The past year has been quite a ride for Dan Snyder and the Washington Football Team.
After being forced to change the team name after decades of pressure, Snyder found himself with mounting lawsuits that alleged sexual harassment in the front office, and growing vitriol with shareholders and minority owners, with seemingly everyone around him looking to either get out or pushing for him to sell the team. Meanwhile, the on-field product was improving, with new head coach Ron Rivera finding a way to take a mediocre product and make the franchise’s first playoff appearance since 2015.
So what does this mean now? Well, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, Snyder has no plans of going anywhere.
“He’s got no plans and no intent to sell that franchise. Ever,” Schefter said Friday, via NBC Sports Washington.
However loud the calls from fans get for Snyder to sell the team, we’ve never gotten any real indication that he would want out. A report arose last week that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was interested in buying an NFL franchise, with the WFT high on his wishlist, but none of that is possible unless Snyder was willing to take a step to the side.
That appears like it won’t be happening anytime soon, and Snyder is likely to put up a fight, as he has been doing for much of the past year in the numerous lawsuits that he’s been a part of. It seems that the only way he’d sell the team is if the NFL forced a sale, based on the findings of their investigation into the team’s actions regarding the sexual harassment allegations.
“I think in the NFL rarely are there any absolutes, rarely is everything black and white,” Schefter said. “But I can tell you that today, even though there are all these limited partners putting pressure on him and even though there are a lot of people that want him to sell and even though there are a host of issues, unless the NFL steps in and forces him to sell that franchise, which could happen, he’s not going to voluntarily step up and sell that team. I feel very comfortable in saying that.”
We don’t yet know if the findings of that investigation are going to be made public, but earlier this week, the 20 former Washington employees wrote a letter to the NFL demanding that transparency is used and that the public be informed of the findings. Whether Roger Goodell listens is another story.
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