One thing has become abundantly clear in recent weeks. For a variety of reasons, the NFL Players Association never should have made Lloyd Howell its executive director.

The question is whether the NFLPA will learn from the misadventures of 2023, and whether the union will make a better hire, both for interim executive director and, in time, Howell’s replacement.

The players seem to realize that the Howell hire was, to use a technical term, a shitshow. A new item from Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler of ESPN.com delves into many nooks and crannies of the failed Howell regime. Near the outset, the article reports that a Friday night call among player leadership included a pointed message from the current face of the NFL as to the union’s current predicament.

“We need to get our choice for leader right,” Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (a co-alternate rep in Kansas City) told the executive committee and board of player representatives.

To get it right, they need to realize — and accept — how badly they got it wrong. Which means, among other things, recognizing that former NFLPA president JC Tretter concocted a horribly flawed search that seemingly excluded viable candidates from the short list of finalists. Then, when it was down to Lloyd Howell and David White, the executive committee didn’t share with the player reps who would vote on the matter a 10-1 landslide straw poll favoring White over Howell.

Instead, and as detailed in the ESPN report, the player reps became enamored by the idea that Howell viewed the union as “a cooperative business” with the NFL, not “a thorn in the side” of owners. This caused them to swallow this selling point from Howell: “I have been the guy fighting against unions for the corporation. So, I know exactly how they think and how they do things.”

Read those two sentences again. And ask yourself whether, in Howell’s experience, management ever views it as a truly “cooperative business.”

Of the two options presented to the player reps at a downtime meeting in June 2023 (they didn’t even know who the candidates were before showing up), they went with Howell. And basic human pride results in decisions being defended, even as the objective evidence that it was a bad decision becomes insurmountable.

Case in point, when Howell tried to tell the executive committee last Thursday night that he was resigning, they tried to get him to stay.

“The EC said, ‘No, you’re fucking not [resigning],’” an unnamed player told ESPN.com.

“They tried to talk him out of it for three hours,” another unnamed source said. “Howell repeatedly said no.”

And here’s why, per an unnamed source to ESPN.com: “They backed Howell through everything. . . . If he failed, their process failed, and they didn’t want to face that.”

Before Howell resigned, he reportedly tendered his resignation to The Carlyle Group in an effort to put out the fire that had been sparked by the reality that the part-time position with a private-equity fund in bed with the NFL hopelessly conflicted with Howell’s primary job. He changed his mind after he learned that ESPN.com was preparing to disclose his strip-club expense-report fiasco. (Howell has since re-changed his mind, voluntarily or not, and resigned from The Carlyle Group.)

And then there’s this fascinating nugget from the story, as shared in part with ESPN.com by director of security (and 18th Century wordsmith) Craig Jones: “Howell ordered the union facilities department to merge two spaces in the parking garage to avoid door dings on his Porsche Cayenne Turbo, the sources said. He asked workers to change the number of the two spaces, 10 and 11, to 32, as an homage to the jersey number worn by O.J. Simpson, according to Craig Jones, the union’s longtime director of security chief. A second source familiar with the matter confirmed the Simpson inspiration.”

It’s OK for the players to admit that they got it wrong. It’s OK for them to blame Tretter for concocting a horrible search process. It’s OK for them to admit that, when things went south, they shouldn’t have circled the wagons around a flawed human being.

It’s more than OK. If they’re going to get their next moves right, it’s critical for the players to fully understand — and embrace — the extent to which their most recent process was a complete and total disaster.