Jason Wright isn’t completely gone from the Commanders, but his tenure as team president ended on Thursday, and he will leave the organization entirely by the end of the 2024 season, serving as a senior advisor until he departs while retaining most of his current duties.
The new President, who will be found by a search group led by Josh Harris, will take over after Wright’s four-year tenure that even he himself said ‘took this franchise through a period of immense challenge and uncertainty and transformed it, setting the table for an incredibly bright future under Josh Harris' leadership.’
Interesting timing, given training camp is about to begin (and it’s not just after the season or during the pre-league year offseason) and Wright was a finalist for the Packers’ top job?
“A lot of times for someone that's annoyed, that like lives and breathes this but doesn't get paid to do so as a fan, you want your satisfaction, your pound of flesh, and sometimes it's okay, to get that red meat,” Danny said. “AKA, while we're just waiting on Rivera to finish out the season and everyone knows he's not coming back, just make me happy and shoot him into the sun, or make me happy and tell Marty that his services are no longer required. But, they are operating in a way where they allowed a guy that I don't think they had much intent, in retrospect, of retaining and bringing back – and we saw the writing on the wall when he was a finalist for that Green Bay job – to explore and flirt. That’s the normal course of business, where things are hush-hush until an announcement is made, but him being out there and noted as a finalist is like a marketing thing for himself; that’s like a statement basically saying do what you want, we’re not firing anybody or here to make you look bad, you can go out on your own terms, and I put that in quotation marks.”
Perhaps just another mistake in a Commanders career full of them for Wright, but for all that, Grant believes there were some big highlights, too.
“I think he had plenty of wins, but I think they were all very minor things that he controlled. Like, he's a really good dude and was good to fans; he’d show up at fan tailgates when they asked him to, and would come to events on the road sometimes that weren't even sponsored by the team.
He had a club in the bag where he was, I think very good to fans that he built relationships with,” GP said. “I think that that's smart and that's necessary, and I thought his decency in a lot of ways, with fans generally, was a nice departure, and he was tangible in a way that the previous President, Bruce Allen, and some that have come before him were not. So I think that's a win.”
But yeah, about those losses…
“The biggest games he played in, if you will, the biggest losses came on the biggest stages, like the stadium deal – where are we on that, and what is going on with the stadium?” Grant asked. “He mentions it in his statement, but it seems like there's not really progress being made right now. I'm sure there is behind the scenes and I'm not telling you it's his fault, I’m just saying that when you think of Jason Wright team president, the first thing you think of is probably the rebrand, and how’d that work out? And the second thing is the stadium, so even if you have 20 wins on the little teeny-tiny games that you played, when your Super Bowls went the way that these couple have, that's gonna be the legacy problem.”
“Yeah – where are they playing and what are they called are so far incomplete and F,” Danny said.
So all that said, G&D tried to peg the biggest win and worst loss of the tenure, and here’s what we got:
“For the good, I will say the effort and the fan relatability. You could reach him and he was way more willing to engage in any capacity; we’ve had him on the show several times, and every media member in this town who covers this team at a level above a certain threshold had time with Jason Wright multiple times over,” GP said. “The bad would be…I’m debating between 2/2/22, Sean Taylor day, or I guess just the fact that there's not only still not been ground broken, but there's no stadium deal. But I just got to go with 2/2/22 and folding chairs at the 50-yard line, ‘we’re the Commanders.’ That whole thing will just always eat at me, and there's nothing anyone can say at me to make me feel better about that.”
“Good is a human being, at a time of the most embarrassment and turmoil, the most awful a pro sports organization maybe has ever had it – pandemic, a million investigations, Dan Snyder ruining everything, absolute rock bottom – here is somebody that was approachable, thoughtful, and you saw a face,” Danny said. “He was there when we needed someone to talk to. But the negative, you touched on the specific but the general is very easy: any kind of institutional memory touch point, any time it was something the fans care about and has to do with the team before you and long after you, was a swing and a miss. You can go up and down the board, it was a consistent Joey Gallo-esque batting average.”