NFL owners will gather in lower Manhattan on Tuesday for their annual fall meeting in New York, and while it’s not on the agenda, expect plenty of discussion about Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder.
There is a renewed focus on Snyder in light of Thursday’s ESPN report where sources told reporters that Snyder has claimed he has “dirt” on several NFL owners. Snyder will not attend the meetings, and Washington is expected to be represented by his wife, Tanya, who has been managing day-to-day operations since last July.
The schedule itself is pretty bland, but there is time for a closed session. In that session, which is scheduled for 5:40 pm ET on Tuesday, only one representative from each team will be in the room where they will discuss (what are believed to be) confidential matters. That’s where those conversations about Snyder can be had.
“I don’t know that other owners don’t even take their calls [anymore]” a team executive said of Snyder to CBS Sports.
Snyder cannot represent the team at league meetings until he meets with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, multiple league sources told CBS Sports. That’s disputed by Snyder’s lawyers, who said in a statement obtained by CBS Sports that he is “no longer under any NFL restrictions related to his involvement with the team.” The meeting with Goodell likely would not take place until after the conclusion of Mary Jo White’s two investigations into Snyder: one into alleged financial improprieties and another into alleged sexual harassment.
Fellow owners have yet to be moved to vote Snyder out. The findings of investigator Beth Wilkinson’s 2021 report on toxic workplace culture have not been released, and the league has no plans to release it. No NFL owner has ever been voted out, and it would take 24 votes to remove Snyder.
Removing an owner would be unprecedented in today’s sports world. Jerry Richardson put the Panthers up for sale in 2017 before a serious investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and racist language began. Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned from the NBA for life and the team was sold after his wife took him out of the trust. Suns owner Robert Sarver put his team up for sale last month after a one-year suspension and amid calls from sponsors and minority owners to sell. Kelly Loeffler, who formerly owned the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, sold the team after clashing with players over the Black Lives Matter movement.
Snyder, whose penchant for retaining private investigators was revealed during the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into workplace culture, is reported to have threatened kompromat against his fellow owners. Megan Imbert, a former Washington staffer on whom Snyder’s lawyers compiled a dossier, wrote on Twitter Thursday that the idea that Snyder wouldn’t do this to his colleagues was “ridiculous.”
Another former Washington staffer told CBS Sports they’ve long suspected Snyder “has dirt on people.”
“It never made sense to me that he could stay as an owner this long,” the former employee said. “I already knew he had a history of suing people and using everything against people. The only way it made sense was if he had dirt on people.”
Snyder’s attorneys, John Brownlee and Stuart Nash, partners at Holland & Knight, have said the allegations against Snyder are “categorically false.”
“Dan has never hired or authorized a private investigator to investigate the owner of any other NFL franchise, nor has he hired anyone to do so on his behalf,” the attorneys said in a statement obtained by CBS Sports. “It has no ‘files’ compiled on any owner.”
One proposal in the ESPN report is to withhold financial aid to Snyder to build a new stadium. The NFL typically approves debt limit waivers for owners when they build new stadiums, and there’s typically a $200 million loan the league makes for stadium funds.
“The league’s only real tool is to starve him of the funds to build a stadium,” a team president told ESPN.
But a senior club executive disagreed. “This is not a legitimate strategy,” the source told CBS Sports. After all, Snyder has shown he’s comfortable operating his team in the worst ballpark in the league for years.
Also in this closed session, the owners plan to discuss the relocation agreement of St. Louis for $790 million, as first reported by The Athletic. A league source tells CBS Sports that essentially “a reasonable conclusion” has been reached on how the settlement will be paid, which likely means Rams owner Stan Kroenke will pick up a good chunk of the tab and the rest will be distributed among the other 31 teams.
Another owner who will be missing from the meeting is Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. Ross, who was suspended in August for game integrity violations for his team’s handling of Tom Brady and Sean Payton, will have his suspension lifted on Oct. 17, a day before the meetings. But the terms of his suspension dictate that he still cannot “attend any meeting of the League prior” to the major owners’ meeting in the spring of 2023. Ross has also been banned from the premises of the Dolphins team from August to Monday.
League sources have indicated that Dolphins general manager Tom Garfinkel will represent the team at Tuesday’s meetings.
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