You’ve surely heard by now of the ESPN story, written by Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta, that basically states how the releasing of Jon Gruden's emails ultimately ruined Snyder's Commanders ownership – and you have probably heard Danny Rouhier’s rant about it Wednesday at the top of the Grant & Danny Show.
Well, not an hour after Danny got to pop off, he welcomed Wickersham onto the show to discuss the situation further – and confirmed Danny’s suspicion that if Dan had just left well enough alone, he’d be fine, but he’s the sole one to blame for this investigation blowing up in his face.
“That’s the thing that we tried to explore with this story: how are we at this point where Dan Snyder is selling the team he swore he’d never sell. The path we all came back to was that week in October 2021 with the Gruden emails, and the thing that was really illuminating was going back to those emails, everyone agreed that if they hadn’t gotten out, we wouldn’t be where we are with Dan Snyder, or have had the Congressional investigations and inquiry, and criminal investigation into alleged financial misconduct, and Snyder backed into a corner saying he was going to blow up the league.”
Was Dan Snyder trying to impugn Bruce Allen, who hadn’t congratulated him on hiring Ron Rivera and was involved in the Gruden emails, the type of perfectly petty thing Snyder would do – and the thing that blew up in his face, not the league’s?
There was no smoking gun, Wickersham says, but there was a “blackmail powerpoint” that incriminated Snyder for sure.
“He talked about the emails that came out later – the Gruden emails. So those were part of a preview well before they leaked,” Wickersham said. “Snyder’s team goes to the league office after the Wilkinson report, and while the league was expecting his side of the story, his legal team put up a series of slides with emails and text messages that are potentially embarrassing. A source with first-hand knowledge of this told us their point was to argue the hypocrisy of the NFL for judging Dan Snyder – but the tactics were so ruthless that some of his attorneys felt uncomfortable after the fact, and the message was clear: if the NFL didn’t do what Dan Snyder wanted in terms of handling the Wilkinson report and the punishment, these emails would be leaked.”
We know what ultimately happened (or didn’t) with that report, and Wickersham quoted a source that Snyder was “dictating his punishment and weighing in on word choices in the press release,” so the word ‘suspension’ was never used and punishment looked voluntary.
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And that’s where the problem happened.
“There was a discrepancy in what they thought was the vague punishment, and when it ended – and he attended every game in the 2021 season, because he thought around the time of the league meetings that October, everything was done and he was free and clear to be seen as the face of the team,” Wickersham said. “The league wanted to keep him away, and Tanya continued to represent the team at league functions, but it looked like he was going to survive until that week when Goodell and his team found some of the Gruden emails. They were supposed to stay confidential – the only people who had them were the league, Snyder, and their legal teams – but within a week, they were out.”
He didn’t quite blow up the league, and definitely blew up himself, but Dan Snyder did at least have some other involuntary collateral damage in Gruden and the Raiders.
“There’s a lot of collateral damage in this, and Raiders owner Mark Davis felt his team was part of it in the war between Snyder and Roger Goodell,” Wickersham said. “He wondered why this was coming out when Gruden was just getting the Raiders back to prominence and they were getting ingratiated into Las Vegas, and he felt pressured by the league to let Gruden go. He ends up filing a lawsuit against the NFL, and says, 'F Dan Snyder, and F the NFL.'"
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Jeff Pash, the NFL’s general counsel and executive vice president, was part of the damage as well, as the Snyder team wanted to “make everyone complicit in this horrifically toxic workplace in Washington” by trying to link Bruce Allen to a ‘cozy’ relationship with the league office…and here we are, almost two years later, with Snyder on the way out.
BUT, and there’s always a but, there’s STILL the Mary Jo White report that has yet to be revealed in any form, now just a week before Snyder’s ownership of the Commanders ends – and Wickersham wonders if we're not going to see it until well after next Thursday?
“We’ll see when this gets announced, and it should be close, but the only template for something like this is her investigation on Jerry Richardson, where the league used her findings as leverage to force him to sell the team, and then released the findings after the fact,” Wickersham said. “I don’t know exactly how that investigation fits here, because it’s been going on for a long time and has been on a parallel track since he announced the team was for sale last fall – and both have been atypical and drawn out, so we’ll have to see the report to see how it fits into any of this stuff.”
Listen to Wickersham’s entire call-in above!
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