Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder, long the overseer of one of the professional sports most dysfunctional franchises, wants you to believe the NFL’s owners meetings are a hateful place. The rest of the league’s owners want you to know this is true. They all hate Dan Snyder.
That’s one of many reported revelations in the latest expose into Snyder’s disastrous run behind a once-successful NFL franchise. Thursday’s deep dive, an 8,100-word examination from ESPN reporters Seth Wickersham, Don Van Natta Jr. and Tisha Thompson, shines a brighter light on a man who has never earned a headline for doing something right.
Football fans are keenly aware of Snyder’s disastrous results on the field. Since taking ownership in 1999 Washington’s football team is 157-216-1, worse than all but five other teams in the league. His two playoff wins in that span are one less than the number of Super Bowls the team won between 1982 and 1991.
That’s merely the B-story to the awful management and hostility fomented inside his own offices. The Commanders have been excoriated for fostering a culture of sexual harassment and abuse, stolen money from season ticket holders and scammed the league’s revenue-sharing program.
ESPN’s report adds another layer to the latent awfulness that’s permeated Washington’s facilities and shows how the rot comes from the top down when it comes to the Commanders. As the league considers removing him as team owner — likely at a hefty cost — Snyder is reportedly considering waging war against the league and the owners sick of weathering the storms he brings upon himself and the NFL.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Wickersham, Van Natta and Thompson’s report.
Snyder may have been protected by his fellow owners in the past, but he's running out of allies
“The NFL is a mafia,” he recently told an associate. “All the owners hate each other.”
“That’s not true,” one veteran owner says. “All the owners hate Dan.”
This exchange is three paragraphs into the story. It is glorious and tells us exactly where this is heading. This is, yet again, another damning look into a man who most recently made headlines by avoiding a subpoena to testify in front of U.S. Congress by hiding out on his mega-yacht.
Snyder maintains he's dug up skeletons from other owners pasts, including Jerry Jones
In recent months, Snyder has told close confidants that his private investigators dug up incriminating information about Goodell, other unnamed league office executives and an unknown number of owners. League and ownership sources say there’s lots of gossip and speculation about what investigators could have unearthed, but some wonder whether Snyder actually has anything at all and is bluffing as a scare tactic.
Snyder’s stance against a league that increasingly wants to remove him has been one of mutually assured destruction. In his own alleged words, he has enough material to “blow up” other owners — by ESPN’s count, at least six — and believes this gives him cover should the NFL begin the process of forcing him to sell the Commanders.
“They can’t f— with me,” he has said privately.
This list includes Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who once served as a mentor to Snyder. The Washington owner reportedly keeps “a file” on his high profile division rival. Snyder, through attorneys, denies this.
Snyder also reportedly has been asking Jones for his support through this latest ordeal. Jones has been reticent to give it, suggesting an ousting is more possible now than ever before in Washington D.C.
Snyder may also have dirt on NFL commissioner Roger Goodell
“He thinks he’s got stuff on Roger.” Another former Commanders executive routinely called Snyder “the most powerful owner in the NFL” because of what he knows, a source says.
Goodell is frustrating other NFL owners by avoiding the situation
Wickersham, Van Natta and Thompson lay out all the ways the NFL Commissioner’s office has failed to properly discipline the Commanders for repeated violations of league rules and decades of fostering a culture of abuse within team headquarters. These include but are not limited to:
- avoiding mentioning Snyder at closed-door meetings that could spur a vote on forcing him to sell his franchise.
- failing to properly address the workplace review filed by independent counsel Beth Wilkinson that detailed how deep the abuse and dysfunction ran in Washington and continuing to allow Snyder to quietly operate the team despite a public announcement he’d stepped away.
- allowing the team to avoid harsh penalties for multiple violations of the Rooney Rule that ensures minority coaching candidates are given interviews for vacant positions.
In one owner’s words, it’s clear Goodell “doesn’t want to touch this.” But Goodell also wants Snyder and his shield-staining ownership out. One source said that if he knew he had the votes, he’d take action and that he wants Snyder “gone tomorrow.”
Many owners disliked Snyder when he bought the team in 1999. His 2003 Super Bowl bid did little to fix that
Snyder was 34 years old when he bought the team and not exactly reverent toward the league’s old guard owners when he joined the inner circle. However, the tipping point that began to turn his colleagues against him may have come in 2003. That year, while attempting to sway owners toward hosting Super Bowl XLII at FedEx Field (a terrible idea in general) his pitch was as much about trashing his competition — in this case, the Bidwill family behind the Arizona Cardinals, who’ve owned the club since the 1930s — as it was propping up his own inferior venue.
In his pitch for a Washington Super Bowl, Snyder spent as much time extolling the virtues of FedEx Field as he did “tearing down Arizona and the Bidwills personally,” an owner recalls. After the Bidwills and Arizona won a secret ballot, Snyder “began yelling at everybody,” angrily telling owners they had made “a big mistake,” an owner says. “Other owners were floored. … He got off on the wrong foot. And not much has changed since then.”
Snyder meddled and interfered with a workplace investigation so much he got reprimanded by Congress
We already knew this, but it bears repeating. Snyder’s team hired independent attorney Beth Wilkinson to investigate his workplace’s culture. Then he hired private investigators to intimidate and badger witnesses and effectively ruin the report from the inside-out. This wasn’t enough, as a deal Snyder struck with the NFL meant he also controlled what information from the report would go public and what would be buried.
The congressional inquiry would later uncover internal documents showing how the league and Snyder’s legal team had secretly struck a deal, known as a “common interest agreement,” that meant both had to sign off before any information was released. This effectively gave Snyder veto power over the release of negative information, as well as “direct access” to influence the Wilkinson investigation, a June 2022 report from the committee said. “This agreement … afforded Mr. Snyder a back-channel to block the release of information and make confidential presentations designed to steer the course of the investigation,” the report said. “The Commanders informed the Committee that Mr. Snyder continued to receive periodic updates throughout the course of the Wilkinson Investigation.”
The full text of the Wilkinson Investigation has not been released. Goodell, allegedly, has not read it but was only given Wilkinson’s notes on the report.
Snyder offered a second seven-figure settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual harassment in hopes of keeping her from speaking on the record
In 2009, Snyder settled a complaint from a former employee alleging sexual harassment for $1.6 million. When Wilkinson’s investigation began in 2020, his legal team allegedly offered another pricy sum in hopes of buying her silence. His offer was rejected, though his lawyers deny it ever happened.
Last year, however, Snyder’s lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to keep the woman from discussing the alleged incident with anyone, including Wilkinson, by offering to pay her a second undisclosed sum, Brendan Sullivan Jr., the woman’s lawyer, told ESPN. The offer from Snyder’s lawyers was “flatly rejected,” Sullivan said. Snyder had offered the woman “a substantial sum” that was “in the seven figures,” two sources with firsthand knowledge of the offer said. Lawyers for Snyder denied Sullivan’s allegation of a second offer.
NFL owners may not want testimony about Snyder's toxic behavior to go public for fear it would lead to investigations of their own franchises
This is Snyder’s reported end game; scare other owners in hopes their shops are all as sloppy as his own.
Ownership sources said some in their ranks are worried that similar inquiries could be made about their own front offices — and that over the course of two decades, Snyder had possibly heard about many of them. “There are 31 guys who are petrified” of Snyder, says a sports executive and longtime friend of Goodell. “If you don’t care about the fraternity, it’s scary.”
A fair number of league executives and owners believe Synder's private investigators were behind Jon Gruden's leaked emails
Gruden resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders last fall after emails where he used insensitive and offensive language in communication with former Washington general manager Bruce Allen were leaked. While no one has claimed responsibility for making those emails public, several figures across the league believe Snyder played a part.
Half a dozen owners and league executives say they believe that the leaks occurred on Snyder’s order or with his blessing. Last fall, some of Reed Smith [a law firm hired by Snyder] lawyers told colleagues about how they sorted Allen’s emails into categories, including one for possible public relations use, the colleagues said.
Somehow, incredibly, the way to fix all this is simply to build a new stadium
Snyder had been on track to replace FedEx Field, but his plans to use local funding have since dried up in the wake of the Wilkinson Report and his Congressional investigation. Figuring that out and breaking ground on a new venue may be all it takes for all this to go away.
When asked whether his fellow owners would forgive Snyder for the team’s financial woes and the toxic culture scandal if Snyder could build a new stadium, the owner quickly replied, “Yes.”
Asked if Snyder is aware of that, the owner said, “Yes.”
That is stunning. And depressing. The difference between keeping Snyder’s toxic leadership and his departure may be hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to fund a new stadium.
Fortunately, Virginia taxpayers want no part of it. Plans to fund a new stadium died in the state legislature, in part, due to public backlash that found nearly 85 percent of residents opposed funding Snyder’s playground.
That stadium issue could be the loophole the rest of the NFL owners use to force Snyder out
If Snyder can’t find public funds for a new stadium he’s unlikely to be able to finance it himself. This would place the onus of his ownership on financial status rather than the toxic culture he’s overseen for decades and thus be more palatable for other executives hoping to keep investigative lights from being shined on their franchises.
A few owners and executives have discussed a rarely enacted option: refusing to let Snyder bypass league rules on how much debt an owner can hold, and possibly withholding the $200 million loan normally available to teams for new stadiums. They say their hope would be to force Snyder into either selling the team or, more likely, transferring ownership permanently to [his wife] Tanya.
New team president Jason Wright is respected across the league but tainted by Snyder's stink
The Commanders hired Wright in 2020 to build an inclusive, winning culture in Washington. While he’s regarded as a well-qualified and capable hire, few people buy that he has authority over team operations.
Wright was supposed to be in charge of the stadium initiative. But after Snyder was punished by Goodell, he announced he would lead all stadium efforts, confusing local lawmakers who didn’t know whom they should be talking to. Before he left the team last month for an executive position in private equity, Greg Resh, the Commanders’ former COO and a vital member of Snyder’s inner circle, told executives at league meetings that he was in charge and dismissed Wright as a figurehead. In the team’s statement, Resh denied making “any such comments.”
Dan Snyder overpaid in the Carson Wentz deal in hopes that a marquee quarterback would make all his problems disappear
Listen, this report is 8,000 words of depressing facts about the league’s worst people. But finally, towards the end, we get a little levity and a reminder that there’s no category in which Dan Snyder is good at this.
Snyder denies all this through attorneys and team spokespersons
A Commanders spokesperson and outside lawyers denied that Snyder has hired or authorized private investigators to track another team’s owner and league office executives, including Goodell. “This is categorically false,” said John Brownlee and Stuart Nash, partners at Holland & Knight. “He has no ‘dossiers’ compiled on any owners.”
A team spokesperson called it “simply ridiculous and utterly false” that Snyder ever said that he could blow up the league, or that the league “can’t f—” with him, or that “the NFL is a mafia” or “all owners hate each other.”
