OPINION:
To have a better understanding of the sport that consumes America — the one that takes up your Sundays, Monday nights, Thursday nights and other moments of the week; the one that fills part of your closet with jerseys you bought of your favorite players; the one that provides fantasies and creates fantasy teams for millions; the one that take hard-earned money out of your pocket with parlays, overs and unders — it is worth investing the time to understand the men who helped turn the National Football League into a national obsession.
You take the time to study statistics, watch videos, listen to podcasts and call sports talk radio shows, all to give yourself a better understanding of this obsession.
Here’s one way to do that — check out the new book, “Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut” by New York Times reporter Ken Belson (Grand Central Publishing). The book illustrates how this powerful trio exerted its power and influence to lead the way to a business that generates $23 billion a year, with no end in sight to its growth.
Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, may be a self-destructive football executive, but he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame because of his business acumen, which brought television into a new era by pushing the league to make a historic deal with the then-fledgling Fox network as well as his aggressive marketing deals that have turned the Cowboys into the most valuable sports franchise in the world.
“When [Jones] is committed to a path or a road or direction that he feels is the correct one, Jerry is a dog with a bone,” says Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons. “He will not let it loose until either he eats it or kills him. People respect that with him.”
Kraft has won six Super Bowl championships as owner of the New England Patriots. But, unlike Jones, he has a style of bridge-building that has made him invaluable in league business, particularly in labor negotiations. Mr. Belson describes Kraft as “a social chameleon and political operator, whose influence on league business was so strong that he was known as the ’shadow commissioner.’”
Goodell, who has been NFL commissioner since 2006, has survived and thrived in part because of his diligence to serve his bosses.
“To keep abreast of what the owners were thinking, Goodell called each one, at least once a month, keeping track of the calls on a card he kept in his desk,” Mr. Belson writes. “When an owner wanted help, say, getting Broadway theater tickets, Goodell would take care of the request himself. In this way, he made himself indispensable.”
Here is a name that comes up a number of times in Mr. Belson’s book, but not because of his power or influence during his time in the league. No, former Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder’s name appears throughout the book in stories that are new or have been told before, with more details now because he was the opposite of the powerful trio who ran the league. He was an embarrassment among his peers.
“On paper, Snyder should’ve been the kind of owner the NFL needed,” Mr. Belson writes. “He was a young, successful businessman, who loved his hometown team, and was willing to spend oodles of money on the franchise. Rarely have the owners been so wrong.”
There are stories about his interactions with owners and league officials. “Raiders president Amy Trask remembered being told by one of Snyder’s assistants to avoid making eye contact with him,” Mr. Belson writes. “She took that as an invitation to look Snyder in the eye every chance she got.
“Despite being in his 30s, Snyder insisted on being called “Mr. Snyder,” When Steve Bisciotti was accepted as majority owner of the [Baltimore] Ravens in 2004, word spread through the meeting about a brief interaction he had with Snyder, who is five years younger. ’Hi Dan,’ Bisciotti said. ’It’s Mr. Snyder,’ Snyder shot back. ’F—- you, Dan,” Bisciotti said before walking away.”
Mr. Belson writes that Snyder even managed to anger Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, one of the league’s friendliest owners. “In 2003, [NFL lawyer Frank] Hawkins gave a presentation to the owners on team debt levels that included a chart with a vertical bar for each team amount. The chart looked like a bell curve with Snyder’s team, which had the most debt, represented by the highest bar, which happened to be in the middle of the chart.
“Rooney was fond of doodling during meetings,” Mr. Belson writes. “Afterward, he went to Hawkins and gave him the sketch he had drawn. Then he whispered, ’Thanks for giving Snyder the middle finger.’”
This is no longer the situation for the Washington franchise in the NFL. Respected owner Josh Harris, who, with other investors, purchased the team from Snyder for $6 billion, now sits at the table.
But in addition to reading about how this league has become a juggernaut and the three figures who helped build it up, the book also reveals that, however bad we thought things were under Snyder’s ownership, they were actually much worse.
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