If Dan Snyder Does Sell the Commanders, the NFL Must Get His Replacement Right

Washington fans are rejoicing, but the hard part is not over for the rest of the league’s owners.

Being an owner is the best job in all of professional sports because you never have to take the blame for anything. The stadium is awful? Blame the local government. A player is bad? Blame the coach. The coach is bad? Blame the search firm, or the GM, or that guy at your pheasant-hunting club who recommended him. Toxic workplace environment? Blame the team president, because how can you control all of that while floating on the Mediterranean in your super yacht? The thing has a two-story IMAX theater; do we really have time to deal with everything happening on dry land?

However, upon the news that Daniel Snyder could be, possibly, maybe, selling the Commanders after hiring Bank of America to explore the possibilities, we have reached a point where the buck stops at the billionaires’ club. Owners, by a 24-of-32 vote, would have to approve another new owner. Presuming, for the purposes of this column, that it’s happening, it’s now their job to actually do a modicum of research and make sure that the next member of their secret society isn’t a stain on the brand.

Obviously, it is good news that Snyder will be moving on. It’s good news for all of the employees who, for years, raised awareness of their own personal horror stories. It’s good, in a different way, for fans of the club, who have begged for Snyder’s removal for almost two decades now. It’s good for folks who would, at some point, like to walk into a crisp, new home stadium near the nation’s capital. It’s good for the fellow owners who won’t have to go through the franchise’s stadium receipts to make sure the NFL money didn’t land in the Kenny Chesney concert money bin (a claim which, in fairness to Snyder, he has denied).

The hard part is making sure this doesn’t happen again.

It would take 24 of 32 teams to approve a sale of the Commanders. That decision should be scrutinized.

Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports

One of the most encouraging evolutions in sports journalism recently has been the ability to turn focus on the people whose names appear on the paychecks, be it Snyder, Jerry Richardson, Jerry Jones, Jimmy Haslam or Jim Irsay. Be it Robert Sarver of the Suns and Mercury or Donald Sterling of the Clippers, it is so much harder for people to hide. It is so much easier for players and coaches and general managers to get a sense of who they’re working for and what kind of values (or lack thereof) a person promotes (given that we can also look up political donations more easily than ever).

This isn’t to say that the NFL needs to find the perfect person. Lord knows that doesn’t exist. Everyone on Earth has something they are embarrassed or ashamed of and wouldn’t want written about in a sports magazine.

This is to say that the NFL needs to do a better job of looking past the net worth on whatever financial summary is presented to them at their equivalent of the rich, white guy rose ceremony. Ownership is bigger than wealth now. Given the broader lens with which we can now view a franchise, ownership says more about a team than a coach or quarterback, and thank goodness for that. We wrote in the past about using this as an opportunity to diversify the NFL’s ownership pool, which feels like a bit of a pipe dream. But isn’t this how compromises work? We start with the best possible scenario and work our way to a point just above the bare minimum. How about an owner whose misdeeds we won’t be reading about for another 20 seasons?

To avoid painting with too broad a brush, it’s important to note that no one person is wholly good or bad. Colts owner Jim Irsay, for example, who has received a lot of positive attention for his willingness to call out Snyder (including from me), has dealt with his own personal exposés. He has also raised more than $20 million for mental health awareness and is a hero to some in his home state for making Indiana less of a desert for emotional support. Bengals owner Mike Brown has his fair share of controversies, but also clandestinely pays for the hospital bills of sick employees, or helps them rebuild their disaster-strewn homes, or picks up the delivery room bill for a coach who has to flee the practice field to become a new parent.

So “owner” doesn’t simply equal “bad person,” even if opinion-havers in the sports world make it feel like we’re trending that way. It’s not a binary. With everything in life, there is a scale. We will tolerate and eventually look past a certain level of bad because that’s what we’d expect from everyone else in our own lives.

But eventually, with some, we reach a level where lives are irreversibly changed due to their negligence or outright mismanagement. We reach a point where the tattered-looking field, the underperforming team and the cynical fan base are just the above-ground portion of a weed that has roots a mile deep underground; one that can only be altered or removed completely.

And that kind of problem forces you to come in from the ocean, power down the super yacht and actually do some work. Who wants that? So how about we just get this one right?