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It sounds like a good effort! Not a great effort, because Congress just received testimony about it and told the FTC and news media about it. But there have been worse schemes than the one alleged here. No matter how any number of government or private investigations into the Commanders turn out, we can safely say two things about the franchise Snyder runs.
One is that a whole lot of people who work for this team seem to wind up testifying to Congress (to say nothing of what they might tell the NFL’s own investigators) about miserable experiences in the workplace. Several women have alleged sexual harassment while they worked for the team, and one has made a claim against Snyder himself to this same committee. Snyder denies it. The team paid $1.6 million to settle a different sexual misconduct claim against Snyder in 2009, the Washington Post reported in 2020 . Whatever crimes Snyder has or hasn’t committed, there are plenty of rich people in the world who would be happy to own Washington’s NFL team and are not the subject of such withering feedback from employees.
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Additionally, the Commanders should email less. This franchise might not be a great deal different from every other NFL team, and those teams might have also let plenty of garbage pile up in their inboxes over the years. But in the case of this team, there is quite a lot of it, as we learned when its internal emails surfaced in an NFL investigation into the sexual harassment claims and led to the end of Jon Gruden as an NFL institution. It’s a public benefit that this franchise’s internal deliberations are getting aired out. Some free legal advice, though: If you are the Commanders, it is best to follow the Stringer Bell rule and not take notes on anything that might be construed as a criminal conspiracy or at least one to evade NFL rules. It is especially best not to send those notes out electronically. This medium is causing Snyder’s team a lot of trouble.
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The past few years have seen a constant drip of stories about Snyder and the Commanders that range from outraging to embarrassing. A popular refrain with each drop is to wonder if this might finally be the one that prompts the NFL to force Snyder out of its ranks of ownership—not that selling a team for billions of dollars is much of a severe punishment for anything.