What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.

It's obvious that the NFL is the most powerful institution in American culture. But far less clear is what the league's power looks like from the inside. Which is why our guest before the Super Bowl is three-time Pulitzer-winner Don Van Natta Jr., whose investigative work for ESPN has offered a rare glimpse at a group that refers to itself as The Membership. Not to mention commissioner Roger Goodell, a human shield who's protected owners from a series of once-catastrophic scandals — and a boardroom that resembles an episode of Succession. Plus: the defenestration of Dan Snyder, the desperation of Bob Kraft and the superpower (and flip phone) of shadow commissioner Jerry Jones. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 2:56Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. And today, we're going to find out what this sound is. This is a pimple on a baby's ass.

• 3:12Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  You're listening to DraftKings Network.

• 3:30Pablo Torre?

  Invariably, Don Van Natta is working on some [BLEEP]. You're usually up to some stuff, Don.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Usually have a few things going.

• 3:37Pablo Torre?

  General principle. When I say, though, that, and I say this all the time, to the point where I actually don't know why you won them, but I say, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Don Van Natta, could you refresh our memory here? Like, what were you doing before you were doing what we're here to actually talk about?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  The first Pulitzer was a public service Pulitzer, actually at the Miami Herald. It was covering Hurricane Andrew, the Eye of the Storm. I was in Florida City, and 165 mile an hour winds were whipping around us in a Comfort Inn motel, which got torn apart. And I wrote a first-person story on a Trash 80, one of these little Texas instrument computers, about what it was like to survive the storm. That got the New York Times' attention, got recruited there at the age of 30, and won two Pulitzers there, team Pulitzers, for explanatory journalism about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York.

• 4:33Pablo Torre?

  In other words, just a natural progression to the NFL.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Yes, right. I always say that covering, like, the CIA, the Pentagon, trying to get secrets out of there, prepared me for covering the National Football League.

• 4:50Pablo Torre?

  So there are two kinds of news that I think you need to know about. There's the kind of news that powerful people want you to find out. And then there's the kind that they don't. And Don Van Natta is a master of that second kind of news. Don is currently working on an unauthorized biography of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. He has famously profiled NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. And at ESPN, he has investigated pretty much all of the most powerful people in pro football, often with Seth Wickersham. And so during Super Bowl week, when almost everyone else does the first kind of news, what I wanted to do was sit down with Don in Miami to talk about what power looks like inside the single most powerful institution in American culture.

• 5:32Pablo Torre?

  Whose status, by the way, was not always this secure. Just over 10 years ago, in fact, the NFL was in crisis mode. I remember no less than former NBA owner Mark Cuban, at this point, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, echoing many other businessmen and many other thought leaders, like Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, when Cuban declared before a Mavs game, quote, "I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion. I'm just telling you, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, and they're getting hoggy. Just watch. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I'm just telling you, when you've got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you."

• 6:17Pablo Torre?

  That is rule number one of business. End quote. And I just don't know if there's a worse prediction in our business.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  I remember that quote vividly. The NFL, you could argue, has been quite greedy since then.

• 6:33Pablo Torre?

  Quite. Quite hoggy.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Quite hoggy. And all of the metrics are moving in the right direction, from ratings to team valuations, which are maybe the most important to owners. But yeah, absolutely, 10 years later, Mark got that one wrong.

• 6:50Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, what Mark Cuban was saying about the real estate available on television, he was saying, "They're trying to take over every night of television, and this is basically a heat check. They're doing too much. They're trying to take too much. People are gonna..." As he says this, he says, talking about the NFL games, claiming Saturday, "Now you're impacting colleges. Now it's on four days a week. It's all football. At some point, the people get sick of it." And we have not yet gotten sick of it. As we see that 72 of the 100 most popular TV shows this year were NFL games. And there's always a stat like that. League revenue, to your point, yeah, surpassed $20 billion. Roger Goodell, his goal of $25 billion in revenue by 2027 is within reach.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  And they're gonna surpass it.

• 7:33Pablo Torre?

  All of the other competitors have fallen away. And in a world in which everything is, we're all siloed. Here is the one thing that isn't, and that seems to add to the largess.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's the communal viewing aspect of the National Football League, right? Why do the ratings on Christmas Day and Thanksgiving skyrocket? Is everybody hanging on every play and every commercial? No, the game is on because as we gather, that is what we can all agree on is the National Football League. And it's the sweet spot in the American culture.

• 8:23Pablo Torre?

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• 11:54Pablo Torre?

  I think part of the reason why you were also like, put on the NFL beat at the time that you joined ESPN and became a sports writer, finally, in earnest, was there were all of these crises.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:06Pablo Torre?

  Right? I mean, let's run through them just briefly to remind people, right?

• 12:10Speaker 05

  A possible correlation between football and brain damage. Two award-winning journalists allege that the NFL waged a two-decades-long campaign to help cover up any potential link.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  By now, you have seen the video of NFL star running back Ray Rice knocking out his fiance. Well, right now, the NFL remains on the defensive as questions build over how it handled this domestic abuse case.

• 12:36Pablo Torre?

  The star quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons now has thrown himself before the mercy of a federal court, admitting in court papers to dogfight.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  Coach of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick, said today he's focusing on this weekend's football game. Well, he may be, but the rest of the sports world is focusing on the news that his team illegally videotaped its opponent's signals. Players on the New Orleans Saints were paid money for hitting players with such brutal force that knocked them out of games.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  In an interview McNair did with the Wall Street Journal, he says he's not sorry. He made the comment about inmates running the prison.

• 13:13Pablo Torre?

  And I'm just wondering, when it comes to the people in power in the NFL, how much credit do you give them for steering the ship through these waters? And how much of it is some larger, maybe more macro? grow dynamic that we don't fully appreciate.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Excellent question. It's a mixture. Certainly, they had somebody like Joe Lockhart, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration, come in and help with crisis communications. He got them through those very tough Colin Kaepernick stories. I know because I talked to him often during that period. They have had help from very smart people on the crisis communication side. But also, don't underestimate Roger Goodell. Roger Goodell, he often talks about protecting the shield. That's what he always wants to do. Roger Goodell's job is to be the shield for the owners.

• 14:07Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  And he has done that job magnificently. I still remember Pablo during the Ray Rice scandal. And I was on that day in and day out on Outside the Lines with Bob Lee. It felt several days a week talking about every development. Roger was not truthful in that autumn, and I still remember the press conference where Roger looked like a deer in the headlights.

• 14:29Pablo Torre?

  I got it wrong in the handling of the Ray Rice matter, and I'm sorry for that.

• 14:38Pablo Torre?

  I got it wrong on a number of levels, from the process that I led to the decision that I reached. As a character in pop culture, Roger Goodell did not inspire confidence.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  No. He was hanging on, it looked at that moment by his fingernails for his job with the way he had mishandled this domestic violence case that became a major national story for weeks. And that's all anybody was talking about during the 2014 season. And he took every one of those arrows. Nobody talked, or very few people. We did a story that raised questions about the Ravens handling of it and the owner Steve Bishati.

• 15:20Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  But Steve Bishati took very few arrows. Why? Because Roger took them all. And I know after the fact, after that story, talking to owners, they were proud of Roger. He did what he was hired to do. Why? Because another slate of games are coming on Sunday or Thursday night. And Americans love their football. Demora Smith, the former National Football League Players Association Executive Director, said, I'll never forget it because he said it to me over, over lunch. He said, Americans are addicted to football like it's crack cocaine.

• 15:55Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  And he just said it like it's just a fact.

• 15:58Pablo Torre?

  A better, a better prediction.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  A better prediction. Mark Cuban.

• 16:01Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it was said actually around that time, Pablo, I'm going to think about 2015, 2016. It was after the Ray Rice autumn.

• 16:08Pablo Torre?

  But there is that thing though, that he's getting at about what is the product and why is it so addictive?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:13Pablo Torre?

  And that speaks to also something that, look, maybe the owners and Goodell get credit for this part, just, you know, the caretaking of said product. But the violence, the gladiatorial coliseum made modern, that stuff, the tribalism therein, that feels like, yeah, a good hand to, to inherit.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's bread and circuses. It's, it's even the ugly side of the game. Concussions, you know, what happened at Tua?

• 16:45Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  Think of the conversation, but that's.

• 16:48Pablo Torre?

  This season.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Right. That weirdly though, still enhances the appeal. It is the test of this sort of macro question of all of these scandals didn't stop the juggernaut of the NFL and will this? Probably not.

• 17:01Pablo Torre?

  The crack cocaine threshold, right? Are you going to actually out compete crack cocaine? But I do want to get to just these back rooms, right? So you are the number, you and Seth Rickasham have done so much great work taking us behind the locked doors where you should not be. What do you think people misunderstand about the rooms where these decisions are deliberated?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  These guys are not, and I say guys because most of the owners are men, are not smart enough to pull off massive conspiracies. I mean, there's just a lot of group think when it comes down to it. I mean, look, the National Football League, they call themselves the membership, right? The 32 owners, they're the membership. It's this very august name for-

• 17:47Pablo Torre?

  A country club unlike any other.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  It is the hardest and arguably the most gilded club in America. The hardest to get into.

• 17:55Pablo Torre?

  I would say it is number one and number two is not close.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely, no doubt about it. However, at its essence, it's really just a trade association of 31 owners and the Green Bay Packers who-

• 18:10Pablo Torre?

  Whose ownership is, yes, more democratically oriented.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  That's exactly, that's right.

• 18:15Pablo Torre?

  They don't have a single overseer in that regard.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  But really, they're, they have massive egos, most of these people. They don't like each other.

• 18:26Pablo Torre?

  That part is such a recurring through line in all of your reporting. How much enmity there is among people that you would assume because of the description of the country club, the membership, you would assume that they were somewhat monolithic, but the competing agendas are where it gets fun.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, the competing agendas when there is punishment, for instance, on Spygate. That was Roger Goodell's first moment where he was tested to dole out punishment for what was a pretty big deal. It's spying on your opponent's coaches in the game and using that to win. It was a cheating apparatus that Seth Wirkusheimer and I wrote in 2015. It was far greater than anybody knew back in 2007. How did Roger handle it? He sent Jeff Pash, his general counsel, to Foxborough where there were videotapes, there was evidence, and Jeff Pash smashed them under his feet.

• 19:22Pablo Torre?

  Under, literally underfoot.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Underfoot, under his wingtips. I mean, you know, talk about a cover-up. This was a smash-up of real evidence. And Roger, according to the other owners who were watching all this, slapped Robert Kraft very gently on the hand with the punishment that he doled out. And then the question is why? Well, Robert Kraft helped Roger Goodell get his job. Roger went up against Jeff Pash and 10 other people for the commissioner job. It's a job Roger wanted desperately. Kraft was his patron. And so, these billionaires, they're highly competitive. They felt the Patriots should have gotten much more punishment than they got, remembered that.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  So when Tom Brady and deflated footballs come around six or seven years later, we're wondering, well, why is the NFL so upset about that? Well, you had to rewind back to the way Spygate punishment was handled. And those owners wanted now, finally, there to be the punishment, the just punishment that should have happened with Spygate, to happen on Deflategate. And Tom Brady paid the price for that. But these are very, look, they're highly aggressive, highly stubborn billionaires, used to getting their way.

• 20:36Pablo Torre?

  That, the...

• 20:38Speaker 03

  And so, they're not going to always get along. They're not going to like how Goodell handles one team versus the other if they feel he's playing favorites. So that in the back room is where a lot of the tension comes. There's tension about who deserves to get in the Hall of Fame faster.

• 20:52Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I want to get to this. But you said it. Here are people who are so rich, so powerful, so famous, relative to their friends in actual country clubs, which must feel great. They're on TV, in the most, yeah, visible television show in our country. There are some things they cannot buy.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:15Pablo Torre?

  And inside of the membership, you see this, or through your reporting, you get to glimpse it. And I just want to give one quote, because Bob Kraft, again, to just reset the context here, was one of Goodell's biggest allies.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:31Pablo Torre?

  And in to this conversation in November 2017, bringing us to another scandal, is Jerry Jones, an owner who you have, I would say, an unparalleled depth of connection with when it comes to subject and reporter. You've drank Johnnie Walker Blue with him. You've seen him wink at people at the bar after hours. The point being that Jerry, in one of these stories that you wrote, tells Roger Goodell in November 2017, quote, "I'm going to come after you with everything I have. If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a [BLEEP]." Compared to what I'm going to do. End quote. Set the scene here, I guess. What is happening in that quote?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Uh, Jerry Jones is furious that Roger punished Ezekiel Elliott, his running back, far greater than Jerry felt was right or just.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  He has read the report. He has reviewed the incidents. And as far as he was concerned, Ezekiel Elliott did not commit any domestic violence.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  He remembered what Roger Goodell did on Spygate. And, uh, actually Jerry wanted Roger out.

• 22:45Pablo Torre?

  So this.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  He literally tried to take the commissioner out.

• 22:56Pablo Torre?

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• 26:17Pablo Torre?

  So as we now celebrate these men in 2025, explain how that came to be so contentious back then.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Well, Roger was up for a new deal. The compensation committee led by Arthur Blank at the time, the Falcons owner, wanted to give Roger a nice, healthy extension and pay him a lot more money. Jerry disagreed, had issues with Roger's performance. And if you actually read some of our stories carefully and others, you could also raise some questions about Roger's track record, not just in the taking arrows for owners, but other things. Jerry felt that some of the revenue streams that he wanted to see were not growing at the pace that he wanted. So he had some business issues with him.

• 27:02Pablo Torre?

  Jerry was, I mean, Jerry is a content guy. Reading some of your, I was rereading them today, like Jerry Jones arguing that the teams should be able to post video clips on the internet.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:12Pablo Torre?

  I'm like, look, it seemed like small potatoes, except he's right.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Oh, he was right. He was right in the mid 90s when he said the teams should be allowed to have their own sponsorship deals. I mean, the Cowboys in the mid 90s, when Jerry took on all of his fellow owners, you know, they were actually responsible for about a quarter of all of the merchandise money. And yet they were sharing it with 31 other teams equally. And that's where this first started. Jerry is all about monetizing everything. And he is a content guy. He's a storyteller. And that's why he wanted teams to be able to tell their own story. And they weren't allowed to do that. It made no sense to him. Look, I always say Jerry is the shadow commissioner. Jerry is the most powerful of all the owners. There's a lot of reasons to believe that. But in this particular moment, Jerry didn't get his way.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Jerry was, he was prepared to take out Roger Goodell, and nobody had his back, particularly Arthur Blank and Robert Kraft and some of the other sort of power owners.

• 28:13Pablo Torre?

  When you mentioned the power owners, I do want to just give a sense of the inner sanctum here. Because some of the names I think are familiar to people, but others I would like to just spell out. Who's in that sort of, uh, yeah, first, first ring of honor, so to speak?

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Well, to get back to my earlier point, Pablo, about the NFL being like a trade association. I mean, it is in the sense that these 32 teams, they don't necessarily like each other, but they share one goal, and that is more revenue. And in these meetings of this trade association, like any trade association, there's five or six or seven people that kind of take the floor and take the reins and are heard. And that group, the people that have the most influence on the committees, on the compensation committee, on the finance committee, on the broadcast committee, the all-powerful broadcast committee, is Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, John Mara.

• 29:09Pablo Torre?

  Giants owner.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Stan Kronke, the Rams owner, Clark Hunt, sneaky powerful owner of the, of the Kansas, of the Kansas City Chiefs, and, and, and the team they're playing on Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles, Jeff Lurie also has quite a bit of power. And they flex it. And they, how they flex it is with Roger and Roger's lieutenants in doing, finding ways to grow that revenue no matter what. And it's always about, do we have enough leverage? Is there enough leverage here to take us to the next level in money? And almost every time, they find ways to do that.

• 29:49Pablo Torre?

  But it is important to note that in November 2017, those powerful men were worried. And they were worried about Roger Goodell, whose tenure as commissioner was in peril. According to Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham, a confidant of one NFL owner even reached out to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, just to check and see if Silver would want the job of NFL Commissioner, to which Adam Silver, quote, "Immediately said no."

• 30:19Speaker 03

  I think that part of why Adam Silver said no is because of the membership, because you have to do what Roger Goodell does and manage these massive egos. Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft don't like each other very much. I mean, that's a sort of a through line of a lot of the reporting that I've done. And do you want, if you're Adam Silver, to deal with that?

• 30:42Pablo Torre?

  And so, in the end, Adam Silver chose not to. Immediately. And the NFL chose Roger Goodell.

• 30:51Pablo Torre?

  Eventually.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  A big reason why they stuck with Roger, you're reminding me, was because, yeah, who is out there? Who can take the place of Roger that can do what Roger does as effectively as him? And when they looked around, there was nobody.

• 31:06Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. There's also this motive, according to one ownership source you quote in the piece, who says, "Switching commissioners is like switching from an iPhone to a Samsung. Do my pictures transfer? Do my contacts? Does my music? In the end, why take the risk?" And it sort of makes the point also that, like, it was pretty good the way they had it. They don't want to jeopardize the status quo.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  That's right. And it's trust the devil you know more than the devil you don't know. And that was the prevailing attitude at that time and why Jerry's attempt at knocking Roger out failed.

• 31:43Pablo Torre?

  What is Roger Goodell's superpower? Like, what makes... So, the salary here is... There's a sticker shock. And I just want to read some of it out. 2011, Roger Goodell is making $29.5 million, which is a nice salary, until you realize that in August 2017, his compensation package totaled $49 million a year. And you famously reported that he also wanted a private jet for life, healthcare for life for his family, and, you know, whomps among us. But then, 2019 to the 2021 seasons, $63.9 million annually. And so, in terms

• 32:21Pablo Torre?

  of, I call it VORC, Value Over Replacement Commissioner, what's he good at? What's he great at that justifies this?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  It's very simple. Team valuations. The Dallas Cowboys, in 2006, when Roger Goodell was hired to be commissioner, were worth slightly more than $1 billion. Today, they're worth $10 billion, according to Forbes, but arguably $12, $13, $15 billion somebody would pay for the Dallas Cowboys.

• 32:52Pablo Torre?

  I agree.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  The exponential growth of team valuations. One big benefit, or side benefit, of getting Dan Snyder out of the league, all the owners were thrilled because somebody was willing to pay $6.05 billion for the franchise in Washington.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  When those kinds of checks are written for teams, the valuations for everybody go up. And Roger, whether he deserves it or not, gets credit among the owners when they take the stock of whether they're going to re-sign him. His contract expires in 2027. I hear that he wants to be extended yet again. What they look at is they look at the popularity of the game, the stranglehold it has on American culture, but also they look at the team valuations. And they continue to spiral exponentially, greater than any other sports league in the world.

• 33:43Pablo Torre?

  There was one league meeting. This is where I just read some quotes from your stories and I go behind the music with you on them. But there was a league meeting in Manhattan. It's 2015 and it's Jerry Jones. And they're talking about the movie starring Will Smith, playing Dr. Bennett Omalu, who was one of the original, you know, discoverers of CTE. If you continue to deny my work, the world will deny my work.

• 34:16Pablo Torre?

  But men, your men, continue to die. Their families left in ruins.

• 34:29Pablo Torre?

  Tell the truth.

• 34:33Pablo Torre?

  Tell the truth.

• 34:36Pablo Torre?

  And Jerry Jones said, quote, "This is a pimple on a baby's ass."

• 34:42Pablo Torre?

  And the reaction, as you characterize it, was awkward silence in the room. But just the idea of like, when it comes to Jerry's superpower, what is it? What does he get that other people don't?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Jerry is a master at promotion. Jerry is a master at keeping the National Football League in the conversation, and the Dallas Cowboys more specifically, in the conversation 365 days a year. Nobody does it better than him. He's constantly thinking about ways for his team to remain relevant when they're going eight and eight, three straight seasons.

• 35:22Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, the one thing he cannot buy is, as you say, a Super Bowl.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  That's right. The one thing he wants most of all is the one thing he can't buy, which is a Super Bowl title. And it'll be 30 years coming up this season. And But what Jerry has proven is, look, he took them on. He came in as kind of the brat of new owners in his mid 40s. This Arkansas Wildcatter shows up at the age of 46, fires Tom Landry, hires his college buddy Jimmy Johnson, and immediately, a lot of the old guard owners are like, who is this guy? And in meetings, he's in their face. He found ways to make them richer and wealthier, and that matters. And that's his superpower.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  And even at the age of 82, and you know, Jerry's maybe arguably lost half a step, he still is going nonstop and thinking of ways, as he puts it, to grow the pie. And that whole ethos that Jerry brought to the league is now the ethos of the National Football League.

• 36:24Pablo Torre?

  In terms of just like the correlation of power to what you bring to the table, there is ostensibly the money you have, there's the amount your team has been winning, maybe it's also like how long you've been a member. But when it comes to just who gets to be in that inner circle you alluded to before with those names you mentioned, how helpful is it to be really good on the field when it comes to this stuff? Does that correlate at all?

• 36:51Speaker 03

  I don't think so, oddly, right? It really doesn't. It's, you know, they share every dollar. It's this socialistic system. And whether you're successful on the field or not, you still get the same amount of national TV money every year. The salary cap is the same for all 32 teams, whether you do well or not. The only real meritocracy that comes out of how the teams play is the draft location, right? Whether you get the first round pick or the 32nd pick if you win the Super Bowl.

• 37:27Pablo Torre?

  It's self a socialistic system, incidentally. Loser is getting the most reward.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  That's right. But there's not a relegation system like we see in European soccer, right? Where the bottom three teams have to win, or they're going to go down to the lower division. And three teams will come up. And so that's important. That's a really important distinction. When you look at incentives here and do teams? I mean, I'm fascinated by the teams that don't spend every dollar of their salary cap that they could spend. You know, you say you're all in Jerry Jones, as he said a year ago, going into this past season that ended up seven and 10. But you're not spending every dollar you can. It's a metric that you could actually challenge any owner. We don't have to single out Jerry here.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Any owner of how badly do you want to win? Does it really matter whether you win? To get to your question, which I think is a really good one. It doesn't. If you don't and you don't even make the playoffs. Sure, you have a fan base that's upset with you, but the dollars keep rolling in.

• 38:34Pablo Torre?

  It's a pretty good status quo that way.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:35Pablo Torre?

  When it comes to keeping the incumbent in office. But one of the owners finally getting to one of my favorite stories that you've done. One of the owners who is unimpeachable when it comes to a run of success. Who has found himself existentially frustrated by what that does not get him is Bob Kraft. There's a lot to the, to the book of Bob Kraft. And it's, and it's a long one. But the Hall of Fame as a room he cannot enter. How, how would you, how would you characterize what Bob Kraft is trying to do and the response to his attempts?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  He deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. There's no doubt about it. You look at the owners that have gotten in there. Jerry Jones, Pat Bolin, Eddie DeBartolo. Robert Kraft deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Why he is not there, there's lots of reasons. But one of them is because Robert Kraft so desperately wanted to get into the Hall of Fame. That he actually made a deal with a book author to give access for the Dynasty book. That was written by an author by the name of Jeff Benedict. And kept the TV and audio visual rights and film rights to that book. Which then became the Dynasty docu-series on Apple Plus, which just so happened to throw.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Legendary Coach Bill Belichick under the bus?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  In the 2017 season, Malcolm Butler played 98% of the snaps. Why was he only on the field for one play during the Super Bowl? Yeah, Matt, we've talked about that.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  I didn't ask you about it.

• 40:28Pablo Torre?

  What has been told to me is that there was something personal going on between Bill and Malcolm that was not football related.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Kraft publicly said he had nothing to do with it.

• 40:43Pablo Torre?

  You provided the reporting behind the fact that this was not influenced. This was also actual business.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  It was actual business. It was a way that many people in sports now do of controlling the narrative.

• 40:57Pablo Torre?

  Oh, and I get it. He's not alone.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  No, everyone's doing it.

• 41:00Pablo Torre?

  But, but him trying to do it spoke to this desperation. Again, the way the Hall of Fame works, for people who don't know, every year, there's one non-coach, non-player contributor, they're called, who gets in. And Bob Kraft, owner of the Patriots, the foremost dynasty of our time, Chiefs not permitting, maybe, he's been trying every which way. And this book and docu-series was in that vein.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  It was because the book was sent by Stacy James, Robert Kraft's longtime PR head, to Hall of Fame voters. Like, this is the actual... It's not that subtle. This is the argument for Robert Kraft, for you to vote Robert Kraft in. Those voters didn't know that Robert Kraft was a sort of secret partner with the author on that book that was very favorable to Robert Kraft, also arguably, possibly minimized the role of Bill Belichick in those dynasty years. It was a Robert Kraft book. And, and so that didn't sit well with what I understood with some of the, some of the voters.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  And again, this past fall, Robert Kraft was not selected yet again for the Hall of Fame. It's been, I think, 13 years now that he's been trying to get in. He stood up at the owners' meeting in Orlando, Pablo, in March of this past year and said...

• 42:27Pablo Torre?

  I felt bad.

• 42:30Pablo Torre?

  That there was so much emphasis on the more controversial and, uh, let's say, challenging situations over the last 20 years.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  And made it sound as if he had nothing to do with it. And, uh, well, he owned the copyright to the docu-series and, uh, he had more than a little to do with it.

• 42:54Pablo Torre?

  One of the other owners, Don, that has benefited from the protection of Jerry Jones, it seems like, had been Dan Snyder. Um, Dan Snyder, who I think is maybe easily was the worst owner in the whole professional sports, um, has been ousted. And he just reported a piece a couple of weeks ago about essentially the, the fraught exit, which is underselling how dysfunctional the exit was. But what does the story of Dan Snyder being defenestrated from the NFL, losing the support of Jerry Jones, what did that tell you? What's the, what's the story there?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Well, Dan Snyder, when he bought the team, remember, this is the team that Dan Snyder loved as a boy. He first went and watched the Redskins play with his father at the age of six. And at the age of 34, Dan Snyder had enough money to write an $800 million check to buy the team he loved.

• 43:47Pablo Torre?

  A record price at the time.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  A record price at the time. And Paul Taglibou, then the commissioner, introduced Snyder by saying, this is the perfect person to own an NFL franchise. Fast forward 25 years later, and in our story, we quote Taglibou telling a confidant, Dan Snyder is the worst NFL owner in history. And so how did that happen? Well, very early on, when Snyder first took over the team, he rubbed his fellow owners the wrong way repeatedly. He showed up at one meeting, he was supposed to be there at noon, it was of the broadcast committee, he showed up 10 minutes to 5 o'clock as everybody's getting ready to leave, he's in a tuxedo, he says, well, I'm going to an event tonight at Lincoln Center. And he then wastes their time, so they say for another 40 minutes, talking about stuff

• 44:33Speaker 03

  that didn't matter to them.

• 44:35Pablo Torre?

  Crimes against the membership.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Crimes against the membership, wasting their time, okay, i- is, is a, is a big one. And so when the revelations came out about the toxic workplace culture, about Snyder himself allegedly sexually harassing a woman that worked for him, uh, you would think that that would be enough.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Former team employee Tiffany Johnston leveled the accusations at a hearing on Capitol Hill today.

• 45:04Speaker 06

  I learned how to discreetly remove a man's unwanted hand from my thigh at a crowded dinner table at a busy restaurant to avoid a scene. I also learned later that evening how to awkwardly laugh when Dan Snyder aggressively pushed me towards his limo with his hand on my lower back, encouraging me to ride with him to my car. The only reason Dan Snyder removed his hand from my back and stopped pushing me towards his limo was because his attorney intervened and said, "Dan, Dan, this is a bad idea. A very bad idea, Dan."

• 45:34Pablo Torre?

  That would be the actual way to tip the scale in favor of get this guy the [bleep] out of here.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  And it wasn't. They hired Beth Wilkinson to do an investigation, which never came out. It looked for a while like Snyder might actually survive. And it wasn't until Seth and I actually reported a story that Snyder was running around telling people, including one of his fellow owners, that he had dug up dirt.

• 46:00Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  On Roger Goodell and on Jerry Jones.

• 46:04Pablo Torre?

  It's incredible. The blackmail, the compromise he was assembling.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Right. He's saying the NFL is a mafia, and I have enough information that I've gleaned about them that I can blow up the whole league if they try to take my beloved team away from me. And the fact that he had his hand in their pockets and was not sharing all the revenues that he was supposed to share, from a team, by the way, that was last in local revenue. I mean, Washington is supposed to be one of the top franchises in the NFL, and they were last in local revenue and with a stadium crumbling. And it was basically Snyder was costing them money and was threatening to blow them up. It was Jerry Jones who was the final firewall of support for Dan Snyder. And I think the reason for that is because...

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Jerry liked Snyder when he first showed up. Jerry saw in Snyder a little bit of himself. This sort of renegade who was going to come in and shake up the National Football League. And so I saw it in 2014 when I did my profile of Jerry Jones. I spent the summer with Jerry when we drank the Johnnie Walker Blue. And Jerry still has a flip phone or had a flip phone then. And Snyder kept calling, asking for advice about a stadium that never got built. He knew all the buttons to press with Jerry to ingratiate himself. And so when Snyder was on the ropes, Jerry held the line as long as he could. But then when he heard that dirt had been dug up on him by somebody he had looked after and held the line on, I think that was the final straw.

• 47:34Pablo Torre?

  I mean, you really can't script this stuff.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 47:36Pablo Torre?

  I mean, even just to the actual exit in which he is actively trying to avoid. Right? He's like, he's on the run.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  He's on the run. So the last night when he's closing the deal, which we just reported Seth Wickersham and I just a couple of weeks ago, he still doesn't want to give up his beloved team. Even though the deal is done, he has an agreement to sell it to Josh Harris and his fellow investors for a record $6.05 billion. In the middle of the night Snyder is holding on to his checking account banking information and won't turn it over. And in the days leading up to it, there was a thought of, well, maybe we can say that Snyder was drunk when a lot of these things happened. They were coming up with all of these reasons at the 11th hour to try to persuade people that he could keep the team. Think of the damage he did to the team.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Think of the anger of the fan base and his fellow partners.

• 48:30Pablo Torre?

  There was literal sewage flowing out of the building.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:33Pablo Torre?

  Again, metaphors made quite concrete.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  And it was Joe Gibbs.

• 48:38Pablo Torre?

  Right, right.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  The hero of the Redskins who won three Super Bowls, who Snyder himself hired to be a coach back in 2003, who actually had to come and say to Snyder, it's time. And because Gibbs was a hero of Snyder, I mean, Gibbs is the-

• 48:55Pablo Torre?

  Right, the childhood icon.

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Childhood icon is the reason that finally Dan Snyder turned over the keys and went off to London and his super yacht somewhere in Europe. It's an episode of Succession.

• 49:07Pablo Torre?

  It really is. It is remarkable too that, yeah, someone finally got to unite NFL ownership about something.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  That's right. It was, we gotta get Dan Snyder out of here. We quoted people in our stories saying, Dan said every, all the owners hate each other. And somebody, a senior owner told me, that's not true. We all just hate Dan.

• 49:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, um, there's comedy in this. Um, dark comedy at times.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Or tragic comedy.

• 49:51Pablo Torre?

  And, and, and certainly some amount of tragedy, but you know, never let a good tragedy go to waste. And so when I think of the way that the NFL from the top down is, and has successfully navigated a would be tragedy that would have threatened it, like Damar Hamlin.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 50:10Pablo Torre?

  I'm in awe. I mean, look, Don, I'm in awe, right? So here is, I think you, you have said this at one point. I have felt this way the whole time. It's obvious. One of the things the NFL, in its nightmares, is concerned about is a player dying on the field.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Roger Goodell told a Hall of Fame quarterback, the thing he fears the most is a player dying on the field. But he added, the reason is because of what it would do to the business.

• 50:35Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  And, yes, and then that night, that game, that Monday night game, uh, Roger Goodell's worst nightmare happened. Damar Hamlin stopped breathing, his heart stopped.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Tonight in sports world, grinding to a halt after a devastating injury during Monday night football. And now players, coaches, and millions across the world praying for a miraculous recovery for Buffalo Bill's safety, Damar Hamlin.

• 50:59Pablo Torre?

  On a medical level, he was not among us.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:03Pablo Torre?

  And then he was back. And not just back on the field, which is crazy, but in various, very televised suites, you know, being celebrated as an avatar of football. Ladies and gentlemen, Damar Hamlin. Damar Hamlin didn't win a Super Bowl ring this year, but he was still one of the biggest. Champions at last night's big game. He went from the nightmare to a poster boy. It's a remarkable tragedy that became good, if not great news that, hey, we because he survived, the story became substantively different. And it's just one of those things where like,

• 51:44Pablo Torre?

  we praise, rightfully so, the navigation of the membership and their shield. But sometimes it's the roulette wheel of human existence that keeps Demar Hamlin alive. And we celebrate it as opposed to worry about who doesn't want to play this game anymore.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Absolutely. The story would have been very, very different if Hamlin didn't, wasn't brought back to life by those incredible paramedics on that field. I wrote the story, Pablo, that the league wanted to keep playing after that ambulance left the field in Cincinnati. Joe Buck said on the national broadcast,

• 52:21Speaker 04

  They've been given five minutes to quote unquote, get ready to go back to playing. That's the word we get from the league and the word we get from down on the field, but nobody's moving.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  And it was the players, it was the two teams, it was the Bills and Bengals, their coaches on the field who said, we're not playing. They told the NFL, we're not going to do what you want to do. You talk about how powerful, all powerful the National Football League is. That's one of those occasions where from the field, literally from the ground up, the players made the decision of whether there was going to be more football that night.

• 52:51Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. What does that tell you?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  It tells me that reflexively, the games must go on, no matter what. No matter what. The thought of Roger Goodell and Troy Vincent, who was in the command center that night, is we got to continue. This is a horrible moment. And no matter how the players might feel about it, they're being paid to play. The games must go on.

• 53:15Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. And now there are more games to go on. There is, as Goodell was saying on Monday, inevitably a Super Bowl internationally. The entire world is a risk board to Roger Goodell in all of the senses. But, you know, I am thinking now that we are truly more than ever going to test Mark Cuban's hypothesis. He was proved wrong 10, 11 years, 12 years after he said that thing. But we're going to keep on giving people football. The hogs are going to get fatter, Don. And I guess let's agree in 10 years to revisit this conversation and see whether we should, yeah, get slaughtered for our takes, too.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  We absolutely, no, we absolutely should. And, and, you know, maybe Mark Cuban was 10 years too early in his prediction. But there's no doubt that football on Christmas, on a Wednesday, if we go to 18 games, if we go to 16 games overseas, and that window every week starts at 9:30 in the morning. Look, there's going to be a lot of people that are going to love every minute of it.

• 54:27Pablo Torre?

  I've been watching football more than I ever have. And I wonder if that's in part because it is the thing that everybody is caring about. There also, again, just now to put myself a bit on the, on the therapy couch, there's also this feeling of, I don't want to miss out.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  It's the one sport that is truly built for television. And it's a communal experience, the last one left arguably in America. And then on top of it, it's hardwired to nostalgia. So many of us, right, grew up watching football with our dads or our moms or our brothers. And, and it has this stranglehold on our emotions. And so we check at the door, any concerns about Damar Hamlin and what happened that night? About the fact that, okay, maybe they are being a little too hoggy? And there's, you know, teams playing three times in 10 days, as we saw this season.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  And again, we don't like it intellectually, but emotionally, we're there. Emotionally, we're all in. And I think they know that. And I think that's what, quite frankly, Pablo, why Roger now looks so confident when 10 years ago he was the deer in the headlights? Is that he knows it and all the owners know it. No matter what happens, the game is almost, it feels like indestructible.

• 55:51Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, indestructible. Addictive, another synonym to quote someone else that you referenced.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, D. Smith. Yeah, addictive, indestructible. And so far, that bet is paid off.

• 56:05Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Don Vanetta, I could have just put a football on a table here and gotten some views, I think. But I preferred to have the reporter behind so many of these investigations with me. So thank you so much for doing this.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Great to be with you, Pablo. Thank you.

• 56:19Pablo Torre?

  See you in 10 years.

• 56:33Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Rachel Miller Howard, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems. Our sound design by NGW Post. Our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo. And we will talk to you next time.

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