Josh Harris Has the Easiest Job in the World: Not Being Dan Snyder
Josh Harris has the easiest job in the history of sports, and possibly the history of American business: to not be Daniel Snyder. The job description is not particularly daunting: Do not create the most toxic culture in pro sports. Do not create three separate ticketing scandals. Do not push anyone with talent away because of ego. Do not file lawsuits against your own fans. Do not appear to threaten other owners. Hell, as long as Harris just doesn’t do all of those things in one decade, he’ll have a better tenure as owner of the Washington Commanders, which he officially became after a vote from NFL owners on Thursday.
The reason younger NFL fans—a group that theoretically includes me—cannot believe Washington used to be a crown jewel franchise is that Snyder thoroughly laid waste to the team, its roster, its stadium, and its fan base. You know how your parents sometimes point at some run-down mall and tell you it was the place when they were growing up? That is how I feel when the D.C. wing of my family tells me about impossibly loud, high-stakes night games at RFK Stadium in the 1990s. I started watching Super Bowls after Joe Gibbs was done winning them, so I’ve never quite believed my family’s stories. Yeah, sure, Washington football was at the pinnacle of the sport at one point in my lifetime. Got it. I’m gonna go get another drink.
But Thursday, Harris took control of the Commanders (a name, incidentally, that he should look at changing once he fixes some other, more pressing problems). The vote, which occurred during a special owners meeting in Minneapolis, was unanimous, and it came after reports surfaced earlier in the week that all the legal hurdles had been resolved in Harris’s $6 billion acquisition. This is the first day of the rest of Washington fans’ lives.
A bad owner is the worst fate a fan base can suffer. A bad quarterback can be replaced; a bad coach or GM can be fired. But a bad owner may never sell. And a bad owner loves hiring bad coaches and GMs who in turn pick bad quarterbacks. I’ll repeat my theory that there are three types of NFL owners: those who know how to win and use their resources wisely (the Krafts and the Luries spring to mind), those for whom winning is incidental and they are fine either way (a larger group than you might think), and those who want to win and are willing to spend to do so but simply don’t know how (I’ve mentioned in the past that I think David Tepper is in this group, among others). Snyder was in the second group—he did not prioritize winning at all—but really, he was in his own unique subgenre. For a while he gave the illusion of wanting to win by spending money on pricey veterans or hiring Mike Shanahan—both of which were undone quicker than you’d reasonably think by various acts of Snyder self-sabotage. But then he gave up on appearances. The franchise was left with a man who seemed to care solely about maintaining power, and it showed. No one has done more damage to an NFL team in a single tenure. Snyder made Matt Millen and Jack Easterby look like Tom Landry.
Unlike the rest of that second group of owners, Snyder’s endgame didn’t appear to be turning his team into a revenue-generating behemoth; rather, it seemed to be about ego satisfaction and making the team a piggy bank for his own enrichment (charging the team you own to display its logo on your personal jet is, frankly, inspired). He was running a scam on the city of Washington, D.C., the coaches and players who worked for him, his fellow owners, and just about everyone in the NFL. Multiple women who worked for the team over the course of two decades said Snyder and other executives sexually harassed them, and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that Snyder suppressed evidence against him and stalled investigations into his conduct. That he got $6 billion to leave and that most people simply see it as a win that he’s gone is a testament to how toxic he was. People just want bad people to leave, however much it costs.
Harris can spend two or three years undoing Snyder’s tenure, and he’ll be cheered wildly. Sure, the team will eventually need a new stadium, but at present the bar is to not almost maim Jalen Hurts with shoddy construction. And yes, the team will eventually need to become a crown jewel franchise again, but the bar is currently to not reportedly collect dirt on other owners as an insurance policy. The business needs an overhaul, but right now you just have to not torch your business relationships in two states and a national capital. Seems doable.
My first assignment as an NFL reporter a decade ago was talking to owners and executives of the winningest teams to see what they had in common. I spent hours with people in organizations like the Patriots, Ravens, Packers, Eagles, Steelers, and Giants and realized they had a lot in common: Owners were present but not meddling. They asked questions to “spur the thinking,” as Patriots executive Jonathan Kraft put it in the linked piece above, and then let their people make the decisions. Most of these franchises promoted from within as much as they could. Most fired employees only when they had to, not as a reflex.
The difference between walking down the facility halls of a team that has it figured out and one that doesn’t is obvious within about 20 minutes. I spent the first day reporting that piece with the Patriots, and it was explained to me that every decision at every level of the organization is planned years in advance, with a handful of contingencies worked into the plan. These decisions could involve the salary cap, general roster building, positional value, the draft, staff hires, or nearly anything else. Everything was thought out and made sense. The next day, for a separate story, I drove to the Bills camp and met with their then-GM and then-coach, Buddy Nix and Chan Gailey, respectively. Respectfully, I noticed a difference or two between the franchises. I did not get the feeling that Buffalo was a roster-building behemoth in that era. Call it an educated guess. Gailey was fired later that year and Nix the next, but nothing really changed until much later in the decade.
There’s been a lot of talk about whether Harris, also the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, will bring “the Process” to the NFL. I’m a fan of a two-year-or-so reset to accumulate as much draft capital as possible and control one or two drafts (look at the possibilities that, say, the Cardinals or Bears have over the next few years) while clearing cap space. I’m skeptical that a full-blown “Process” can build a legitimate NFL contender—NFL players’ primes are too short, and the advantages of cheap rookie-wage-scale contracts go away after three years—but a mini Process could work. And Harris will be afforded a longer leash than almost any owner in history because he is not Snyder. He can engage in some trial and error and have some false starts, and even if Washington fans roll their eyes, they will still look at their buddies and say, “At least he’s not the last guy.” Harris should feel freer to build a great team his way because of this. He is not inheriting a legacy of victory. He is inheriting an abandoned building, and he needs to install, say, a front door.
Again, all of Harris’s extremely normal maneuvers will likely be greeted as huge successes. No D.C.-area politicians wanted to work with Snyder, so no progress was made politically on a new stadium. (Think about this: Cities refused to negotiate for an NFL team to come because of Snyder.) Attendance nose-dived. Anheuser-Busch cut ties with the team. The name, uniforms, and branding look like they’re from a fake franchise in an unlicensed mobile video game and could use sprucing up or a total overhaul. And accomplishing even some of this will make Harris look like a conquering hero.
A few years ago I was at an NFL owners meeting in D.C. My aunt, who, along with my uncle, was a longtime season-ticket holder but gave up during the Snyder years, joined me for breakfast. I noticed over her shoulder that Snyder was at a table behind us. “Hey, look, it’s your owner,” I said. She stared straight ahead: “I don’t want to look at him.” I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. She was so contemptuous that she would not even steal a glance at him at a breakfast spot in a D.C. hotel. This is the bar Harris is trying to clear. This should be a celebratory day in D.C. sports history and for Josh Harris: He paid $6 billion for the easiest job in the world. It was worth it.
Source: The Ringer
