Perhaps, in hindsight, it would have been wise for the current Washington Football Team owner to have used three names.
Were he known as Daniel Marc Snyder, he would be following in the tradition of the three men who ran the show for the Washington Football Team prior to his arrival: George Preston Marshall, Edward Bennett Williams, and Jack Kent Cooke. All had mercurial personalities and massive egos. All had prominent embarrassments. But, to date, all had greater success than two-named Dan Snyder.
Alas, three-name owners – at least the male variety – are out of favor in the today’s NFL. There are your Virginia Halas McCaskeys and your Denise DeBartolo Yorks – married women who took their husbands’ names while keeping their own surnames as well – but there is only one male owner who currently goes by three names. I would tell you who it is, but I feel that I am getting off on a major tangent here, and probably should get to my point.
That point is – four men have essentially run what is now known as the Washington Football Team throughout its 90-year history. Here is a brief biography of each.
GEORGE PRESTON MARSHALL (Majority owner, 1932-1969)
Marshall retained majority ownership until his death in 1969 but over a several-year period in the early-60s, ill health forced him to relinquish daily operations. By 1965, though still the nominal owner, he was uninvolved in team business.
Coming to terms with Marshall and his extraordinary career in professional sports is a chore for any serious fan of the franchise he founded. On the one hand, he was the man who, along with a few soon-to-be-forgotten partners, birthed the franchise into existence in 1932 as the Boston Braves. Five years later, he was the man who moved the team to its new home in Washington. In those early days, under his leadership, Washington won two Championships, and was often a contender for the title.
But those early achievements barely scratch the surface of what George Preston Marshall meant to the NFL. Unlike prominent owners the likes of Chicago’s George Halas, Marshall had no particular football knowledge. He presided over a dry cleaning empire, and harbored ambitions of becoming an actor. It was this latter passion – a passion for show business – that made Marshall instrumental in elevating the league from its second-class status to the new national pastime by the end of his life.
Marshall proposed numerous on-field rule changes to make the game more exciting. The most important of these – liberalizing the ability of the quarterback to throw a forward pass, the use of hash marks to allow an offense better spacing – became fundamental components of what the game would become.
And off the field, he brought the showman’s touch, creating the concepts of a marching band and uniformed cheerleaders, halftime shows, radio and then television networks, as well as many other successful and less-than-successful innovations.
George Preston Marshall was elected into the inaugural call of the Pro Football Hall of Fame with very good reason.
And yet, Marshall embodied many of the worst qualities you could find in an owner. His meddlesome nature caused him to constantly interfere in games, running onto the field to harangue an official over a questionable call or to make suggestions/demands of his coaches regarding personnel and play-calling. He was also notoriously stingy, and this caused him to lose many fine players over the years.
Marshall was wise enough to hire the outstanding coach Ray Flaherty when the team moved to Washington, and he was savvy enough to retain him even after Flaherty openly challenged the owner’s attempts to involve himself in on-field decisions. That decision paid off in a championship in 1937. But as soon as he got his chance, Marshall would jettison Flaherty for more acquiescent coaches, and that decision would lead into a long, slow slide into mediocrity and beyond.
Worst of all, Marshal was a bigot. He was the last owner to integrate his team, and he only did so under the threat of federal sanctions. By that time, in the early 1960s, he was presiding over the worst franchise in the league, a laughingstock that struggled to win even a game or two. His apologists claim the owner bore no racist intentions. They claim this was a business decision. There were no teams in the south at this point. The shrewd businessman in Marshall jumped on this opportunity to extend his fan base into the deep south, and he maintained that such a fan base would not tolerate black players.
At best, this was short-sighted and weak-willed. At worst, it was a crass rationalization of his inherent racism. Subsequent research suggests that the latter is closer to the truth.
Whether you choose to accept such things as being products of a particular time or not is your own decision. At least one part of his legacy is undeniable. Without George Preston Marshall, there may have never been a professional football team in Washington DC. A team probably would have been established in Baltimore, and that may have been it for the region.
Marshall sold off a quarter interest of the franchise to a Canadian businessman living in California in the early 1960s, but rules regarding cross-ownership in multiple leagues prevented the new minority owner from taking an active role in the team’s operations. Consequently, when Marshall’s health began deteriorating in 1963, another minority owner with a mere five percent stake began to seize control. And his name was …
EDWARD BENNETT WILLIAMS (Minority owner/President, 1965-1979)
For younger fans of the Washington Football Team, Williams may be the least-known of the men who called the shots. So it is worth pointing out that in the world outside of football, Edward Bennett Williams had a larger impact on the way American society functions today than the other three owners combined.
Indeed, though Williams was a major player in the sports world (he maintained ownership of the Baltimore Orioles after selling off his football team stake), he had a day job as an attorney. A defense attorney. A defense attorney who represented the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and Joseph McCarthy. An attorney, who alongside colleagues like Louis Brandeis, Clarence Darrow, and Thurgood Marshall, was arguably among the most important legal minds of the 20th century.
You can learn more about Williams’ fascinating life elsewhere (Evan Thomas’ The Man to See is a very good starting point) but suffice to say that many of the rights that the common man enjoys today when coming into conflict with the government exist due to the efforts of Edward Bennett Williams. For instance, the police cannot tap your phones without cause in large part because of a defense Williams once employed in a case.
But that has nothing to do with his ownership of the Washington Football Team. Williams bought a small piece – eventually 5% — of the club back in the late 1950s. When Marshall began exhibiting mental decline, Williams and two other minority owners went to court to wrest day-to-day control from him. One of the other owners died, and by 1965, Edward Bennett Williams was running the team.
Williams could be just as mercurial and star-struck as his predecessor. One of his first actions as owner was to fire coach Bill McPeak and hire legendary quarterback Otto Graham. Then, in the manner of the current team owner, he immediately began to undermine his new hire by conducting his own private meetings with players and staff. He engineered awful personnel moves – acquiring Heisman Trophy winner Gary Beban and perennial problem child Joe Don Looney. Both proved disastrous.
But he did a few other things that worked out pretty well. For one thing, Williams began changing the culture that had been lukewarm at best to players of color (There is an entirely plausible story that Williams was in line to buy a much larger share of the team in the late ‘50s, but his continual suggestions that the Washington Football Team integrate its roster led to a cooling of his relationship with George Preston Marshall).
He also pulled off a coup by convincing Vince Lombardi to leave Green Bay and come to Washington in 1969. After Lombardi’s untimely death, Williams then brought in George Allen, the man who had fleeced him in the Gary Beban deal, from Los Angeles.
Williams and his coach had a tumultuous relationship (Early on, the owner famously proclaimed “we agreed we had an unlimited budget. He has already exceeded it”). But in less than a decade, Washington went from laughingstock to conference champion and their first Super Bowl. Shortly before ceding complete control, Williams was instrumental in hiring a new general manager in the late 1970s. That GM, Bobby Beathard, would help the franchise ascend to the top of the mountain under the next regime.
Williams also engineered a structural maneuver that would have lasting impact on the franchise. After George Preston Marshall’s death in 1969, Williams arranged for Marshall’s controlling interest in the team to be sold back to the franchise. The franchise then liquidated those shares. The effect of these moves was to elevate that mostly silent partner Canadian partner to the status of majority owner. However, since he still owned teams in other professional leagues out west, he remained behind the scenes, allowing Williams to control his shares.
Williams helped the Washington Football Team emerge from decades-long doldrums. He made the owners box at RFK Stadium the place to be. Stars from politics and journalism mingled with Hollywood celebrities. The team saw quick results in the early ‘70s. Then after a difficult split with George Allen toward the end of the decade, Williams helped rebuild so that even greater success would be possible. It just needed the right man at the helm.
JACK KENT COOKE, THE SQUIRE (Majority/Sole Owner, 1980-1996)
Cooke was actually the majority owner from 1974 on, but his ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angles Kings prevented him from acting as owner. Then he got divorced in the late ‘70s, sold off his Los Angeles teams, and moved east, where he would lead the Washington Football Team to glory.
Cooke was as iron-willed and egotistical as the two men who preceded him. Maybe more so. But he understood one fundamental fact better than they did (and better than the man who would eventually succeed him). Jack Kent Cooke knew what he didn’t know.
He was an extremely successful entrepreneur. But in the highly specialized world of professional sport, he recognized that others had more expertise. This probably came about because he had owned professional sports teams prior to owning a football team. Bobby Beathard was already in place. Joe Gibbs was about to arrive. Jack Kent Cooke was smart enough to write the necessary checks, and then sit back and let the professionals do their jobs.
Beathard and Gibbs agreed that the Squire only stepped in when the coach and GM couldn’t agree on something. Then the owner would settle the dispute. The results were obvious. Three Super Bowls. Green, Grimm, Monk and the Diesel to the Hall of Fame. Along with the coach. The Hogs. A new rivalry with the Giants. Success through strikes. Success in the draft. Success with free agents. Success after success after success.
Of course, it had to end. And it didn’t end pretty. It rarely does. Mr. Cooke’s plans late in his life would not work out how he intended. The first blow came when Coach Gibbs suddenly called it quits just one season after winning his third Super Bowl. Gibbs was worn out and even the Squire could not convince him to stay on.
He did not live to see the other two disappointments. Cooke desperately wanted a new state-of-the-art stadium. The beloved RFK was, by the mid-‘90s, the smallest venue in the league. And it was falling down. Cooke invested a great deal of time and effort into building the current stadium. Despite his efforts, the fans never warmed to it, and it will most likely come and go never having carved its place into the public’s heart. Cooke died before it was completed so he never saw the finished product.
And then there was the awkward matter of transition. Cooke’s son, John Kent Cooke, seemed destined to take over after his father’s death, but Jack’s will made that difficult. It left the franchise in the hands of trustees who were instructed to sell it to the strongest bidder. John Kent Cooke initially appeared to be in position to complete the purchase, but eventually, he would lose out.
Before he did, there was a group of executors who actually served as de facto ownership for two years…
THE EXECUTORS (1997-98)
The less said about them, the better.
Suffice to say, a muddled situation in which John Kent Cooke and a group of other functionaries – many of whom were financial advisers to Jack Kent Cooke, with no football experience of which to speak – battled over day-to-day decisions, benefitted no one. Trent Green would have stayed on as quarterback, maybe on a team-friendly deal. But there was no one to give GM Charlie Casserly final approval.
So Green walked, and Casserly traded for Brad Johnson. Johnson was good for the two years he was with the Washington Football Team, but he was a short-timer, and the draft capital given away for him made it harder to rebuild an aging team. Small example of some serious disfunction.
And while we’re on the subject of disfunction…
DANIEL SNYDER (Majority owner, 1999-present)
In 1999, it looked as if the trustees had found their buyer in a group headed by real estate titan Howard Milstein and his brother Edward. The Milsteins already held a substantial interest in the NHL’s New York Islanders. But the deal, which was announced in January of ’99, had to be approved by the NFL finance committee. And when the finance committee got into the details of the bid, they did not like what they saw. The bid was eventually withdrawn.
The Milstein’s partner, a successful young man who had grown up as a big fan of his hometown team, decided to forge ahead. Daniel M. Snyder found new partners and completed the purchase for $800 million. It dwarfed the previous record for the sale of a franchise.
It became apparent early on that despite his thirst for winning, the new owner lacked something that the previous three had. He was not comfortable in the spotlight. Though he clearly was prepared to invest in the team, he was never going to be the quotable Cooke, the eloquent Williams, or the showman Marshall.
That kind of thing really shouldn’t matter. And if you win, it doesn’t matter. But when you lose, as the team consistently did under Snyder’s stewardship, his particular brand of prickly shyness came across as smug and defensive. As if he was too thin-skinned to ever hear loyal-but-frustrated fans.
Beyond issues of personality, Snyder made a number of poor decisions early on. He seemed to run the team like a fan would, paying huge salaries for big names who were in the mercenary stages of their careers. Those signings – Smith and Sanders and George – almost never worked out.
He hired a professional coach in Marty Schottenheimer, then almost immediately undermined him, as Edward Bennett Williams had done with Otto Graham three decades earlier.
When Jack Kent Cooke saw a struggle brewing between his coach, Jack Pardee, and his GM, Bobby Beathard, Cooke made a quick and decisive decision to support his GM. Pardee was a highly-respected football man, but it’s hard to argue with the outcome. Early on, Snyder had a similar decision to make. He made the disastrous choice to side with his sycophantic player personnel man Vinnie Cerrato over Schottenheimer, setting the franchise back for a decade.
After moving on from that disaster, Snyder bungled the situation surrounding his supremely-talented young quarterback Robert Griffin III by establishing a back channel line of communication between player and owner which essentially chopped the legs off his veteran coach Mike Shanahan. Neither Shanahan nor Griffin was blameless in what eventually played out, but it all stemmed from an owner who couldn’t keep the chain of command in proper perspective.
The team’s fortunes have suffered correspondingly. Though there is some legitimate hope that Snyder has grown as an owner during his disappointing twenty-year run, a lot of the fanbase remains skeptical. You will hear a lot of comments to the effect of “this team will never win until a new owner is in place.”
The past few years have seen an odd confluence of positive signs on the field and turbulence off of it. A good young roster, a trip to the playoffs. A more diverse front office comprised of real football men, and football women. Those things go along with a horribly-botched situation with All-Pro tackle Trent Williams, very troubling allegations of a long-term sex scandal, and some ugly shake-ups in the front office and in the ranks of ownership.
The most obvious upheaval came when Snyder reversed decades of proclamations and changed the team’s name and everything associated with its iconic mascot. That decision, and the fact that the franchise has not yet come up with something beyond the generic Washington Football Team, is a good metaphor for Snyder’s ownership.
Some applauded the move as long overdue. Some decried it a capitulation to political correctness. It becomes clearer with each passing year that nothing Dan Snyder does will win unambiguous favor in the court of public opinion until his team wins on the football field.
His detractors hope that the recent troubles – especially the sex scandal – will eventually force him into selling the team. Do not hold your breath. Though they have the power to do so, NFL owners have never forced a sale under these types of conditions. They do not want to be in this position. The closest they have come was in 2018, when Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson gave in to pressure and sold his team to David Tepper. There had been numerous reports of sexual impropriety in Carolina, along with secret settlements to keep it all under wraps.
If more evidence comes out about Snyder’s involvement with similar activities regarding the Washington Football Team, the thought is that Snyder, like Richardson, can be encouraged – if not outright forced – to sell. This does not take into account several key differences in the two situations.
Richardson was old and in poor health when he made the decision to sell. It is likely he was not interested in a fight at that point in his life. Snyder is still young, at least by owner standards, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, still healthy. Given what we know about him, it seems unlikely he would shy away from a fight.
Then there is the issue of emotional attachment. While Richardson was a Carolina boy, he had no particular attachment to the Panthers franchise because it did not exist when he was growing up. As everyone knows, Snyder was a childhood fan of the team he now owns.
Furthermore, Richardson could sell the Panthers content with the knowledge that he built it from the ground up. He was the team’s original owner. He brought professional football to North Carolina. He took his team to the Super Bowl.
Snyder, on the other hand, inherited one the league flagship franchises and, to date, has squandered much of its good name and at least some of its value. Marshall won two championships. Williams got his team to their first Super Bowl. Cooke won three of them.
To date, Daniel Snyder has not won a damn thing. I do not see him going quietly under such conditions.
That said, things are looking somewhat better for the Washington Football Team these days. Snyder’s mark has been much less positive than his three predecessors, but hope is always alive with the start of a new season.
And speaking of mark, I still think that Daniel Marc Snyder could be a winning owner, though I am less confident in Dan Snyder.