With Dan Snyder is gone, the real work begins to overhaul the Commanders

In early June, during wide-ranging interviews with Yahoo Sports about sovereign wealth funds and the future of NFL ownership, a few long-tenured and highly-perched team executives couldn’t resist one last jab at Daniel Marc Snyder. The long-embattled Washington Commanders team owner was already on his way out of the league — requiring just a few last-minute agreements with his fellow owners before closing a history-making $6.05 billion sale of his team. But even as he headed toward the door, Snyder’s 24-year tenure in the league’s ultra-exclusive ownership club remained a scab that critics yearned to poke at.

So much so, when the Saudi Arabian-backed LIV Golf tour essentially strong-armed a controversial partnership with the PGA in June (effectively buying the Saudis partial control of the PGA), the reaction of some C-suite NFL executives was to process the news through Snyder’s pending departure. As it stands, the league doesn’t allow foreign investment in the purchase of franchises — creating a wall that makes it impossible for sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to buy its way into the NFL. But the same executives who watched the league’s stance on gambling do a 180-degree turn couldn’t resist posing some what-ifs about whether attitudes might have changed at the intersection of a monumental sale price and simultaneous motivation to push Snyder out.

It’s a crossroads that was focused through questions that will now never be answered: What if the Saudis had offered $9 billion for the Commanders? What would Snyder have done if owners had refused to entertain a massive overseas bid? Would the fan base really have cared if the team was owned by a foreign entity? In the end, was the most important criteria simply finding someone that was not Dan Snyder?

It was a fan attitude not lost on Snyder’s NFL critics. As one executive swiped, “If you’re in Washington, I’m sure fans would rather have Qatar own the Commanders than Daniel Snyder. Let’s just call it what it is.”

It was a half-serious reach for humor, but also a reflection of how Snyder was viewed in league circles at the end. A large step forward for the Josh Harris-led ownership group was already accomplished the moment the sale was approved Thursday: The Harris group isn’t Dan Snyder, and that’s a great start to the next regime.

Of course, that honeymoon will only last so long. At some point, it’s going to have to showcase the kind of results that were once expected of Snyder when he took over the Washington franchise in 1999. To the youngest generation of NFL fans, Washington’s reputation is that of a bottom-third franchise with an aggrieved fan base and very little star power or success. What these same young fans aren’t familiar with is that when Snyder first took charge, Washington was considered one of cornerstones of the league — worthy of being mentioned alongside the storied histories of teams like the Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Miami Dolphins, Pittsburgh Steelers, Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants.

This is what the Harris group is now expected to reclaim. With that in mind, here are four priorities that top the list in the coming months and years…

1. Dig into every closet and under every rock to find remaining unknowns inside the franchise.

Given the time, effort and discovery process that went into Mary Jo White’s investigation into the Washington franchise and Snyder, the final 22-page report (we’re not counting the cover sheet) released to the public seemed remarkably brief and singularly focused. But the report itself also seemed to shed some light onto why that was. Both Snyder and individuals inside and outside of the organization failed to cooperate in key aspects of the investigation regarding both financial impropriety and issues of workplace culture. The tenor of that claim is unambiguous. Something along the lines of we found evidence of wrongdoing, but we may not have found all the evidence or all the wrongdoing.

As the report stated loudly:

That is a remarkable sentence, particularly given that it involved the Washington franchise essentially defrauding business partners (fellow NFL owners) out of millions in revenues that should have been shared. The report also went on to state that other aspects of shared revenue that appeared to be withheld couldn’t be fully discovered by the investigation.

For the Harris group, that should underline a clear priority. Specifically, getting under the hood of everything that was happening both financially and culturally inside the franchise and setting a plan in motion to repair it. If Snyder being pushed out of NFL ownership in the wake of this investigation is a little like Richard Nixon resigning the presidency after the Watergate scandal, then the Harris group is the next presidential regime coming in and immediately identifying and shutting down the remaining shadow operations hiding in previously undiscoverable corners.

2. Reboot the workplace and business culture in the building

Snyder is gone. Now the Harris group has to ask a natural question: Did all the dysfunction in culture go with him? Was one man at the top ultimately responsible for everything that went wrong in the building? Even in the event of a bad owner departing a team, NFL history suggests the answers to both of those questions is no, particularly when the previous regime spans decades of hiring and culture shaping.

The simple reality for the Commanders is there are very likely some bad eggs still tucked away inside the layers of rank and file management. Snyder wasn’t operating every lever in the team unilaterally. There were people inside the club who were likely enabling some of what was uncovered in the Mary Jo White investigation. Or some that remained silent about it even after it became clear that Snyder was on his way out and some of the dirt was going to get pushed into the sunlight.

One of the prime examples of this is the individuals who stood along Snyder and played a part in failing to cooperate with portions of the investigation. While some or all of those individuals may have been following orders from Snyder, it’s still worth questioning whether you would want those individuals sticking around under new management. In a situation like this, turnover is always necessary. And given how unprecedented this end was for Snyder, the firings may have to run deep to secure real and lasting change inside the franchise.

3. Find a location and get the stadium project on the rails as quickly as possible

A new stadium for the Commanders has effectively been flatlined since the summer of 2022. With Snyder embroiled in so many investigations and his brand so politically toxic, the franchise had zero hope to realistically move forward with a new stadium. Not only were there no realistic localities that were going to propose a partnership with Snyder, it’s likely there wasn’t a taxpaying base that would support new stadium infrastructure with him still at the helm.

Not only will that all change now, there’s an argument that the Harris group will have a significant boost of momentum behind their stadium search. From Virginia to Maryland to Washington, D.C., there will be political support to reeling in the next stadium along with the new regime. There should also be some wind put into the sails of taxpayer support, with the Harris group’s fresh start featuring a full-throttle embrace from fans.

In short, the Harris group is riding a wave of positivity that will have a honeymoon period. The faster it moves to decisively take advantage of it on the stadium front, the less it will have to worry if football success remains elusive in the next few years. And lest anyone forget, the lease at FedEx Field ends after the 2026 season, giving new ownership less than 3 1/2 years to have a new home built. The clock is ticking.

4. Delegate football decisions to the right people, and then get out of the way

Whether Snyder was a day-to-day fly in the ointment for Washington’s football decision makers — or someone who periodically dropped in and made major draft or free agent decisions recklessly and unilaterally — it’s clear that his involvement in the football side of things was not seen as a net-positive. In fairness to Snyder, he wouldn’t be alone in that respect. Very few owners are capable of weighing in meaningfully when it comes to building a roster, making a locker room fit together, hiring the right position coaches or managing a wide array of personalities and goals.

New primary owner Josh Harris is going to have to embrace what he doesn’t know — despite already being part of ownership groups for the Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils and formerly the Pittsburgh Steelers. The top spot in an NFL franchise is remarkably different than those other leagues, largely because the organizations themselves are so vast and driven by a combination of data, experience and money. Franchises don’t get any bigger than on the NFL stage, making them vulnerable to any number of internal failures or breakdowns that ultimately scuttle a Super Bowl window.

At least initially, the Harris group is going to have to audit the football side of the ledger and determine which front office executives, coaches, players and ancillary support staff fit moving forward. Like other parts of the building, it means there is bound to be some high-level turnover inside the football operation. But there is also an element of patience and space at play. Once the group determines how to go about shaping the upper reaches of the football management, it has to have the confidence to delegate authority to a chosen few and then the patience to let those people take the football controls.

Including interims, Snyder had a mind-boggling 10 head coaches in 24 years. In that same span, he fielded nine different general managers or de-facto general managers. And the combination of those two extremely important jobs managed to produce two All-Pro players in 24 years. Two. It’s fair to wonder whether the lack of patience when it came to upper management had something to do with the complete lack of elite talent over more than two decades.

Picking the right people and then having the patience to let those people find a way to work in harmony goes a long way in the NFL. The Harris group should learn from its predecessor and go against the last 24 years of repetitive upheaval.

In the larger picture, these four laundry list items will be a gargantuan task. Getting them all resolved will take several years of work and successful decision making. Possibly more. Almost certainly, there will be failure during the process. But it’s what the Harris group must do differently in the face of ego and failure that will set this regime apart from Snyder.