It’s been a busy and heavy week, with the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; President Biden visiting Kyiv; a talkative grand juror relishing her moment in the spotlight; belated national attention to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio; more signs that the Biden team wants China to play nice and Beijing refuses; new studies declaring the effectiveness of natural immunity against Covid-19 reinfection; and an announced plan to fix whatever the heck is wrong with Don Lemon through “formal training.”
Let’s also close out the week with something lighter: a report that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hired an investment firm to evaluate a possible bid for the Washington Commanders, according to two sources talking to the Washington Post. (Usual caveats: Bezos owns the Post, and I’m now a contributor to the Post.)
Commanding Washington
If you don’t live in the D.C. area, you may not grasp the degree to which Washington Redskins-turned-Commanders owner Dan Snyder is detested by the team’s fanbase and most locals. It makes progressives’ attitudes toward Donald Trump look calm, rational, and mild. It makes conservatives’ attitude toward Joe Biden look like a minor disagreement. Most Commanders fans rage at Snyder and his meddling methods with the energy of a sun going supernova.
This intense animosity is driven by several factors. First, the fanbase and local media have fond memories of the previous owner, the late Jack Kent Cooke — probably too fond. The team won three Super Bowls while Cooke owned the team, and through much of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the team was a powerhouse, which will get a lot of people to overlook an owner’s cantankerous or imperious ways.
When Cooke passed away in 1997, you would have thought a beloved former president had died. The Post’s Tony Kornheiser wrote about Cooke — nicknamed “The Squire” — and his role in the Washington aristocracy:
The Squire knew all the important people in town. But more importantly, they knew him. You would see them with him in the owner’s box on Sunday afternoons at RFK. Cabinet members. U.S. Senators. Justices. Ambassadors — folks who might not have opened their doors to him years ago when he was poor, selling encyclopedias door-to-door across his native Canada. But they were there on Sundays, attracted by the light, lined up like toy soldiers in a rich man’s den.
Cooke was a larger-than-life, combative, shrewd, competitive, exuberant personality — a bit of a J. R. Ewing, which is an ironic comparison considering the Redskins-turned-Commanders’ rivalry with the Dallas Cowboys.
Dan Snyder does not have this personality. Over the years, he has grown more private, more secretive, and less interested in interacting with the media and avoiding any interaction with the fans he can’t control. He’s notoriously thin-skinned, once suing the Washington City Paper for publishing “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Dan Snyder, an encyclopedia of the owner’s many failings.”
It is not merely that the Redskins-turned-Commanders have lost a lot since Snyder owned the team, although that is no doubt a major factor in fan dissatisfaction. Since Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Commanders have had a record of 164 wins, 222 losses, and two ties — that averages 6.8 wins per year in a league with 16-game season from 1999 to 2020, and a 17-game season the past two years. The team has made the playoffs six times in 23 years, and have just two playoff wins in that span; the last playoff win was in 2005.
Snyder developed a reputation as a young super-billionaire who overspent for free agents, dictated draft choices, and meddled in coaching and personnel decisions, with those moves often backfiring. The team has had ten head coaches in 23 years, and quite a few stepped into the job with previous records of building winners, most notably Joe Gibbs (the second time he stepped into the role of head coach), Mike Shanahan, and current coach Ron Rivera (who had led the Carolina Panthers to a Super Bowl). There is a persistent pattern of successful coaches coming to Washington and failing to achieve similar results while working for Snyder, an indication that Snyder is simply incapable of allowing others to do their jobs the way they’re used to doing them.
There are other factors in the team’s woes, some beyond Snyder’s control, some not. He effectively inherited FedEx field in Prince George’s County, Md., which was state of the art when it was built but is now considered one of the bottom-tier venues in the league. The site is only nominally accessible by Metro — the nearest station is a mile away. For a long stretch, the stadium’s turf was notoriously bad and wore out by midseason; an opposing kicker once lamented, “It’s dirt and they spray paint it green.”
The old Redskins used to boast that 200,000 fans were on the wait list to order season tickets. In 2018, the team announced there is no waiting list anymore. Now, opposing fans “take over” the stadium on a regular basis, because so many Commanders fans are willing to resell their tickets rather than trudge out to the stadium to watch another loss.
The team’s days as the Redskins ended shortly before the Post published a series of articles, laying out an ugly portrait of ubiquitous and tolerated sexual harassment within the Redskins organization. More than a few observers contended the announcement of the intention to change the team’s name was an effort to distract from the embarrassing revelations in the Post series.
On top of all this, former employees describe Snyder as a man who gleefully breaks his word, thinking he’s outfoxed someone:
Snyder is long on bluster and short on everything else, including competence, and his duplicity has made him chronically distrusted. What should worry Snyder now is how his fellow owners are grinning back at him.
The vulgar phrase describes a petty schemer who says whatever people want to hear, smiles and shakes hands in agreement and then does the opposite, gaslighting and screwing over whomever they grin at. This is how Snyder always has handled his franchise, and he so boasted about it that he often misunderstood who was using whom.
With Snyder’s time as owner being such a cavalcade of disappointment, embarrassment, and scandals, it is fair to wonder how he’s stayed in power. Just last year, ESPN reported that Snyder boasted he’s accumulated blackmail material against other team owners:
Dan Snyder does this thing when he feels cornered, say those who know him well. He paces in a hotel suite, or on his superyacht, or at River View, his $48 million Virginia estate. Cradling a drink in one hand, he tells members of his inner circle about the dirt he has accumulated on fellow owners, coaches, executives, even his own employees — all the stuff he’s learned from other sources, including private investigative firms. He never says exactly what he knows, only that in his 23 years as owner of the Washington Commanders, he knows a lot. And that in the zero-sum world of billionaires, this is how you survive. Snyder recently told a close associate that he has gathered enough secrets to “blow up” several NFL owners, the league office and even commissioner Roger Goodell. . . .
Senior team executives and confidants have heard him say it since he was considered merely one of the worst owners in sports. 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. Snyder, now 57 years old, has told associates he will not lose his beloved franchise without a fight that would end with multiple casualties.
Add it all up, and you have a loathed owner who is widely believed to be the root of the team’s woes, and who is reportedly a horrible human being in many ways. Almost every sports fan in Washington wants to see Snyder sell the team, believing that just about any other owner would be better.
One of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, has a tie to Washington through his ownership of the Post, and a tie to the NFL through Amazon’s streaming rights to Thursday Night Football games. Last November, in a CNN interview, Bezos chuckled, “I have heard that buzz. . . . There’s not much I can say about that right now. . . . I grew up in Houston, Texas, and I played football growing up as a kid. And it is my favorite sport, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Last November, Snyder and his wife, Tanya, the team’s co-CEO, announced that they’d hired Bank of America to consider possible transactions involving the Commanders. It was not a promise to sell the team, but an indication that the Snyders were finally open to hearing offers. Unnamed sources “familiar with the process” told the Post that a full sale of the team is the most likely outcome.
Oddly enough, the Washington area has another big sports franchise for sale; the Lerner family is selling the Washington Nationals baseball team, with reportedly no serious bids yet. Just up Interstate 95 a bit, Baltimore Orioles chairman and CEO John Angelos says the Orioles are not for sale, but there have been persistent rumors of a potential full or partial sale, or even a future move to Nashville, Tenn.
Any sale of an NFL team must be approved by 24 of the 32 owners. If Bezos bought the team, he would be in the odd position of owning one of the league’s teams while also owning one of the league’s broadcast partners in Amazon, which might give some other owners second thoughts. It would also put the Washington Post — the city’s largest paper, by a wide margin — in the odd position of covering the Commanders — now the city’s second-most popular team after the Nationals* — while sharing the same owner. But the Post has figured out how to cover Amazon regularly and in-depth, under a similar arrangement.
There are other potential buyers of the Commanders — Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Wizards, Capitals, and Mystics; Josh Harris, the owner of the National Basketball Association’s Philadelphia 76ers and the National Hockey League’s New Jersey Devils; and Byron Allen, who put in a bid for the Denver Broncos last year, among others.
Why should non-Commanders or non-NFL fans care about whether the team gets sold, and if so, who buys it? Well, billionaires are already often influential and at least semi-famous, but if you want to be a really influential and popular figure in the nation’s capital, buying one of the local sports teams is an effective way to pursue that goal. (There’s a reason Donald Trump tried to buy an NFL team twice.) Whoever ends up owning the Commanders will instantly have a lot of powerful friends in town, angling for an invitation to the owner’s box on Sundays. Dan Snyder’s unsavory traits and growing unpopularity mitigated the power of his position as team owner, the social clout that Cooke commanded so effectively. And while the Commanders missed the playoffs again last year, their 8-8-1 record hinted they may be headed in the right direction, with five players making the Pro Bowl. In a year or two, the Commanders could be winning and popular again, and a new owner is likely to kick-start the process of building a new stadium in a better location.
The next owner of the Washington Commanders is going to be a very big mover and shaker in a city that runs on political influence, connections, relationships, and favor-trading.
*That survey was conducted shortly after the Nationals won the World Series in 2019; last year, the Nationals had the worst record in the major leagues, so it is possible the Commanders are the most popular team again.
ADDENDUM: You must read Jeff Blehar’s takedown of historian Michael Beschloss’s outlandish conspiracy theory.