In 2023, the NFL Players Association released their first ownership grades, giving a letter assessment to NFL owners about their treatment of players in multiple categories such as food, number of trainers, how they treat families on game day, and more. In the two-plus years since, NFL owners who have received poor grades in the rankings have either chosen to get better and raise their grades or chosen to complain and press the union to suppress the grades.
New York Jets owner Woody Johnson is apparently one of the owners trying to suppress the grades.
In March 2025 at the NFL league meeting, Johnson told the media that the survey was totally bogus and seemed to indicate that it violated the leagues collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA.
Per a report from ESPNs Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham, Johnson said he took issue with how they collected the information [and] who they collected it from. [It] was supposed to be according to the agreement we have with the league. Its supposed to be a process [where] we have representatives and they have representatives, so we know that its an honest survey.
And that was violated, in my opinion. Im going to leave it at that, but I think there are a lot of owners that looked at that survey and said this is not fair, its not balanced, its not every player, its not even representative of the players.
A separate owner said the only owners that care about the NFLPA report cards are the ones who received subpar grades. ZING!
In 2025, Johnson received an F from his players the only NFL owner to earn the lowest possible grade. Owners from the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers managed at least a D- with the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots earned a D.
The Jets organization came in 29th of 32 teas according to the NFLPA metrics. Not only is Johnson trying to block the release of the grades, Jets players think he actively has tried to make conditions worse since the NFLPA grades first came out as a retaliatory measure.
If thats the case, it looks like the relationship might not get better any time soon.