In April 2023, Dan Snyder agreed to sell the Washington Commanders. An ownership group led by Josh Harris purchased the team, and Jayden Daniels and the Commanders advanced to the NFC Championship Game in their first year without Snyder at the helm.
ESPN’s Seth Wickersham has written about the Snyder saga in recent years and his reporting played a huge role in Snyder’s decision to ultimately sell the team.
Seth Wickersham Opens About Dan Snyder Reporting, Commanders’ New Ownership
PFSN caught up with Wickersham to discuss his reporting on Snyder, his recent follow-up about how Snyder “hates” the Commanders’ success, how Harris and Magic Johnson have changed the organization, whether it’s a coincidence that Washington is thriving right after Snyder was out of the picture, Snyder’s infamous “Blackmail PowerPoint,” and much more.
I’ve heard from a number of executives who say the hardest part of their job isn’t trying to sign free agents or negotiate trades, it’s actually trying to work with their owners and get them to sign off on things. Do you think most fans realize the impact that a good or bad owner has on a franchise?
Seth Wickersham: “That’s funny. I think that managing up is definitely a plight of team presidents, no matter what sport you’re in.
“And I think that is one of the things that Don Van Natta Jr. and I, both separately and together, have enjoyed doing is writing really deep, detailed stories that show you who these owners are and what they’re like in private meetings and the things that they say and the way that they manage and the decisions that they make.
“It’s something that we’ve really enjoyed trying to do, and hopefully, fans enjoy it because I think that the ownership circle and the boardroom of teams has been a really undercovered aspect of sports until about the last 10 or so years.”
For a long time, it felt like owners were kind of untouchable and could do whatever they wanted. Now, in recent years, that has changed with Donald Sterling, Dan Snyder, and Robert Sarver losing their teams. I think part of that is because of the work people like you, Don, and Baxter Holmes have done. But why is it that owners are now being held accountable?
Seth: “I don’t know. I think you’d have to take a really detailed poll of all sports journalists to try to understand that, but my gut would tell me that it’s just really hard. And especially a lot of journalists are stretched pretty thin with a lot of responsibilities, so really trying to understand who owners are and the decisions that they make, what motivates them, what it’s like to work for them, what it’s like to be in a room with them, I think takes a lot of time.
“One of the things that my colleagues and I have really been blessed with is being able to pursue stories without artificial deadlines and to report and report and report until you feel like you’ve got a story that’s ready rather than a story that has to fit into a particular news cycle.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why, with a lot of these stories that I and some of our colleagues have done, they kind of almost become their own news cycle. Because you’re able to just get a depth of reporting and hopefully the quality of storytelling that makes people stop whatever they’re doing and wanna read it.”
Once the Donald Sterling situation happened, I wonder if that sort of set the precedent and encouraged other people to speak up about their experiences too.
Seth: “I think that that sounds plausible. I don’t think that you enter into a story saying, ‘I’m gonna report this with the goal of somebody losing their team.’ I think you’re just trying to be as thorough as you possibly can, and whatever happens, happens. I mean, in 2022, Don Van Natta Jr., Tisha Thompson, and I did our first Dan Snyder story, which was a big deep dive into how he was trying to hold onto his team, how he had survived as an owner.
“A lot of it had to do with the ‘dirt’ that he had collected. He said to sources, ‘They can’t f with me because of everything that I know.’ But a month later, he puts the team up for sale. A couple of days after that story, Jim Irsay, on the record at the NFL owners meeting, says that it’s time for the NFL to move on from Dan Snyder. And a month later, Snyder puts his team up for sale.
“Now, we didn’t write that story with the goal of it for Dan Snyder to sell his team. As a matter of fact, that story, the meat of it, was how he had hung onto it! And so I think whatever story you’re trying to pursue, you just pursue it as fully as you possibly can, and then whatever happens after it is really beyond your control.
“I do think that that story helped push the collective ownership group to want to push Dan Snyder out in a way that a lot of the other cultural issues that they’d had in the building didn’t, and that’s a very odd dynamic there, a very interesting ecosystem. But again, we were trying to show how he had survived in that one.”
Has Snyder ever contacted you or your colleagues — either directly or indirectly — to share how he feels about your reporting?
Seth: “Not personally, directly to me. I don’t know about others.”
The detail about Snyder digging up dirt on the other owners was interesting. Why do you think he didn’t release the dirt, and do you think there’s a chance it will someday see the light of day?
Seth: “I think he liked having it as a threat to be able to deploy rather than that he actually wanted to release it. I don’t think he actually wanted, like, a civil war. I think that he liked having it as something that kind of kept people on their toes. In the summer of 2023, Don and I did another story on Dan Snyder about how close he was to hanging onto his team and it centered around the Jon Gruden emails.
“There was a meeting that we reported on in the league office where Snyder’s lawyers presented their rebuttal to an investigation and they did it for Roger Goodell, Jeff Pash, and some other league executives, and their entire rebuttal to this investigation that had gone on about the culture of the team was basically to put up a bunch of emails from Jeff Pash and Roger Goodell and text messages with the tacit understanding that they can leak those at any time. I mean, the executives called it the ‘Blackmail PowerPoint.’”
Wow. Do you think it’s a coincidence that in the first year without Snyder, the Commanders advanced further than they ever did with him in charge?
Seth: “I think it would have been difficult for Dan Snyder to hire that quality of talent to the team. I think Jason Wright obviously did, I think, a pretty good job as team president. I think that he knew that he wasn’t going to be in that job forever. And so, how do you fix things on the football side?
“Does Adam Peters come to Washington from San Francisco if Dan Snyder is still the owner? I kinda doubt it. I don’t know that for a fact, but I doubt it. If he’s not there, is Dan Quinn even in the mix to be hired there? Are they able to get an offensive coordinator like Kliff Kingsbury?
“The draft pick, that stuff they easily could have picked [Jayden Daniels still]. But I don’t know if they would have had such a strong infrastructure if Dan had still been there.
“We reported a lot about it, but Dan, for a long time — not irrationally, by the way — felt that all of his problems would go away if they just had a top-four franchise quarterback. You see what having a quarterback of that quality does to a team like Cincinnati, for instance — just how much one quarterback is able to elevate an entire building by his presence alone and mask, shall we say, other deficiencies in parts of the building.”
I love the way you ended your most recent article with the quotes from Josh Harris and Magic Johnson. In addition to putting the right people in place, what do you make of the new ownership group and what they have done differently with the organization?
Seth: “Well, look, everything’s been coming up Washington lately, right? You had the senate bill in December that freed up the RFK site to be managed by the District of Columbia and to build a stadium there. I think the problem was that Snyder was so toxic that he just created a ton of problems that even talented and well-intentioned people could not transcend.
“So, when Jason Wright and other executives are lobbying senators trying to get that DC RFK site for a new stadium, the first 20 minutes of any meeting has to be dedicated to the elephant in the room, and that’s Dan Snyder. ‘Is he going to be gone? When is that gonna happen?’
“With him gone, it just lifted a huge weight off of everybody. And then to have success on the field helped; now, when those executives go to meet with senators, the first 10 minutes of the conversation is about the on-field product and this quarterback that they have that looks like he could be one of the best ones in the league going forward.
“Just the tone of every conversation changed when Dan Snyder left. I think he was the biggest albatross to them doing things externally, and I also think internally within the building.
“I think trying to be a change agent in a building when you have such a toxic and powerful owner — an owner famous for being in the weeds on every single decision, especially financial ones — that just made things really hard, I think, for the executives of that team down to the coaching staff.”
As you were reporting on this saga, what was the craziest Dan Snyder story that you heard? The “Blackmail PowerPower” is really wild — that’s probably up there.
Seth: “Yeah, the ‘Blackmail PowerPoint,’ I think, was the one that really stood out. And he wasn’t even in the meeting, it was his lawyers that did it. But that was the type of owner that Dan Snyder was, it was the way that he thought [was] best to get the attention of league executives.
“And I’m sure that Snyder himself saw a hypocrisy across the NFL that he had become the guy that they wanted out, and that’s the way that he chose to fight back. But I think that it was revealing in a lot of ways and newsworthy.”
In your most recent piece, you reported that Snyder “hates” the fact that the Commanders are thriving. How did this follow-up piece come together?
Seth: “Well, stories come together in all kinds of different ways. In 2022, we had a specific idea for a story: how has Dan Snyder managed to hang onto this team? And so we were reporting for any details that kinda fit within that umbrella. This story was different.
“One of the best things about ESPN is that they let us continue to gather string on people or situations that might be newsworthy without having to just rush it out for the sake of rushing it out, so there are pieces of that story that Don and I have had in our notebooks for over a year.
“I think that as the fall went on, we, and especially Don, realized that something on Dan Snyder might be really newsworthy. For some personal reasons I won’t bore you with, we weren’t able to do a lot of work on that story in December and early January.
“But then once they made it to the NFC Championship Game, we huddled with our editor, Mike Drago, who kinda was like, ‘Hey, what can we put together right now? Do we have a story?’ We had some reporting gaps to fill in, but for the most part, we felt like we had a good story and something to say, and we were able to put that one out there.”
Washington fans seemed to love the fact that Snyder is miserable and hating the team’s success. What did you think of the response from Commanders fans — did it surprise you or did you see it coming?
Seth: “No. I mean, I’m never surprised. I’ve written a lot of pretty tough investigative stories on the New England Patriots, so I’m not ever surprised by any fan base’s reaction to anything. But I think that fan base just wanted a new owner. They wanted a reason to follow up with their team again, and any stories that they read that maybe help reinforce why they felt that way, I think they tend to like.
“There was somebody who tweeted at some point, ‘If the District of Columbia was gonna throw a parade for people who helped write stories that led to Dan Snyder selling the team, here are the top 15,’ and Don and I were two of the top 15. That’s kind of an interesting image to think about, parading down DC. (Laughs) I don’t think we would go to it, but it was kind of an interesting image and a funny thought.”
I think you guys would probably be in the top three! You did an incredible job with these articles, and I think these kinds of investigative pieces should be taught in journalism classes. What advice would you give to aspiring journalists who see these pieces and want to do something similar?
Seth: “Well, I think there’s a lot of bad news about our business. But when you’re in school and you’re just getting into it, the thing that I think is cause for a ton of optimism for those students is that you get so much more exposure to big stories and high-profile assignments than I would have gotten back when I graduated from the University of Missouri in 2000 and that a lot of people would have gotten.
“I mean, before, I think there was much more of an infrastructure in place — you paid your dues doing cops and courts or doing a beat for a college basketball team, and then you eventually moved up to maybe a pro team in the market, whatever it might be. And because of some of the issues in the industry, a lot of the steps have been eliminated.
“So, when you’re coming out of college, you have an opportunity to do way more high-profile stuff at a younger age, and so I think there’s a reason to be excited if you’re one of those students because with those chances comes just a ton of opportunity, and you never know where these stories might lead.
“You’ve seen a lot of young reporters rise to have pretty high-profile assignments; Baxter Holmes is one of them, for instance. But I just think that the opportunity to do those big, meaty types of stories is out there for the taking in a way. And so if I were a student coming out of journalism school, I would be very optimistic and excited about that.”
