Commanders Coach Ron Rivera Discusses Impending Sale, Working for New Owner
It was Thursday, and Commanders coach Ron Rivera was behind his desk, watching tape, when the news got across to him, the same way it got to the rest of the world—through news reports. So Rivera paused the tape (he was watching receivers, and TCU’s Quentin Johnston was on the screen) and gave himself a moment before doing any fact-finding of his own, just as the cellphone sitting nearby on his desk started to blow up.
Word was, finally, the franchise was being sold, with the initial report, from the sports business site Sportico, having it going to D.C.-area native Josh Harris for $6 billion.
“I mean, truthfully, for me, it was bittersweet,” Rivera told me, driving home Saturday.
It wasn’t long before the enormity of it sunk in, or, in Rivera’s mind, started to become official, after the Snyders gave word to team president Jason Wright, and Wright then passed the facts along to the team’s coach. And, yes, for Rivera, there’s absolutely a sense of relief in the transaction that everyone’s been waiting to get finalized.
Yet, he used that word: bittersweet.
On one hand, Rivera was happy for all his players and staff, who had to answer for things that were mostly happening before any of them arrived and, obviously, well out of their control. On the other? Well …
“I know I’ll get bashed for this …” Rivera says, with some resignation.
For Rivera, the multibillion-dollar transaction, celebrated by an entire region, wasn’t as simple as it was for a fan base singing, in unison, “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” or as simple as it was for the women who accused Snyder and his employees of unspeakable things over two decades, or as easy as it will be for a laundry list of coaches and players who went through Snyder’s Ashburn, Va., and left with a terrible taste in their mouth.
All those people had the day they were waiting for Thursday. Rivera was a little more conflicted. So in the moment? He turned the Johnston tape back on and went about his day.
This is the second time Rivera has been coach of a team during an ownership change.
Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports
We’re closing in on the draft, and that gives us plenty to get to in this week’s MMQB column. So in this week’s Takeaways, we’ll cover …
• The final stages of the Panthers’ QB search.
• Bijan Robinson … top two player in the draft?
• Trades! What the one for Jeff Okudah means, and what Budda Baker might be worth.
But first, right here, we’re covering the biggest news of last week, and how it’s being digested by the leader of the football operation in Ashburn, Va.
Rivera’s a good man. He played in the NFL for nine years, has coached in it for more than a quarter century and gained the respect of just about every power broker in pro football along the way. He didn’t explicitly say it to me—but he knows his words carry weight.
This also isn’t his first rodeo, even in a scenario just like this one. In December 2017, SI ran a report delving into a litany of workplace-conduct issues that, almost immediately, led then Panthers owner Jerry Richardson to put the team he founded on the block. Rivera was his coach. Within six months, the team was under agreement to be sold to hedge-fund kingpin David Tepper for $2.275 billion.
This situation, of course, has more layers to it than that one in Carolina did. Snyder has certainly been more defiant and reluctant to sell his team. Still, for the coach the two had in common, there’s a key parallel between the two in how a guy’s personal experience with someone is in direct conflict with what that someone has done.
“That’s basically it, Albert. That’s why for me, it was the same thing with Mr. Richardson,” he says. “The [Richardson] that I knew, my brother Mickey dies of cancer, and the dude gets a plane for me to fly me in and out so I can get to the funeral. My house burns down, and he calls me right away and says, Do you need me to advance you some money? Do you need some help with anything? That’s what I’ve had.
“I’ve been around these guys, and it’s been nothing but positive. So when all this stuff comes about, I’m sitting there going, Wow. O.K., I get it, I know people talk about it all the time, but that’s not what I’m seeing.”
Really, for Rivera, it comes down to treating people the way he’s been treated.
That’s why, on March 18, Rivera was front and center for Richardson’s memorial service in South Carolina. It’s also why Rivera won’t kick Snyder—who most people would agree deserves plenty of that—on his way out the door. And why he chose to use the word bittersweet to describe the day last week when he found out he was getting a new boss.
“So, for me, it’s a little bittersweet,” Rivera continues. “Because I understand it. I understand what happens, what it means to people, how it affects people, the impact on the organization itself. Those are all things that I’ve kind of had to go through in my own mind. And, again, not to disrespect or downplay what all these other people have gone through, it’s just that the guy that I’ve dealt with is a different person to me. …
“He’s really helped me. When I got sick, he was there, and helped me and my family. My mother passed away recently; he was there to help me out, getting back to the funeral and being there for my dad. So that’s the guy I know. And that’s why when people ask me, How do you feel about this? That’s what I say; it’s bittersweet. ’Cause again, this is the guy that’s been nice to me. He’s been there. So that’s hard for me.”
Rivera added that Snyder was true to his word on what he wanted the coach’s mission to be—primarily to change a broken culture, one that Snyder himself has been credibly accused of fostering for 20 years. He promised Rivera he’d get the power and the resources needed to accomplish it. And Rivera’s proud of how far his team has come in that regard.
This was soon after Rivera was hired in 2020, and after he’d told anyone who’d listen that there’d be a building-wide open-door policy: If you had a question or a problem or any issue with anything, you could go to Rivera’s office for answers. The new Washington coach had his head down, walking down the hallway and … boom.
He smacked his head right into a set of glass doors, the kind that might seem invisible if you weren’t really looking, that separated the coaching offices from the personnel offices. From there, he went to find his administrative assistant, Barbara Allen.
“I looked around, and I said, What the f---?” Rivera says now, laughing. “I went to Ms. Barb and I said, O.K., Barb, can we get these doors taken down? So I had them taken down and somebody came up to me after I had them taken down and said, Hey, where did the doors go? … You weren’t kidding when you said open-door policy.”
It was a funny moment. But Rivera also took it as a sign of how deliberate he’d have to be in fixing everything that had gone rotten with the once-proud franchise—which now stands as his own acknowledgment of how messed up the place was. And as for what most needed fixing, most of it came back to, as Rivera saw, how people were treated.
Three years later, Rivera thinks, at a baseline, the Commanders have a much healthier working environment, and in part because it’s a more diverse environment.
“I think it’s having, when we went through it, the most qualified people,” Rivera says. “And whether those people are men, women, whatever their racial background is, or their ethnicity is, it’s just being able to say how diverse we’ve become. I think that’s important, too, and I think [team president] Jason Wright deserves a lot of credit as well.”
Wright, of course, is also an example of it, as is general manager Martin Mayhew. In 2021, the Commanders became the first team in NFL history with a Black team president and a Black GM.
But just as important, and probably more so given the nature of what Snyder and the organization were accused of, has been how the team hired women into key positions over the past few years, with one of those women being Rivera’s own daughter, Courtney. And so it was no mistake that Rivera pointed right to Courtney, when I asked how she and his wife, Stephanie, have played into Rivera’s wading through what his bosses were accused of, both in Carolina and in Washington.
“Just the fact that my daughter worked both at Carolina and here, you better damn well know I’m not going to let that f---ing s--- happen when she’s around,” he said, with real emotion. “That was my attitude. I was going to be protective. If I saw it, it didn’t matter who did it; I was going to put an end to it. And that really helped. Secondly, though, having my wife and daughter around, it was always trying to make sure I treated them the right way.
He also tried to put the team’s money where his mouth was in hiring women, and doing it not because they were women, but because, as was the case with Wright and Mayhew, they were the best people the team could find. One example he raised was with the 2021 hire of Dr. Barbara Roberts as team psychologist, whom Rivera says has become like an “auntie” to his players, and in particular to those who grew up in single-parent households and might be more apt to open up to a woman. That, as he sees it, is materially making the team better.
In other words, no, Rivera couldn’t make up for all that Snyder’s organization had done. But he could make sure it wasn’t happening on his watch, put people in place who would be as vigilant about it as he’d be and ensure the culture change he saw as necessary to meet his boss’s expectations would happen as planned.
Many Commanders fans are celebrating Snyder’s expected impending exit.
Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports
Rivera also has seen the other side of a sale—what happens after the confetti is cleaned from the office floor and champagne bottles are in the trash.
Generally, the new boss wants his own people.
Rivera built a good relationship with Tepper after the billionaire arrived in Charlotte. In the end, that didn’t buy him much time—he was fired a little over 18 months after Tepper was approved to purchase the Panthers. That, by the way, happened after Rivera missed the playoffs in consecutive years, which is where the Commanders are now, with, presumably, Harris coming in. So, naturally, with the excitement over the sale, there’d be equal parts concern on the part of the people in football ops in Ashburn.
“I worry about my coaches, that I do worry about,” Rivera says. “I’m not worried about me; I’m not. I’ve done this long enough. I know. This is my 27th year as a coach, I’ve been a coach and player in this league, and so I’m really not concerned about myself. I worry about these young coaches that I have, very good young guys that are working their butts off right now, and they’ve been working their butts off for the last two years. And we’re in a position where we feel like our head is above water.
“You feel like we did some good things, we finished on a high note, we did some roster building off a young quarterback’s contract, we’re able to do some pretty good things this offseason, get Daron [Payne] signed. … And then we went out and we signed several guys that we’re very happy about in free agency.”
Rivera then measured his words and added, “There’s a lot of good reasons to be excited. So I’m concerned for them, because they’re good, young guys that are working hard. We just gotta keep it going for them. Whatever’s expected, I want to be able to get a good feel for that, make sure everybody understands, this is what’s expected of us.”
The upshot, as Rivera sees it now, is that his players will be able to focus on football.
And while he didn’t want to use it as an excuse, he said there were times, and in particular last year, when the questioning of players on Snyder’s misdeeds, the team’s previous misconduct and the resulting potential sale were tough to manage.
“It’s the rapid-fire questions at them: He’s going to sell the team; who do you think is going to buy it? Don’t you think Jeff Bezos should buy it?” Rivera says.
After the announcement in early November that Snyder had hired Bank of America to shepherd the sale, the conversation in the local media—and as a byproduct with the media in their discussions with players—became more or less a daily one. Rivera told his players to defer to him, that he’d take the bullets. But when there was news, and in particular news on game day that would bleed into the environment at the stadium, the temperature turned up, and that could wear on the players.
Assuming everything goes to plan, that burden will soon be lifted from the players’ shoulders, which Rivera believes will give them a chance for his program to, finally, turn the corner on the field the way it has turned the corner in the workplace.
The reality is if that happens, Rivera won’t have to worry about job security for himself or his coaches. If it doesn’t, well, then chances are (again, presumably) Harris will go his own way and, like most owners in that spot would, hire his own people to give the organization a fresh start. The good news for Rivera’s crew is that they have some control over that. Simply put, it’ll come down to how the players play and the coaches coach.
“That’s the truth of the matter; it really is,” Rivera says. “And that’s to be expected. So like I said, for me? I’m not worried about me. I want my coaches to be able to keep going forward and keep going on [with the team]. They do a good job. They work hard.”
As Wright took Rivera through the ins and out of the potential sale Thursday, with that tape of Johnston paused on the screen in his office, the bittersweet feeling the coach got ranged from relief, to those conflicted feelings on Snyder, to a little anxiety in how working with a new owner would be after his history in Carolina.
After the 2022 season, Rivera went through the team’s personnel plan and budget for ’23 with Snyder. Would he have to do that again with his new bosses? Would he have the chance to talk to Harris before the draft? Would they be on board with the changes the team has made, and the decision to, at least for ’23, build around second-year quarterback Sam Howell?
Rivera, of course, remembered going through it with Tepper, and had learned, through how his 18 months working for Tepper went, how important those conversations would be.
“I think it’s just to get as much information I can that way, so I can share it with the people around,” Rivera says. “You have to be in constant communication, and try to communicate what the plan is, communicate what we believe is good for us going forward. And then again, you just try to listen, as well, and understand what is expected and what’s wanted.”
That said, it doesn’t take an NFL head coach to understand what the first expectation will be, or an NFL owner to lay it out for him.
The rest of it is academic, and Rivera knows that. Because the news he and the world got Thursday was only half of what people in D.C. have been looking for over the past quarter century. His job will be to give them the other half of it.
Which is why he wasted no time getting back to that tape.
