Don Van Natta Jr.

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90 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard Feb 2025

Don Van Natta Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Pablo Torre Finds Out · What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr. · 7 Feb 2025 podcast
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 Wickersham 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.
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? 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 deflategate, and Tom Brady paid the price for that.
But these are very, look, they're highly aggressive, highly stubborn players 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 faster. Oh, I want to get to this.
Jerry Jones is furious that Roger punished Ezekiel Elliott, his running back, far greater than Jerry felt was right or just.
He remembered what Roger Goodell did on Spygate. And actually, Jerry wanted Roger out. He literally tried to take the commissioner out.
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.
Oh, he was right. He was right in the mid 90s when he said the team 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... 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.
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.
Stan Kroenke, 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 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.
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?
A big reason why they stuck with Roger, 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.
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