Inside the battle over reporters’ access to NFL locker rooms
Earlier this year, Tee Higgins, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver, struck up a conversation with Ben Baby, an ESPN reporter, in the locker room. Higgins had missed time with a hamstring injury, and fans around Cincinnati were wondering aloud whether he was faking it.
In his sixth season on the Bengals beat, Baby has built trust and rapport with Higgins. He offered an idea: Why not go on the record and explain his point of view?
Higgins agreed, and Baby wrote the story. “It’s an example of how the job is supposed to work,” Baby said.
It’s also part of the decades-old compact between athletes and reporters. Players open their place of business, including where they get dressed, for reporters to act as a conduit between players and fans, bringing increased attention, engagement and - ultimately, ideally - revenue from fans.
But this season, the NFL players union has taken a stand against reporters’ long-accepted access to the locker room. This month, the union released a statement calling the media policy “outdated” and announcing that players would begin to request that interviews happen outside the locker room.
“Anybody getting dressed for the day, you wouldn’t want a dozen strangers in that area,” said Thomas Hennessy, the long snapper for the New York Jets. “The media stands there; they hover; they talk to each other. It’s honestly just inappropriate.”
It’s not an unreasonable request on its face, considering occupational hazards of giving interviews in your underwear (and the occasional player caught on camera undressed). To the uninitiated, the ritual of half-naked players surrounded by microphones is bizarre if not indecent.
Reporters say it’s critical. It’s where they meet players, chat off the record and collect phone numbers for future reporting. But that fertile reporting ground is drying up across sports. The WNBA closed the locker room to reporters recently, and most college locker rooms were never open. (NBA locker rooms and MLB clubhouses remain open before and after every game.)
Cutting off the locker room, reporters said, is an existential threat to their jobs, particularly in an era of media contraction and as many players connect with fans through their own social media and podcasts.
“They don’t want us in the locker room not because of privacy but because they just don’t want to talk to us,” said one reporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional backlash.
The locker room played a central role in the evolution of the job of sportswriter. Black reporters who covered Jackie Robinson’s debut season were prohibited from dressing rooms and press boxes. (Two received press cards the following year.) It took a lawsuit for female sports reporters to gain access. Locker room access has produced iconic moments such as Len Dawson smoking a cigarette during halftime of the Super Bowl, and the scenes from a losing clubhouse after a playoff series produce some of the most evocative writing in the profession.
In recent weeks, the issue has sparked debate across sports, with the Kelce brothers discussing how easy it is not to be seen naked, while other players have taken to social media to decry the awkward dynamics.
The NFL’s media policy, set by the league with input from the players and the Pro Football Writers of America, calls for locker rooms to be open for 45 minutes usually three times per week and after games, following a brief cooling-down period. During the practice week, reporters usually mill around waiting for a few players - sometimes a new starter, a new acquisition or a player with a big assignment that week - to appear ready to speak. Quarterbacks and other star players often speak on select days in news conferences.
Players can be fined $25,000 if they aren’t available during these sessions. Calvin Watkins, who covers the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News and is the president of the PFWA, said the league sent letters to two players last year about violating the policy and one so far this year, though no fines had been issued.
According to George Atallah, assistant executive director of external affairs for the players union, players have been looking to change the policy since the pandemic, when locker rooms were closed to media. More recently, younger players, recently out of college, have raised questions about the policy. The union’s executive committee passed a resolution in 2022 and another one this year.
Players can’t kick reporters out of the locker room. Some, though, have been asking media to conduct interviews outside the locker room during the week, exercising a right that has existed in the current policy.
Hennessy said the union would like reporters out of the locker room: “That’s the ultimate goal,” he said. The union distributed T-shirts to players that read “Let’s Talk Outside” on the front and “Decency=Discussion” on the back.
Some teams have issued new locker room policies that don’t allow filmed interviews during the week, including Atlanta and Kansas City. (Buffalo and Seattle previously had such a policy in place.) Dallas has a policy that prohibits cellphone video in the locker room. Players on other teams, including Cincinnati and Detroit, have had several players ask reporters to conduct interviews outside the locker room. The majority of teams, however, have not changed protocols.
Several reporters told The Washington Post that they were skeptical of the players’ stance.
“I’ve been covering football players for 35 years,” said Mike Silver, a national football reporter for the Athletic. “Toughness is a defining characteristic. Torn biceps, separated shoulders - this ain’t baseball. Not only the request, but language being used is laughable. I think they said safe space. I’m a bleeding-heart lefty. I believe in sensitivity; I take that seriously. But the football players I’ve known for years have got to be rolling their eyes on this. These tough-ass dudes saying their privacy is being violated.” (The players’ statement said they requested a safer working environment.)
“No one is trying to talk to players butt naked. That’s absurd,” Watkins said.
As alternatives, players have suggested “mixed zones,” common at the Olympics, where reporters pull aside players in a dedicated space as they come off the field. Watkins said “mixed zones” are less reliable and less intimate.
Watkins said if teams and players set aside 45 minutes per day during the week to find a place where players are mandated to appear the same way they are now, he would be fine with that. But he was skeptical that practice facilities have such spaces and believed that would be more of a burden on players. (The union did not have a specific response to that idea, but Atallah said it had offered numerous alternatives.)
The impact of reporters losing access is less obvious than decades ago, before every game was televised and highlights were ubiquitous. But Ed Malyon, the former managing director of soccer coverage at the Athletic, pointed to the minimal access to players in the English Premier League as a counterpoint. They are rarely available during the practice week, and reporters are lucky to speak with one or two after a game. Malyon said something like the Athletic’s popular anonymous player polls couldn’t be done without the current access.
“There’s less coverage of Premier League teams than American teams, and part of that is because of the access,” Malyon said.
The Premier League is certainly not struggling for popularity, but coverage tends to be more focused on coaches because they are often the only ones speaking with the media. The Premier League, Malyon said, isn’t tapping its full potential because players are so inaccessible. “The [NFL] is damaging itself if it gets rid of this,” he said.
Added Kevin Clark, a former NFL reporter for the Wall Street Journal who now hosts Omaha Productions’ “This Is Football”: “The NFL has the best, most accurate, most nuanced local coverage, and it’s because beat writers can go up to a guy and just say, ‘Hey, I was thinking on that defensive bust maybe the call was something and this happened’ and a player can just say yes or no.”
He continued: “There will always be annoying writers, but you can avoid them. We can have better media training. And if the problem is [photographing] guys who aren’t dressed, that can be addressed, too. We can have meetings.” (Several baseball reporters noted the New York Yankees have a separate area for players to get dressed outside the clubhouse.)
One thing players and writers agreed on: Only the NFL can change the policy. Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked about it recently. “We think it’s important to have the kind of media access that you all want but I think our fans want, too,” he said.
He called the current policy “pretty effective.” A person familiar with the league’s thinking said there are no plans to change it.
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