Culture of Snyder’s football team won’t change unless he does
NFL ISSUES $10 MILLION FINE AFTER PROBE INTO WORK ENVIRONMENT
It has been a week since the NFL issued its flaccid, Cliffsnotes-style report on the inner workings of Daniel Snyder’s football team, and already the fallout has all but evaporated. Tanya Snyder will run the team for a time. Her hubby, whose franchise is worth $3.5 billion, will be out a $10 million fine, which he may have found between the couch cushions in Ashburn, Va. Oh, and he will be sent to face the corner for a timeout. No word on whether a dunce cap has been issued.
It’s fair to be somewhere between annoyed and outraged that the NFL’S investigation into the “toxic” environment — its word, not mine — Snyder created and oversaw offered no specifics about who did what to whom and when. It’s also understandable to want to shove all that noise to the side and focus on what’s positive about this football team with training camp ahead later this month: Ron Rivera’s leadership as the head coach, Jason Wright’s complete overhaul of the business operation as team president, the change of the team name and on and on. The franchise is almost wholly unrecognizable from, say, the last days of 2019.
But even with Tanya Snyder as CO-CEO, when it comes to the most important line on the Washington Football Team’s masthead — owner — the name still reads Daniel M. Snyder. It does today. It will tomorrow. It will next year. It will until further notice. From here, it feels like that notice might never come.
We have been over this territory ad infinitum, but it remains unshakable. The only constant in more than two decades of sustained incompetence with Washington’s NFL franchise is the man who might not be in charge at the moment but will be in charge at some point again — maybe soon. In the penultimate paragraph of its statement outlining the findings of independent investigator Beth Wilkinson, the NFL said Tanya Snyder “will assume responsibilities for all day-to-day team operations and represent the club at all league meetings and other league activities for at least the next several months.”
Put another way: When “the next several months” — whatever that means — are over, Daniel Snyder will be back in his old chair, chomping on his same old stogie, same as it ever was.
Listen to Wright, and there’s fodder for encouragement about the near term. He assembled a diverse leadership team because he believes diversity yields the best outcomes. He meets regularly with staff to encourage open communication in which there are no mysteries and hidden agendas. It’s not hard to believe that the misogynistic, old-boys network that defined Snyder’s office place for years no longer exists, and that’s great.
On the football side, there are positive curiosities, too. Washington is the defending NFC East champion for just the fourth time in Snyder’s tenure. Chase Young may well be the NFL’S next great pass rusher, and he leads a defence that could be a force for years. The offence should be more dynamic, and the training camp quarterback competition between vagabond Ryan Fitzpatrick and who-knows-what-he-really is Taylor Heinicke provides intrigue.
And yet all of that is true in the summer of 2021 and only in the summer of 2021. Those storylines — constructive developments that portend better results this fall — are current and current only. They portend nothing about the future.
If that seems overly pessimistic, consider that we — collectively, as Washington NFL consumers and observers — have been bludgeoned into that stance not in 2021 but over decades. Talk to people who have worked for Washington under Snyder’s watch, and they can simultaneously be encouraged by all of the change but view it askance. Rightfully so. There have been so many attempts at clean breaks, at starting anew, at trying something different that it all fosters skepticism, even among optimists. That’s not a healthy way to live. But it’s a realistic — even protective — stance to consider anything in which Snyder’s talons are still embedded.
❚ About that: We don’t know what kind of leader Tanya Snyder will be or how long “the next several months” will last or whether she intends to put any sort of personal imprint on what has forever been her husband’s team and toy. What we do know is that Tanya Snyder is still married to Dan. Think dinner conversation will be devoid of the Football Team? Dan is still here. Maybe not day-to-day but whatever. That’s not as important as year-to-year anyway.
❚ One possibility, I suppose: Could he — gulp — return a changed man?
“Over the past 18 months, Dan and Tanya have recognized the need for change and have undertaken important steps to make the workplace comfortable and dignified for all employees, and those changes, if sustained and built upon, should allow the club to achieve its goal of having a truly first-tier workplace,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement when the league vaguely summarized Wilkinson’s findings.
❚ A question and an observation: Given the detailed accusations in The Washington Post’s reporting that precipitated Wilkinson’s investigation in the first place — the routine demeaning of women, a virtually nonexistent system for reporting harassment, an outdated locker-room culture that permeated the building — why did it take the past yearand-a-half for the Snyders to recognize the need for change? Moving forward, though, the key phrase in Goodell’s pablum is this: “if sustained and built upon.”
That’s the key. Wright may consider himself an autonomous leader with the power to make meaningful decisions about how the franchise operates and whom it hires and therefore how it’s perceived. Rivera may have full say over the football operation, empowered to choose players and staff and to run the systems he sees fit. It’s possible he doesn’t realize how unusual that is here. If he’s curious, he should hook up with Jim Zorn or Jay Gruden — just picking names from a hat.
But “if sustained and built upon,” that’s the thing. Not just in the changes that turn an organization run amok into something resembling a respectful American workplace. Rather, the changes — fundamental changes — in how someone who’s an owner and leader operates, in what he values, in whom he empowers and for how long.
Wright and Rivera may well be the right leaders in the correct positions for the Washington Football Team as the 2021 season approaches. Here’s hoping they are. But that’s not the test. The test will be whether the practices they put in place are allowed to flourish and foster into 2022, 2023 — and beyond. The NFL’S wrist slap of Daniel Snyder was just that, painless. Yes, his wife’s name is on his old office door. But his will return, and for more than 20 years, that mere fact has trumped all others in Ashburn. For the results to change, he will have to, too. Is that even possible?