Jim Trotter: what happened when an NFL insider sued the league

IIn the contact sport that is NFL news, Jim Trotter breaks away from the group. At Sports Illustrated, he captivated readers with his revealing profiles of coy stars and his insider’s perspective on the internal workings of the league. At ESPN and NFL Media, he was an even more obvious outlier, the TV watchdog who insisted on holding league power brokers accountable without a moment’s thought of losing access or favor. At The Athletic, the expectation was that Trotter would continue the good work after joining the company in May 2023 – the same month he became the second black journalist to ever be recognized with the professional football writers’ equivalent. lifetime achievement award.

But then, four months later, a bombshell hit the sports ticker: Trotter had filed a lawsuit against the NFL. “I told them before I ever took the job that there was a very real possibility that I would sue the NFL,” Trotter says. “I was told it wouldn’t be a problem. But when I told them I would be filing, I was given the option to delay the lawsuit and continue defending the NFL, or be taken off the court while the case was pending. I told them the case was too important to what I was fighting for not to move forward.” Ultimately, The Athletic’s splashy new NFL hire was sent further away.

The original Movement of 53 pages reverberated across American sports. In the lawsuit, Trotter alleged that the league and its broadcasting department did not renew his contract after he raised concerns about the lack of diversity among the NFL’s executives, coaches and journalists. He further claimed that two team owners had dismissed these concerns when confronted directly in explicitly bigoted rhetoric.

Additionally, this news came in the context of three other race-based motions against the NFL: Colin Kaepernick’s collusion complaint, the discrimination lawsuit filed by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, and the wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former Raiders coach Jon Gruden . who accuses NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and others of forcing his firing by leaking select racist, sexist and homophobic emails he sent years earlier while working for ESPN. To defend them in the lawsuit against Trotter, the NFL hired Loretta Lynch, the first black woman to serve as U.S. attorney general.

On Wednesday, Trotter announced a settlement of the lawsuit with the league. The NFL has agreed to donate to a scholarship fund for journalism students at historically black colleges — a cause that has long been near and dear to the Howard University alum. The new initiative – called Work, Plan, Pray Foundation – is inspired by a maxim from Junior Seau, the San Diego Chargers star with whom Trotter became close when he defeated the team. After Seau committed suicide at the age of 43, the likely result of repeated brain trauma was discovered in a postmortem CTE diagnosisTrotter wrote the authoritative biography of the Hall of Fame linebacker.

The settlement closes a year-long chapter during which Trotter was removed from the NFL’s coverage by The Athletic to protect itself from conflict of interest claims. “I consciously did not call any NFL sources over the past year because I wanted to be honest with them,” said Trotter, who could not reveal specifics of the settlement. “And it would have also made it harder for me emotionally if I did that but wasn’t able to write about the things I know.”

Instead, he went to work as a generalist sportscaster – a role, he admits, was a baggy one. “I’m not going to lie to you: It was tough being taken off the NFL beat,” he says. “That’s why people know me best. That is where my expertise and my contacts lie. I have three decades of institutional knowledge that I can apply to what I write about. And so to get into these other sports where you basically have no institutional knowledge, you’re not an expert, people don’t know your name and you can’t just pick up the phone and call the people in charge, it was difficult. There were times when I thought, ‘Man, I just don’t do that know enough.'”

As someone who has known Trotter for almost twenty years, starting as his own Sports Illustrated fact checkerI can confirm that his modesty is indeed on display here; it couldn’t be more sincere. Trotter is old-fashioned to the core, forced by orthodox journalism to push back against any forces that would put him at the center of a news story. But without becoming a central figure in one of the most influential sports media stories in recent memory, Trotter may never seize the late-career opportunity to expand himself. Ultimately, he turned out to be a must-read at The Athletic for his fresh perspective on other sports. As the NFL beast lumbered along, he sat at Jackson State University, thinking The long shadow of Deion Sandersthen at WM Phoenix Open interrogating the overly raw sceneand then stepping back to consider sports in the overview as the gambling industry tightened its grip. Most compellingly, he covered Caitlin Clark’s transition College Hoops’ blockbuster attraction to the WNBAs hot-button topic.

That Trotter kept going influence the news cycle while parachuting into those beats only goes to show how easily he could have distinguished himself as a writer or feature columnist had the San Diego Union-Tribune not put him on the Chargers beat in the late 1990s. While Trotter let curiosity guide his sports walk, his various peers and students from the NFL press corps took turns serving as the league’s unofficial diversity ombudsman.

When Goodell met the press at a Super Bowl press conference in February, Kansas City radio host Darren Smith said was concerned about NFL Media’s lack of diversitya question Trotter Goodell had asked in the same setting a year ago while working at the company, only to receive the same old lip service. “I give Darren a lot of credit for that,” Trotter says. “I didn’t know until he called me a night or two earlier that he was going to do it – and that was such an individual and personal choice. The point is, and people miss this point: it’s not about me. The fact is, our job as journalists is to ensure that people’s actions reflect their words. So if the NFL continues to publicly say that diversity, equity and inclusion are core tenets of the league, and their actions don’t reflect that, isn’t it our job as journalists to point that out?”

At this early stage, it’s difficult to say whether the lawsuit will impact the normal business of the NFL. But at the very least, it leaves the door open for beat reporters to continue pestering the league for more updates on the diversity front. Now that the lawsuit is over, “I have the opportunity to get back to writing about what I know best,” says Trotter, who still hopes to continue writing about other sports. All the while, he’ll be trying to run a foundation — and the decisions about where and how to allocate money to achieve the maximum impact are already nagging at him. “I don’t want to just throw money at kids,” says he. “I really want to equip them to be successful as they move forward – especially in non-traditional ways. If a student is offered an internship in Washington and it is an unpaid position, I would like to be in a position where we can help.”

“Work, plan, pray” is both a personal mantra for him and a rallying cry for journalists to hold the powerful accountable. That it also nods to Seau, one of Trotter’s most influential journalism teachers, is just his way of thanking the player who did the most to instill the courage of his convictions. “So many people thought he was feeding me stories and scoops,” Trotter says. “But Junior was so protective of his dressing room. Why I will forever be grateful to him is that he taught me the culture of a locker room and the mentality of an elite athlete. I don’t believe I would have the success I have had without the lessons I learned from him.