Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder has a face made for white-collar prison. His childish pout, gone jowly with age, would pair best with a bright-orange jumpsuit, number stitched over the spot where the heart should be. His soft, bloated villainy is reminiscent of a Ken Lay or a Bernie Madoff, the kind who bilk billions in plain sight, poisoning everything around them like a toxic, odorless gas.
But no one will ever accuse Snyder of failing to make a stink. Calling him scandal-plagued does a disservice to both scandals and plagues. He’s been very (very) credibly accused of systemic sexual harassment of his team’s cheerleaders, named in a sexual harassment lawsuit (since settled for a big payout) in which Snyder allegedly attempted to force himself onto an employee on his private plane, and also of underreporting ticket sales of his struggling franchise so he didn’t have to share the wealth with his fellow NFL owners.
Which one of those transgressions do you think really made the other billionaires mad?
Now the offensive Snyder is going on the offensive. According to a recent ESPN report, sources close to Snyder claim he has hired private investigators to dig up dirt on several other NFL owners and league commissioner Roger Goodell. If they try to oust him as a team owner — which would require a significant 24 votes among the 31 other teams — he will “blow up” the whole league, according to the story.
You know who isn’t scared of Dan Snyder?
The Green Bay Packers.
The Packers are owned by the city and citizens of Green Bay. That’s often touted as a fun piece of trivia about the big team from the smallest city in professional sports, but it is a true asset now more than ever. Nobody in Wisconsin is afraid of Dan Snyder because Dan Snyder has nothing on Wisconsin. Did his army of snoops catch the Hodag in Rhinelander snorting Adderall without a prescription? Does he have illicit photos of Bucky Badger in a secret relationship with Phlash the Phoenix from UW-Green Bay? Some devastating, Soylent Green-style revelation about what’s really in the cheese curds?
It’s not just that there’s no one to bully around the Fox Valley. The advantage of Green Bay’s unique ownership structure means fans don’t ever have to suffer under the petty tyranny of a sleaze like Snyder. Because the Packers are operated in a more traditional corporate structure, nobody in their organization, not even team president Mark Murphy, could get away with anything close to this level of behavior without being shown the door.
In that same ESPN report, Snyder likened the NFL’s ownership to the mafia. That’s not entirely untrue, although it elides the fact that he’s one of those made guys shielding himself behind the slanted rules of the sports-franchise omertà. The cabal of billionaires who own these teams, with their powerful trickle-up economic structures facilitated by taxpayer-funded stadium schemes, really are akin to the Illuminati, assuming the Illuminati involves Jerry Jones bogarting the complimentary shrimp cocktail tray at their conspiracy meet-ups. The owners have created elaborate workarounds to accountability to ensure that their place among the powerbrokers remains unassailable. But those same structures now prevent them from removing the Snyder-shaped tumor from the football body politic.
“I believe that there’s merit to remove him as owner of the [Commanders],” Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said at the league owners’ meeting on Tuesday. “I think it’s something that we have to review. We have to look at all the evidence and we have to be thorough going forward, but I think it’s something that has to be given serious consideration.”
The always-savvy Judy Battista points out that, depending on your perspective, Irsay “was either the first owner to have the nerve to go after Snyder publicly, or the one with the least self-control.”
This is the same Jim Irsay whose dark spiral as a boy-billionaire inheritor has led to multiple encounters with police. (The full, tragic extent of it can be found in this deep dive on ESPN.com.) His behavior over the years would disqualify him from a wide array of businesses, leaving his options mostly narrowed to NFL franchise ownership and probably politics if he was into it.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson sold the team in 2018 after multi-million-dollar settlements and bombshell reports of a deeply entrenched culture of sexual harassment. Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke evicted a Texas man from his home in 2016 as part of a massive land deal; when the man killed himself, he began his suicide note by citing Kroenke as the primary antagonist. Who the hell knows what is going on with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones?
Minnesota Vikings fans, in particular, like to poke fun at Packer fans who proudly display their certificate of ownership in the team. But wouldn’t those same fans be pretty thrilled to be divested of all involvement with Zygi Wilf, who, along with other members of his family, was ordered by a judge in 2013 to pay out $85 million in restitution for “organized crime-type fraud” that was said to be perpetrated with — their language here — “evil motive”?
There seems to be no shortage of evil motives among the NFL ownership hegemony. Maybe they will enact star-chamber justice on Snyder, the most detestable among their lot, and maybe he will do his damnedest to spread the slime and take some other owners down with him. The consequences of all these actions could reverberate around the league for months or years and have second-hand effects on the state of some of the teams themselves.
But that’s no concern for the Green Bay Packers. They are a big business to be sure, but they are beholden to the will of no one man or woman, nor subject to the whims of some of America’s most prominent criminals.
