This is where shit gets serious for owners: When haplessness and personal odiousness achieve the rare feat of poisoning a top-10 media market. Far more significant, though, is the fact that over the last few years Snyder has made a disastrous mess of his pursuit of a new stadium, such that important forces across all of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia are now organized in opposition to hosting his football team.
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It's true that fan apathy is way up, attendance at Commanders home games is way down, and what used to be one of the NFL's marquee franchises is now the exemplar, across all of North American professional sports, of organizational dysfunction. It's not even really a public relations problem. You or I might hope that the owners' reason for wanting to be rid of Snyder is a moral rejection of his whole deal, but obviously that's not it. Multiple owners and league and team sources say they've been told that Snyder instructed his law firms to hire private investigators to look into other owners-and Goodell.
Snyder, now 57 years old, has told associates he will not lose his beloved franchise without a fight that would end with multiple casualties.Īccording to more than 30 owners, league and team executives, lawyers and current and former Commanders employees interviewed by ESPN, the fear of reprisal that Snyder has instilled in his franchise, poisoning it on the field and off, has expanded to some of his fellow owners. Now that he's facing investigations on multiple fronts and running out of high-powered allies, he alludes more than ever to the dirty work. "They know he'll burn their houses down." According to ESPN's sources, it is widely believed at the NFL's ownership tier that Snyder has done the legwork to develop damaging dossiers on coaches, executives, fellow owners, and even on Commissioner Roger Goodell, which Snyder would gleefully weaponize in any situation where the league's power structure coalesced against him. "This is what happens when you get into business with bad people," an unnamed owner told ESPN. Third, they fear the sensitive things Snyder knows about his fellow owners, and how he might decide to use them. Secondly, no action to remove Snyder from the NFL is likely to pass without long and expensive legal challenges. First of all, NFL owners will naturally feel that it is dangerous to affirm that ownership of NFL franchises is conditional. So why don't they get rid of him? The mechanism exists: If 24 NFL owners vote together, they can force Snyder to sell the Commanders. But they certainly hate him, because he is an entitled, aggrieved, vindictive, tyrannical little shit, and because he brings shame and embarrassment to their shared enterprise. And perhaps some of them still can find reasons to form temporary alliances with Snyder, even if only as a way to offload the burdensome contract of Carson Wentz. NFL owners, an extraordinarily exclusive subset of capitalism's leechlike ownership class, together represent the subculture on the planet that is most primed to accept and endure Snyder's cartoonish villainy, to perhaps find in his ruthlessness and hostility to accountability some sort of warped and exploitable merit. "All the owners hate Dan," says one unnamed veteran owner, explaining in part why Snyder may have gained from an overexposure to barely veiled hatred the misapprehension that all owners hate each other. That is both a thing I believe and also the upshot of a big triple-bylined story published by ESPN Thursday morning.
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