The former NFLPA head offers a rare insider perspective on the NFL in his new book, discussing Roger Goodell, league nepotism, media dominance, and the fight for players’ rights.
DeMaurice Smith ran the NFL Players Association for nearly 15 years, from 2009 to 2023, giving him unique, singular access and insight into the league and the powerful men who run America’s most powerful and profitable sport. Smith, now a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school, recently published a book titled “Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game,” offering a perspective not normally seen from authors who are usually players or owners.
“I wanted to write a book that was a journey of a man of color coming from outside of the world of sports into a world that’s charitably a rough and tumble world,” Smith told me in the latest episode of Boardroom Talks.
That rough-and-tumble world is led by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, someone the 61-year-old Smith described in his book as “cold and dark” in the way he extracts maximum value out of the league’s partners.
“There’s a side of Roger that’s affable, that’s fun to be around, but there is that side of him that is difficult,” Smith said. “He can be extremely empty when he is coming at you with something that he wants. Roger is brilliant when it comes to running the National Football League. The way in which the NFL has wrung the majority of media dollars out of the sports media ecosystem is phenomenal.”
The NFL wants most of the media spending devoted to sports, Smith continued, “happy to leave everybody else in the cold, fighting for whatever is left. They think of it as, ‘first of all, I know you’re going to lose money on football because every media company loses money on football. Everyone.’ And if you don’t have football as a staple of your network, you’re not going to be a network for long.”
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Smith also guided the NFLPA through two lockouts, with guys like Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers helping the PA navigate the first one in 2011 against a set of 32 owners who he said often prioritize nepotism over hiring the best and the brightest to executive positions.
“I have a hard time believing that some of the people who are running these teams could get a job in a top 1,000 company,” Smith said. “If you would look at the management team at the Bengals, I challenge you to prove to me that any one of those people would be the chief operating officer of any top 50 company in America.”
Smith also spoke at length on numerous other subjects, including why the NFL would rather be nepotistic than hire qualified Black coaches and executives, his thoughts on Jerry Jones, Mike Brown, and the risk for a lockout or a gambling scandal in the near future.
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