The veteran reporter has long worried about a lack of diversity in the league. Now he is hoping to help the next generation of Black football journalists
Andrew LawrenceFri 11 Oct 2024 06.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 11 Oct 2024 06.42 EDTShareIn the contact sport that is the NFL news beat, Jim Trotter breaks away from the huddle. At Sports Illustrated he hooked readers with his revealing profiles of reticent stars and his insider’s perspective on the league’s inner workings. At ESPN and NFL Media he was an even more marked outlier, the TV watchdog who insisted on holding league power brokers to account without giving a moment’s thought to lost access or favor. At The Athletic, the expectation was that Trotter would keep up 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 equivalent of the pro football writers’ 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 I was going to sue the NFL,” Trotter says. “I was told that it wouldn’t be a problem. But once I told them I was going to file, I was given the option of delaying the suit and continuing to cover the NFL or being taken off the beat while the case was pending. I told them the case was too important for what I was fighting for to not go forward.” Ultimately, The Athletic’s splashy new NFL hire was dispatched farther afield.
The original 53-page motion reverberated across US sports. In the lawsuit, Trotter claimed the league and its broadcast arm did not renew his contract after he raised concerns about the lack of diversity among the NFL’s executives, coaches and journalists. He further alleged that two team owners had dismissed these concerns when confronted with them directly in explicitly bigoted rhetoric.
What’s more, this news landed on the back 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 case brought by former Raiders coach Jon Gruden – who accuses NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and others of forcing his resignation 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 women to serve as US attorney general.
On Wednesday, Trotter announced a settlement of the lawsuit with the league. The NFL has agreed to donate towards a scholarship fund for journalism students at historically Black colleges – a cause that’s long been near and dear to the Howard University alum. The new initiative – called the Work, Plan, Pray Foundation – takes inspiration from a maxim of Junior Seau, the San Diego Chargers star who Trotter became close with while covering the team. After Seau killed himself at 43, the likely result of repetitive brain trauma discovered in a postmortem CTE diagnosis, Trotter wrote the authoritative biography on the hall of fame linebacker.
The settlement closes a year-long chapter during which Trotter had been assigned away from NFL coverage by The Athletic to safeguard themselves from claims of conflict of interest. “I intentionally did not call NFL sources during the year-plus because I wanted to be fair to them,” says Trotter, who can’t reveal specifics about the settlement details. “And also it would’ve made it harder on me emotionally if I were doing that but not able to write about the things that I know.”
Instead, he segued into a role as a generalist sports reporter – a role, he concedes, was a baggy fit. “I’m not gonna lie to you: it was hard being taken off the NFL beat,” he says. “That’s what people know me best for. That’s where my expertise and my contacts are. I have three decades of institutional knowledge that I can apply to what I’m writing about. And so to step into these other sports where you basically have zero institutional knowledge, you’re not an expert, people don’t know your name and you can’t just pick up the phone and get those people who are in charge, it was difficult. There were times that I felt like, ‘Man, I just don’t know enough.’”
As someone who has known Trotter for almost two decades, starting as his Sports Illustrated factchecker, I can confirm that his modesty is indeed showing here; it couldn’t be more sincere. Old school to the core, Trotter is compelled by journalism orthodoxy to push back against any forces that would place him at the center of a news story. But without becoming a central figure in one of the most consequential sports media stories in recent memory, Trotter probably never takes the late-career opportunity to stretch himself. In the end he proved just as much a must-read at The Athletic for his fresh-eyed outlook on other sports. While the NFL beast trundled on, he was at Jackson State University contemplating Deion Sanders’s long shadow, then at WM Phoenix Open interrogating the overly raucous scene, then stepping back to consider sports in the overview as the gambling industry tightened its grasp. Most enthralling, he covered Caitlin Clark’s transition from college hoops’ blockbuster attraction to the WNBA’s hot button topic.
That Trotter continued to affect the news cycle while parachuting into those beats just goes to show how easily he could have distinguished himself as a general features writer or columnist if the San Diego Union-Tribune hadn’t put him on the Chargers beat in the late 90s. While Trotter let curiosity guide his sports walkabout, his various peers and mentees in the NFL press corps took turns filling his post as the league’s unofficial diversity ombudsman.
When Goodell met the press at a Super Bowl news conference in February, Kansas City radio host Darren Smith raised concerns about NFL Media’s lack of diversity, a question Trotter had asked Goodell a year ago in that same setting while employed by the company only to receive the same old lip service. “I give Darren a lot of credit for doing that,” Trotter says. “I didn’t know until he called me a night or two before that he was gonna do it – and that was such an individual and personal choice. The thing is, and people miss this point: it’s not about me. The fact is it’s our job as journalists to make sure that people’s actions are reflective of their words. So if the NFL is going to continue to say publicly that diversity, equity and inclusion are core principles of the league, and their actions don’t reflect that, is it not our job as journalists to point that out?”
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At this early stage, it’s difficult to say whether the lawsuit will impact business as usual in the NFL. But at the very least it leaves the door open for beat reporters to keep pestering the league for more updates on the diversity front. With the lawsuit behind him now, “I have an opportunity to get back to writing about what I know best,” says Trotter, who still hopes to keep writing on other sports, too. All the while, he’ll give running a foundation a go – and already the decisions about where and how to allocate funds to achieve the maximum impact are nagging at him. “I don’t want to just throw money right at kids,” he says. “I want to truly equip them to be successful as they go forward – especially in non-traditional ways. If a college student is offered an internship in Washington and it’s a non-paid position, I would like to be in a position where we can help.”
“Work, plan, pray” is as much a personal mantra for him as it is a rally cry for journalists to hold the powerful to account. That it also nods to Seau, among Trotter’s most impactful journalism teachers, is just his way of thanking the player who did the most to stoke 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 locker room. Why I will be forever indebted to him is that he taught me about the culture of a locker room and the mindset of an elite athlete. I don’t believe that I have the success that I’ve had without the lessons I learned from him.”