Welcome to the Tanya Snyder Era
July 7, 2021
by Steve Thomas
The NFL’s year-long look into the toxic culture of the Washington Redskins Washington came to an end last week, with majority owner Daniel Snyder’s wife, Tanya, being named co-CEO of the team and the results of investigating attorney Beth Wilkinson coming in the form of oral recommendations rather than a written report. In the end, Dan Snyder was essentially sent to his room without supper, having been fined $10M and volunt-told to surrender “day-to-day” control over the franchise to his wife for awhile in order to pretend to focus on the team’s desired new stadium and other, unnamed projects.
Not one thing about this investigation or the results surprised me in any way.
The fine is nothing. $10M to a billionaire is the equivalent of a normal person having to hire a plumber when the toilet breaks – you’d rather not shell out the $200, but it’s fine and needs to be done. That’s what $10M is to someone with a net worth in the multiple billions. The optics of the fine is a bigger deal than the lost dollars themselves. As far as I know, this was the largest fine the NFL has ever handed out to an owner, and that does significantly more to Dan Snyder than the actual loss of cash.
Before I continue, I want to absolve everyone of two important notions: first, Roger Goodell did none of this. As in, zero. Goodell is the public face of the NFL solely and only because the owners want someone else to be the public punching bag instead of having to do it themselves. Goodell is hired by the owners. He doesn’t discipline, criticize, or punish owners. No, this was a decision made by the small group of influential owners who run the league: Bob Kraft, Jerry Jones, the Rooney family, and a couple others. Let’s call that group The Committee. Goodell is just the guy who was required to speak and was told to implement whatever fake, pretend oversight will be done. Remember when you were a little kid and got grounded by your parents, who then left you with a babysitter with instructions for him or her to watch you and keep you in your room? The Committee are the parents and Goodell is the babysitter.
Second, The Committee isn’t particularly upset about the innerworkings of the Washington franchise. Almost every franchise has skeletons in their closet. They’re more mad that Snyder let things become public than anything else. One owner has or had a chemical dependency problem and got arrested for DUI. Another owner was busted with sex-trafficked message therapist-prostitutes. Another owner was a gnat-hair away from betting charged by the feds for fraud in conjunction with corruption in his chain of truck stops. One owner was found liable in civil court for racketeering. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head without doing any research. There’s more, much of it not public. The point is that the people who really matter in the NFL – The Committee – were, are, and always will be more concerned with protecting the NFL and keeping prying eyes out of their own closets than they ever were in uncovering and revealing the truth about what was going on in Washington or genuinely changing a culture that encouraged things like awful treatment of female employees and reporters. Really getting rid of Dan Snyder, by which I mean forcing him to sell the team, would open up a can of worms that The Committee doesn’t want and could possibly bring unwanted attention their way.
If you were under the misguided and delusional belief that outside counsel like Beth Wilkinson was going to come in, make real change, and get rid of Daniel Snyder, then please email me because I have a great investment in windfarms to sell you. There’s a reason why Wilkinson was not required to write a report, and that reason is that those owners don’t actually want a written record of Washington’s bad stuff. If a report then existed, it would be immediately leaked to the media, endlessly debated, every word parsed, and then used to compare and analyze every other franchise. That’s the opposite of what The Committee wants. I’m not going to review her list of ten recommendations here because they don’t really matter. The most fervent wish of The Committee is for this to get through a short news cycle and then go away. Also, outside counsel like Wilkinson doesn’t do punishment. Her job was to investigate what she was told to investigate and then report results in the form in which she was told to report them. Period. The Committee does the punishing, not the lawyers. The Committee doesn’t really want one of their own to receive a harsh punishment unless there’s no other choice (see, e.g., Richardson, Jerry), because that sort of punishment makes it more likely that someday punishment will come for them.
I know all of this sounds cynical, but you don’t come to me for an inaccurate, sunshine and roses-laced view of the truth.
While we’re on the subject of truths, the fact is that Tanya Snyder isn’t going to make any difference in the day-to-day operations of the team. NFL owners don’t handle day-to-day operations. Every franchise in the NFL has someone with a title akin to “president” who runs the team. Only Jerry Jones is in the weeds on a day-to-day level, and even in his case, his son Jerry Jr. is handling most of that stuff now. It’s not like owners come into the office every day, sit down at their desk, and start to look through their inboxes – many of them aren’t actually around very much. I spent significant time inside an NFL franchise’s headquarters when I was on their outside counsel team years ago, and that owner wasn’t in the building on a single one of those days. Tanya will go to the NFL meetings and release a few statements, but don’t expect much real change from her, particularly since she’ll be consulting with her husband on every decision anyway. At this point, the team is 99% in the hands of Jason Wright on the business side and Ron Rivera on the football side, for better or for worse. It’s those two people who are going to change the fortunes of this franchise, provided that they continue to have the authority to do so.
If you’re upset about the results of this saga, I understand, but it was inevitable. If you wanted serious punishment for what was certainly abominable conduct and a dereliction of leadership, well, that was never going to happen. We could’ve predicted this result a year ago; in fact, aside from Tanya being given a formal role, we did just that on The Hog Sty. The choice for the fanbase going forward is to either forget about this entire event and support the team on the field . . . or find another team to root for.