When an almost universally disliked owner is forced to sell a sports franchise, most of us assume the disappointment they must feel is assuaged by the billions of dollars that will rattle into their bank accounts.
Indeed, Dan Snyder can now buy his own fledgling football league and run it into the ground if he so chooses. He can buy his own island on which he can sign aging stars like the Saudi professional soccer league and force them to play for his own amusement. He can buy every newspaper that ever wrote a bad word about him and have them burned in a monstrous firepit on one of his palatial estates. Presumably, he could buy this very website and have this column erased from cyberspace (so be sure to take a screenshot!).
But for Commanders fans looking for their pound of flesh Thursday, on a day when Snyder was reported by Sportico and ESPN to be finalizing a sale of the franchise to a group led by 76ers co-owner Josh Harris and Magic Johnson, among others, they can take solace in the fact that Snyder cannot buy enough disinformation to mask the fact he led a proud franchise into the ground, and someone else will be there to save it.
He cannot buy a buffer from your celebratory mindset. He cannot buy a way to stop you from shotgunning 15 beers in your John Riggins jersey and hollering on Instagram about how this is one of the greatest days in the franchise’s history. He cannot buy a spot in the Hall of Fame, which is reserved for the kind of owners who care enough about their brand, their team and their city not to let the place rust like an old wheelbarrow.
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As we saw in Queens, when Steve Cohen bought the disheveled Mets and began running the team like his own personal fantasyland, the fan response was a dagger enough. Fans embraced a renewed love of something that had become unrecognizable. They showed up in droves, singing as their well-paid closer ran to the mound or their top-of-the-market shortstop turned a double play. Billions of dollars cannot shield someone from the obvious.
And so, enjoy this day, Commanders fans. Enjoy the weight lifted off your shoulders. Enjoy a fresh start. Enjoy saying goodbye. If you are still there, if you are still planning to roll into that run-down old stadium each Sunday to watch football’s equivalent of a straight-to-DVD movie, you earned this.
I think there is something in all of us that is legacy minded, and certainly Snyder deserves credit for his business acumen before the purchase of the football team in Washington. He claims to have made seven figures while still working out of his parents’ house. He doesn’t have a college degree. He bought a club and a stadium for $800 million and will reportedly sell it for just over $6 billion. In most of the circles he travels in, that will amount to a lifetime of knowing winks and nods at the next vintage wine auction.
However, he will now miss the chance to rectify his mistakes, to become the owner the NFL was slowly forcing him to become through one lawsuit and congressional investigation after the next. Only begrudgingly did he ever care. Only in the grip of a complete and total political headlock did he finally start to clean up the toxic spill. Only on the brink of complete and total failure did he realize that something had to change. Hatred from employees. Hatred from season-ticket holders. Hatred from players. Allegedly, hatred from fellow owners. That will be cemented in his Wikipedia biography under “Professional Sports Ownership” forever.
We have to grasp onto those little victories because, as fans of sports teams, we have to realize how under the thumb and powerless we really are. There are meetings taking place in every facility, in every market, about better ways to trick us, to gouge us, to drive us to the absolute point of financial lunacy supporting a team and then, once we’re distracted again, snap us with one more surcharge. That doesn’t even begin to describe the wanton mismanagement that takes place impacting the actual product on the field. The owners who won’t pay anyone. The owners who won’t fix the seats under our butts. The owners who show up at the last minute before draft time and force our teams to draft a unicycling clown as a quarterback instead of the piece that would actually fix the gaping holes in the roster. How many of these tropes are Commanders fans intimately familiar with?
Hopefully, for the sake of Commanders fans, those days are over (hopefully they won’t even have to be called the Commanders any longer). They always say to dance like no one is watching. But in this case, dance like Snyder is. It’s your only recourse, and it may be more powerful than you think.
