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

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I am Pablo Torre.

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Invariably, Don Van Natta is working on some sht.

You're usually up to some stuff, Don.

You guys have a few things going.

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?

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-in 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.

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

That's 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.

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, 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 on you.

That is rule number one of business.

End quote.

And I just don't know if there's a worse prediction in our business.

I remember that quote vividly.

The NFL, you could argue, has been quite greedy

since then.

Quite hoggy.

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.

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 getting, 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.

And they're going to surpass it.

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 largesse.

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.

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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.

Yes.

Right?

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

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.

By now, you have seen the video of NFL star running back Ray Rice knocking out his fiancé.

Well, right now, the NFL remains on the defensive as questions build over how it handled this domestic abuse case.

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

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 it knocked them out of games.

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.

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 dynamic that we don't fully appreciate?

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 communications 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.

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.

I got it wrong in the handling of the Ray Rice matter.

And I'm sorry for that.

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.

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 Bascioti.

But Steve Baschati 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 lunch.

He said, Americans are addicted to football like it's crack cocaine.

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

A better prediction.

A better prediction than Mark Cuban.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was said actually around that time, Pablo.

Come to think, about 2015, 2016, it was after the Ray Rice autumn.

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

Yes.

And that speaks to also something that, look, maybe the owners and Goodell get credit for this part, just 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 inherit.

Absolutely.

It's bread in circuses.

It's even the ugly side of the game,

concussions.

You know, what happened at Tua?

Yeah.

Think of the conversation.

But that season.

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.

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 Rickersham 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?

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 groupthink 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.

The country club, unlike any other.

It is the hardest and arguably the most gilded club in America.

It's hardest to get into.

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

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...

Whose ownership is

more democratically oriented.

That's exactly.

That's right.

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

But really,

they have massive egos, most of these people.

don't like each other.

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.

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 wickersheim and i wrote in 2015 that 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 under literally underfoot underfoot under his wingtips i mean you know talk about a cover-up this was a smashup of real evidence and 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.

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 Deflate Gate.

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.

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 five.

Oh, I want to get to the Hall of Falls.

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.

Yes.

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.

Yes.

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 Johnny 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 p

compared to what I'm going to do, end quote.

Set the scene here, I guess.

What is happening in that quote?

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

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.

He remembered what Roger Goodell did on Spygate.

And

actually, Jerry wanted Roger out.

So this

literally tried to take the commissioner out.

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

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 them.

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.

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

Oh, he was right.

He was right in the mid 90s when he said that 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.

Jerry 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.

When you mentioned the power owners, because 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, yeah, first ring of honor, so to speak?

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, Giants owner, Stan Cronke, the Rams owner, Clark Hunt, sneaky, powerful owner of the

Kansas City Chiefs, 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 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.

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 Nada 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.

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 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?

And so, in the end, Adam Silver chose not to immediately.

And the NFL chose Roger Goodell

eventually.

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.

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.

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.

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, whomst among us.

But then 2019 to the 2021 seasons,

$63.9 million annually.

And so in terms of,

I call it Vork, value over replacement commissioner,

what's he good at?

What's he great at that justifies this?

It's very simple.

Team valuations.

The Dallas Cowboys in 2006, when Roger Goodell was hired to be commissioner, were worth slightly more than a billion dollars.

Today, they're worth $10 billion, according to Forbes, but arguably $12, $13, $15 billion somebody would pay for the Dallas Cowboys.

I agree.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But men,

your men,

continue to die,

their families left in ruins.

Tell the truth.

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

And the reaction, as you characterize it, was awkward silence in the room.

But 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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 30-second pick if you win the Super Bowl.

It's itself a socialistic system.

It is.

Incidentally, the loser is getting the most reward.

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 can actually challenge any owner.

We don't have to single out Jerry here, 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.

It's a pretty good status quo that way.

Yes.

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 Craft.

And there's a lot to the book of Bob Kraft,

and it's a long one.

But the Hall of Fame as a room he cannot enter.

How would you characterize what Bob Kraft is trying to do and the response to his attempt?

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 Bolan, 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 audiovisual rights and film rights to that book, which then became the Dynasty docuseries on Apple Plus, which just so happened to throw legendary coach Bill Belichick under the bus.

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?

Matt, we've talked about that.

I didn't ask you about it.

What has been told to me is that there was something personal

going on between Bill and Malcolm that was not football related.

Kraft publicly said he had nothing to do with it.

You provided the reporting behind the fact that this was not influence.

This was also actual business.

It was actual business.

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

Oh, and I get it.

He's not alone.

No, everyone's doing it.

But him trying to do it spoke to this desperation.

Again, the way the Holocaust works for people who don't know, every year there's one non-coach, non-player, contributor, they're called, who gets in.

Yes.

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 docuseries was in that vein.

It was because the book was sent by Stacey James,

Robert Kraft's longtime PR head,

to Hall of Fame voters.

Like, this is an odd, 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

so that didn't sit well.

with what I understood with

some of the voters.

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, I felt bad

that there was so much emphasis on the more controversial

and,

let's say, challenging situations over the last 20 years.

And made it sound as if he had nothing to do with it.

And, well, he he owned the copyright to the docuseries, and he had more than a little to do with it.

One of the other owners, Don, that has benefited from the protection of Jerry Jones, it seems like, had been Dan Snyder.

Dan Snyder, who I think is maybe easily was the worst owner in the whole professional sports, has been ousted.

And you just reported a piece a couple of weeks ago about

essentially 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 story there?

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.

A record price at the time.

A record price at the time.

And Paul Taglubu, 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 Taglubu 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 five 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 that didn't matter to them.

Crimes against the membership.

Crimes against the membership, wasting their time.

Okay, is 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,

you would think that that would be enough.

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

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.

That would be the actual way to tip the scale in favor of get this guy the f ⁇ out of here.

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

on Roger Goodell and on Jerry Jones.

That's incredible.

The black male,

the compromat he was assembling.

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 with the 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 Jerry liked Snyder when he first showed up.

Jerry saw in Snyder a little bit of himself, this sort of renegade who's 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 Johnny 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.

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

No.

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.

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 think of the anger of the fan base and his fellow partners there was literal sewage flowing out of the building

again metaphors made quite concrete and it was joe gibbs right right right the hero of of the redskins who won three super bowls who snyder himself hired uh to be a coach uh 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 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.

It really is.

It is remarkable, too, that, yeah.

Someone finally got to unite NFL ownership about something.

That's right.

It was, we got to 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.

Yeah,

there's comedy in this.

Dark comedy at times.

Or tragic.

Dark comedy.

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 DeMar Hamlin.

Yes.

I'm in awe.

I mean, look, Don, I'm in awe, right?

So here is, I think you have said this at one point.

I have felt this way the whole time.

It's obvious.

One of the the things the NFL in its nightmares is concerned about is a player dying on the field.

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.

Yes.

And yes.

And then that night, that game, that Monday night game,

Roger Goodell's worst nightmare happened.

Jamar Hamlin stopped breathing.

His heart stopped.

Turned out the Sports World grinding to a halt after a a devastating injury during Monday night football.

And now players, coaches, and millions across the world praying for a miraculous recovery for Buffalo Bills' safety, DeMar Hamlin.

On a medical level, he was not among us.

Right.

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, DeMar Hamlin.

DeMar Hamlin did 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, we praise, rightfully so,

the navigation of the membership and their shield.

But sometimes it's through let 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.

Absolutely.

The story would have been very, very different if Hamlin 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, 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.

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 are 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.

Yeah.

What does that tell you?

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.

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.

We absolutely

no, we absolutely should.

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.

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 therapy couch, there's also this feeling of I don't want to miss out.

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

it has this stranglehold on our emotions.

And so we check at the door any concerns about DeMar 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.

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.

Yeah, indestructible, addictive.

Another synonym to quote someone else that you referenced.

Yeah, D.

Smith.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Addictive, indestructible.

And so far that bet is paid off.

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.

It's great to be with you, Pablo.

Thank you.

See you in 10 years.

Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, 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.

We will talk to you next time.