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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 you said a year ago going into this past season that ended up 7-10. 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.

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.

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 DiBartolo. 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+, which just so happened to throw legendary coach Bill Belichick under the bus.

It was actual business. It was a way that many people in sports now do of controlling the narrative. Oh, and I get it.

It was because the book was sent by Stacey James, Robert Kraft's longtime PR head, to Hall of Fame voters. Like, this is the actual— Not quite subtle. 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.

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

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