NFL’s first Black team president looks ahead
Jason Wright faces pressure on multiple fronts, not just because his hiring makes history, writes columnist Mike Jones.
Jason Wright gently taps his heart through his crisp, white Oxford.
“I can feel that. I can feel the flutters,” the 38-year-old running backturned-businessman admitted. He’s discussing the magnitude of the pressures associated with the job he just accepted: president of the Washington Football Team.
The business-related pressure of saving a floundering franchise plagued by nearly two decades of losing, a diminishing fan base, organizational dysfunction, a toxic culture, particularly for female employees. The pressure of rebranding an NFL team without a formal name after corporate sponsors forced the abandonment of the long-controversial “Redskins”
nickname by threatening to back out of multimillion-dollar deals. The pressure of finding a locality willing to strike a new stadium deal after the efforts of his predecessor proved fruitless for years.
The cultural pressure of becoming the first Black team president in the NFL’s 100-year history.
“There are so many things to do. So many things to fix,” Wright told USA TODAY Sports on Monday, hours after his team broke the news of his hiring on “Good Morning America.”
So the Southern California native reverts to a familiar course of action.
“I do the same thing that I did as a player when I would feel that flutter of pressure in the moment,” he explains. “You take a deep breath, and I focus on my fundamentals. When I was a player, ‘Hey, line up at the right depth. Get your feet placed in the right way. Take the right initial steps. Get your hands placed in the right place when pass blocking.’ Slowing the game down to its fundamentals. It’s the same thing on the business side . ... There are fundamentals as a businessman that I’m just anchoring in right now. … It’s all about establishing the fundamentals and setting the new norms about how I will lead and where we will go as an organization.”
Wright is unlike any team president the NFL has seen.
And he’s charged with executing a mission that no one during Daniel Snyder’s 21 years of ownership has managed to accomplish.
However, if he can turn the beleaguered organization around, he will achieve victories on two massive fronts: restore health to a once-proud franchise and open doors for people of color, who for generations have seen owners deny them opportunities of advancement to senior positions despite qualifications that equal or surpass those of white counterparts.
Wright’s hiring comes at a time when Snyder is desperate to fix the culture of the team after the name debate reached its boiling point and after accusations of long-running episodes of sexual harassment brought the organization to its lowest point.
It also comes at a time when the league has intensified efforts to create fair hiring opportunities for people of color with head coaching, general manager and team president aspirations. This year, owners approved guidelines that require teams to interview two minority candidates for head coaching positions, at least one minority candidate for coordinator openings and at least one external candidate of color for front office positions.
But Wright is no token hire. Instead, he’s an example of what a clear vision and an authentic equal opportunity hiring process can produce.
Wright’s background as a person, football player and businessman made him one of the most well-rounded candidates on Washington’s radar.
He spent seven seasons in the NFL (2004-10) with San Francisco, Atlanta, Cleveland and Arizona. Upon retiring, he obtained his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and joined D.C.-based global strategy and management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he focused on anti-racism, inclusion and diversity practices in business.
“I’m a football player at heart,” Wright says. “I started playing when I was 7 years old, and my fondest memories are of being out in the Southern California heat, running hills with ankle weights on with my dad as my coach. Then I went to Northwestern where we won a Big Ten championship there and made life-long friends. And my time in the league was formative because I was getting fired every other week my first year and a half. Learning to have resilience, making money last longer than it needed to, and all that was well before having a good, long career and becoming a team captain and all of those things.
“But a side of me is a bit of a nerd, and when I was transitioning out of my NFL career, I was excited to rediscover that analytic side of my brain, and business problems – the complex business problems that companies and organizations face – were fascinating to me, and I just got lost in it from an intellectual perspective.”
Diversity, inclusion and the advancement of people of color always ranked among Wright’s passions. He was genetically programmed that way. His grandfather founded the East Texas chapter of the NAACP. His mother and father were active in the civil rights movement.
“That’s always been core to who I am,” he said. “And it has always had different manifestations at different times in my career. But very much in the business world, I was able to latch onto something very interesting that comes from my nerd side, and that was it’s not just the right thing to do. It’s not just about justice. It’s also about getting better business outcomes because more diverse teams make better decisions, and companies that are more diverse perform better over time.”
Wright had been on the NFL’s radar for some time. Aware of the impact he was having in the business world, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent tried to lure him to the corporate office to help improve diversity and inclusion efforts in 2018. However, Wright didn’t believe the timing or role was right.
When Washington’s team president opening became available following Snyder’s firing of Bruce Allen last season, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell encouraged Snyder to consider Wright.
In his news release, Snyder said, “If I could custom design a leader for this important time in our history, it would be Jason.”
Vincent, who spearheads the league’s diversity and inclusion efforts when it comes to coaching and front office hiring, raved. “Why was it a good hire? Complete understanding of the business of football,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “The gentleman has a complete and full understanding of the scope of the business of football. He has studied, he has researched, he understands how marketing works. He understands how stadium economics works. He understands public policy and the importance of that as it pertains to stadium build-outs, commercial rights, media rights. And when you bring all of those things together, he’s a perfect fit for the new Washington brand, the culture.”
Vincent and Wright agree it shouldn’t have taken 100 years for the NFL to hire its first Black team president. Wright remains baffled as to why it took so long. But he wasn’t shy about explaining why he outshined the other candidates for the job.
“Because the unique qualifications that I bring are germane to the situation the Washington Football Team is in right now,” he explained. “Yes, I’m Black and I wear my Blackness quite on the outside, but more so the experience of transforming companies in really critical moments in their trajectory.”
History is not on the side of those who have joined forces with Snyder during his tenure as owner. He has made splashy hires in his coaching and front office ranks. But more often than not, those partnerships end in firings and the franchise seemingly in worse shape.
But Wright believes in his chances for success because based on his extensive discussions with Daniel and Tanya Snyder and coach Ron Rivera, his vision for building a healthy culture aligns strongly with theirs.
“It’s going to be a culture where colleagues openly trust each other,” Wright stressed, “where they feel comfortable raising any behaviors that may not be aligned with the values and culture that we want to espouse, where women in particular feel really empowered to make bold decisions that change the direction of the organization in important ways.”
When he starts his new job next Monday, Wright expects to find himself under heavy scrutiny. Drawing on his experience as a player, he welcomes that.
“I’m a former player. The eye in the sky don’t lie,” he laughed. “We measure output, and I do that in business as well, and if we don’t get the job done, yes, all right. That makes sense. But otherwise, I have no worries about things fracturing in any way, shape or form because of the alignment around changing the culture.”
The eyes of Snyder and the team’s long-suffering fan base will certainly be trained on Wright. So, too, will those of the owners who often wait until another takes the first step and succeeds before following the path to innovation.