On Friday’s PFT Live, Michael Holley and I suggested (half-jokingly, half-seriously) that Skydance should dispatch a film crew to Daniel Snyder’s current location and capture every second of his day on Sunday, when the team he used to own returns to the NFC Championship for the first time since 1991.
Is he happy? Is he miserable? Will he watch? Will he dial up Gomer Pyle reruns instead?
Our guess is that, given his overall reputation and despite the fact that he was a lifelong fan of the team, he’s probably not root-root-rooting for the home team that made him go away.
Someone who was part of a “dinner with longtime associates” hosted by Snyder in London came away with a stronger characterization. As explained by Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN.com, the associate later shared with a colleague Snyder’s attitude toward the current resurgence of the Commanders: “He fucking hates it.”
Commanders fans still, for the most part, hate him. And they love the fact that he’s gone. Bad teams stay bad because of bad ownership. And the owner is the one person who can’t be fired.
Unless the owner gets involved in a critical mass of messes, prompting the league office to press the Mary Jo White button.
Some owners initially didn’t like the idea of pushing Snyder out, based on the results of Beth Wilkinson’s initial investigation. She would have recommended a forced sale, but the league didn’t ask for her recommendation. The league didn’t want a recommendation, because at that point the league didn’t want to get rid of him.
Good owners like having a cluster of clusterfudge competitors. Most owners dread the idea of one disgruntled former employee making a single claim at a single time that morphs into a leave-no-stone-unturned witch hunt that finds, and melts, a witch. (Of course, the melted witch also gets to, in this case, turn an $800 million initial investment into more than $6 billion.)
The Mary Jo White phase of the investigation prompted the other owners to realize that pushing Snyder out was the right thing to do, even if it not only turns a perennial doormat into a potentially consistent contender but also creates a precedent that can be used against any, some, or all of the other members of Club Oligarch.
The fact that they went along with it shows how they eventually felt about Snyder. Per the report, former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue recently told confidants that Snyder is “the worst owner in the history of the National Football League.”
The move to get rid of him might be triggering one of the best turnarounds we’ve ever seen. Even if Snyder himself sees none of it.
