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

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. And Paul Tagliabue, 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 Tagliabue 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 stay for another 40 minutes talking about stuff that didn't matter to them.

Crimes against the membership, wasting their time, okay, 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.

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.

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 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 was going to come in and shake up the National Football League. And so I saw it in 2014 when I did my profile with 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. 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.

No.

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.

Yes, that's right.

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 childhood icon. 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.

That's right. It was we got to get Dan Snyder out of here. We quoted people in our story 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.

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.

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.

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