Grant Cohn vs. Kyle Juszczyk and NFL Player Privacy Complaints

Why is the NFLPA complaining about media access?

From Subscriber Drew, who’s noticed that this morass of an early 49ers season has produced a locker room sports media controversy:

Hey,

I was hoping to get your thoughts on the recent locker room drama happening with the nfl. While I know a lot of the niners fans don’t like grant, I thought Kyle juszczyk’s tweet that implied some nasty stuff about him was way out of pocket. Torrey smith also had a ridiculous tweet about reporters who want locker room access. Although I am sympathetic to athletes wanting more privacy in the locker room, calling reporters “gay” for wanting locker room access is insane considering that from what I know the athletes have plenty of time to change before media is allowed in. Was curious about your thoughts on this considering you’ve written about it before regarding the nba.

Apparently retired NFL wide receiver Torrey Smith called some male reporters “straight meat watchers.”

For those not following this particular local drama, this is the tweet from 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk:

And the NFLPA statement:

Over the past three years, the NFLPA has tried to work with the NFL and Pro Football Writers of America to move media interviews out of locker rooms. However, there has been little willingness to collaborate on a new solution. The NFL's current media policy is outdated. We, the NFLPA executive committee, urge the NFL to make immediate changes to foster a more respectful and safer workplace for all players. In the meantime, we encourage each player to ask for interviews outside the locker room during the week.

Well then. There’s a lot going on here, some of which I covered in my 2022 post about NBA union efforts to restrict locker room media access. We’ll start with the broader topics, and get into the specific controversy involving HoS guest Grant Cohn (I reached out to Grant).

This sentence is interesting to me, as it’s a very Current Year sort of argument:

The NFL's current media policy is outdated.

Outdated why? That part isn’t really fleshed out, so to speak. There’s an irony in how this formal appeal to Current Year progress is arriving with a side of informal athlete-conveyed, “The GAY MEDIA is looking at my penis!”

I’ll note that, in a collectively bargained set up, the players have the right to negotiate media access out of their routines. If the union wants to complain between now and the next negotiation, that’s also their right, but I’m not sure what purpose it serves. If you want the media out, you can negotiate them out.

And why would it be a negotiation? Because, if the NFL is smart, they realize that access helps create a more charismatic product for fans. Much as many of you/I hate the media, take them out of the locker rooms, and you get farther from authenticity. You get more of that sterile “Twitter reacting to Twitter” content. From my 2022 post on NBA access:

Here’s the simple reason that media people hardly ever explain about the locker room’s value: It’s a place where all the players are around one another. To the fan, that might seem like a normal scenario. But it’s not.

And:

In the locker room, a media person can quickly bounce from person to person, taking minutes to glean insights that would otherwise take months. As a small example, one of my best performing Athletic stories was this game-night feature on how the Warriors’ strategic shift helped win them the Western Conference finals. I got the necessary audio off maybe five minutes of locker-room interview time with four relevant actors (Steph Curry and the big men who implemented the far away ball-screen strategy). I spoke to Curry, Jordan Bell, Kevon Looney and Zaza Pachulia within that five-minute span, jumping from station to station. At one point, Curry and Bell, whose lockers were neighboring, acted out the plays together. 

Look, if the NFL and its players mutually agree to kick media out of the locker rooms, I’m sure we’ll all live. The sport will continue on, making tens of billions. I just believe that the media product will suffer to the league’s detriment. This belief is somewhat informed by the viewership collapse that happened during the NBA’s 2020 playoff bubble, though obviously, there were a lot of confounding variables that postseason.

I’m pretty critical of sports media in this space, but critical isn’t the same as believing they’ve no useful role. The idea of “narrative” has been denigrated in sports coverage, but human beings understand almost everything through story. The media members are like story-seeking truffle hounds, digging up aspects of intrigue from the scene fans are curious about. The athlete themselves can provide this service, but they often run into the “Players’ Tribune problem.”

Back in 2014, the Player’s Tribune launched as part of this broader effort for athletes to own their own stories. The publication, founded by Derek Jeter, was pitched with not a small amount of resentment for the sports writers who’d previously owned narrative production. The Player’s Tribune had some hits here and there, but never really caught on. The reason for that, I believe, was that it was too sanitized and guarded, much like Jeter himself. The athletes disliked sports writers in part because such people exposed their secrets and weaknesses. That’s an understandable gripe, but there is no closeness without vulnerability.

Anyway, Grant Cohn. Did the most provocative 49ers media man act in a gross meat-ogling manner? I asked Grant if “Juice” was referring to something specific or just trolling. Grant said:

No incident involving me, (Kyle Juszczyk was) just trolling.

I’m inclined to believe Grant because, if his enemies within the 49ers org had a tangible charge to press, they’d likely go full court. Juszczyk is a savvy guy. His tweet conveys a possible implication (or accusation, from the perspective of Grant’s dad) while maintaining plausible deniability. This leads me to infer that, while reasonable people can criticize Grant’s coverage for its pejorative bombast, there’s not much to the idea that he’s some locker room ogler or whatever else may have been insinuated.

But there have been incidents regarding NFL locker room access this season, mostly kept under the surface. I’ve been told of situations where partial nudity has gotten (accidentally, presumably) uploaded to YouTube and then promptly taken down. This is where I can be a bit more charitable to the NFLPA’s, “The NFL's current media policy is outdated,” perspective. Perhaps the issue isn’t changing social mores regarding privacy in the workplace. It’s that “media” now means a lot of people armed with phone cameras that instantly transmit video to the world.

If that’s the case, the solution isn’t to wholly kick everyone out of the locker room. It’s to come up with sane privacy safeguards. Does every stall get a hospital-type privacy curtain? Do the interviews happen 15 minutes later, to ensure that whoever wants to get dressed completes the task? I’m agnostic on what the specific reform should be but am fairly certain that there’s an easy solve for this situation.

I understand the perspective of players and fans who note how “weird” it is that this seeming relic of locker room access exists. I’d argue that this is a “Chesterton’s fence” scenario and the access remains for a reason. The short answer, beyond what I’ve already described, is just efficiency. The players don’t want media around their private work area, but they also don’t want to be held up from going their 53 separate ways. This easiest compromise has been just to let media in one room, where all the players are, right before they leave.

So, even if it indeed is the Current Year, locker room access appears to be lindy. Kicking the media out might get a lot of support from players and fans alike, but it’s still here because it serves the fans. If the access itself is truly “outdated,” then opponents should maybe demonstrate why, instead of merely insisting.