If you have someone that you'd like to add to the group, I'll send links to prior newsletters when appropriate to bring them up to speed, but let's try to keep information regarding our plans mostly confined to this group while still setting out to create greater awareness among the general public, media, and active players.

That one negative behind, I feel we have a golden opportunity to get the disability changes off the table and call attention to the corruption within the Plan and NFLPA that has enabled so many abuses to disabled players.

I'm going to be doing some research over the next few days that should aid us in our goals, so step up and keep the Twitter offensive going.

Great work, so far, everyone! Let's keep it moving forward!