Dan Snyder has agreed to sell the Commanders to Josh Harris, but what are the chances that the NFL owners are actually ready to vote on to ratify the sale at next week’s owners meetings in Minneapolis?
Better than not, says Brian Mitchell, even if it’s not “official.”
“I’m going 60/40 they’re going to vote. It might be a secret vote and they don’t say anything just yet, but they’ll have the numbers and know what they’ve got – and I think the numbers will be positive,” BMitch said.
JP Finlay doesn’t think they’ll vote because ‘some older owners might want to go through processes,’ so he called those odds ‘juicy’ and the vetting process – but once again, Brian doesn’t think that’s as big a hurdle as many believe.
“We’ve been listening to things over the last few weeks and it’s been all negative – you know how many people the NFL has to go out and do research and investigate things?” Brian said. “Vetting is not as difficult as we all think. Anybody’s name that popped up, they started vetting immediately; they’ve been doing that since we first heard who was involved in this group.
Josh Harris has been vetted before, and I guarantee the top names have all been vetted."
JP even admitted that ‘the vetting is just to make sure the money is real,” and there’s no doubt it’s real when you have names like the former CEO of Google – and really, when it comes to people with that much money, there aren’t too many to keep track of.
“There’s only a certain number of people who are billionaires, and the number of multi-billionaires is even smaller,” BMitch said. “You reach out to Forbes and others who keep tabs on those guys, but we act as if the NFL is hanging around on a street corner waiting for them to do something. The NFL cares about assets and liabilities, that’s it.”
“Anyone who doesn’t think they have the money is nuts,” JP replied, “and anyone who didn’t think they’ll have the money to do the stadium right away…they do.”
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Both Brian and JP know, of course, that building a stadium isn’t as easy as simply buying land and building it, with the former saying 2028 and the latter 2030 when predicting Day 1 in not FedEx Field, which is plenty of time to get more financing together.
“They understand what a new stadium will do for the value of this franchise, and they’ll work on getting it done – but there are a bunch of people who think you can call Amazon and order a stadium and have it pop up overnight,” BMitch said. “You still have to wait for them to build it, and it takes time.”
Follow BMitch & Finlay on Twitter: @BMitchliveNBCS, @JPFinlayNBCS, and @BMitchandFinlay
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