BLESS JIM IRSAY FOR TARGETING SNYDER, AS OTHER NFL OWNERS PAUSE

While Jones and Kraft were busy sparring, the reborn owner of the Colts stepped forward despite a past league suspension, leading the charge to remove the Washington rogue who enabled a toxic culture

     Eyes red, speech slurred, so high on oxycodone and hydrocodone that the police made him sit on the hood of their squad car so he wouldn’t fall, Jim Irsay was an NFL owner with a problem. Busted for driving under the influence, he could have killed someone late on an Indiana night.

     The league suspended him for six games and fined him $500,000, which shamed him as a pariah within the billionaire boys club in the mid-2010s. He cleaned up a wicked addiction to painkillers and alcohol and resumed life as a better man, but years later, the sting of his ordeal could have relegated him to humbled silence at official ownership functions.

     Instead, in his most admirable deed as owner of the Indianapolis Colts, Irsay is leading the charge against another owner with many problems. Dan Snyder has reduced a football franchise in our nation’s capital, once proud and immensely profitable, to a wretchedly performing debacle with a toxic laundry list. He carries on as if he’s above the law, let alone the NFL shield. The league is investigating him, but he shrugs and defiantly blames a “well-funded, two-year campaign to coerce the sale of the team, which will continue to be unsuccessful.” Congress subpoenaed him, but he ignored the demand and stayed on his yacht near Cannes. Nothing fazes Snyder, who was dressed like a beach bum last Thursday night in a suite at Soldier Field, where the club he has owned for 23 mostly abysmal seasons beat the Chicago Bears, one of the few teams worse than the Washington Commanders.

     But maybe an outraged man in Indiana will faze him. Thinking about his three daughters and seven granddaughters and their future, Irsay cannot fathom the debauchery that poisoned the culture of Snyder’s franchise. Maybe other owners can tolerate a workplace environment in which sexual harassment was rampant and videos circulated of partially nude team cheerleaders. Maybe they can support Snyder amid an accusation that he groped and tried to remove the clothes of a former team employee on his private plane — a lawsuit settled for $1.6 million, reports the Washington Post. Irsay chose to use the NFL’s fall meeting as a platform to rub out Snyder, once and for all. Removal will require 24 votes from the league’s 32 owners, no simple mission, but Irsay is hellbent to build consensus.

     “I believe that there is merit to removing him as owner. I think serious consideration has to be given to removal. I believe in the workplace today, the standard that the shield stands for in the NFL, that you have to stand for that and protect that,” he told a group of reporters in a lower Manhattan hotel. “I just think once owners talk among each other they will arrive at the right decision. I believe that’s the road we probably need to go down and we just need to finish the investigation, but it’s gravely concerning to me the things that have occurred there over the last 20 years. You have to protect the game, protect what we’re about. This isn’t what we’re about.

     “Some of the things I've heard doesn't represent us at all. I want the American public to know what we're about as owners. You can't shy away from the fact that, I believe it's in the best interest of the National Football League that we look at this squarely in the eyes and deal with it. I think America, the world, expects us to as leaders.”

     How disturbing that the NFL, the biggest show on television and never more stocked with fortune and power, hasn’t already gathered unanimity among owners to begin ejection proceedings. The owners can’t handle prosperity, as shown by a heated exchange during the meeting between the league’s two most powerful owners, Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft. Jones was the only owner in the room who doesn’t want to reward commissioner Roger Goodell, the builder of their kingdom, with more guaranteed money in his next contract than the collective $128 million he made the last two years. At one point, Jones snapped at Kraft, according to ESPN.

     “Don’t f— with me,” Jones said.

     “Excuse me?” Kraft replied.

     “Don’t mess with me,” Jones shot back.

     Wait, didn’t Kraft get married just the other night? No honeymoon, Bob? Jerry didn’t bring you a wedding gift?

     The official reason why the league is on pause about Snyder, according to Goodell: Investigator Mary Jo White must be given sufficient time to complete her probe of Snyder. But the underlying element is that owners fear Snyder’s litigious warpath, already made apparent by ESPN’s recent bombshell that he has hired law firms and private eyes to gather dirt on his enemies. Many of these owners have much to hide, and if Detective Dan knows where the bodies are buried, some may be reluctant to join Irsay’s crusade. How curious that those on the fence include two men who have paddled through scandalous waters themselves. Jones, a longtime friend and ally of Snyder, paid $2.4 million to settle voyeurism claims made by four Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders against Rich Dalrymple, his longtime publicist and media protector. As for Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, his Pilot Flying J chain paid a $92 million fine so the U.S. government wouldn’t prosecute his truck-stop company in a fraud case, which came before he ignored a boatload of civil cases against Deshaun Watson for inappropriate sexual conduct — now up to 26 — and signed the quarterback to the NFL’s largest-ever fully guaranteed deal, $230 million over five years.

     “We’ve all agreed we wouldn’t comment. But I know this, I’ve said it, I have no knowledge of anything that has got any basis to it,” Jones said as he left the hotel. “And I’m brought up in the (ESPN) article. This is a media issue more than it is an ownership issue. I have no knowledge. Period.”

     “It's premature for anybody to make any comments," Haslam said. "We need to follow the process.”

     Irsay has nothing to hide, apparently. That makes him a hero in a climate where powerful, wealthy men are trained to cover their asses. “I could care less. You can investigate me ’til the cows come home,” he said. “That’s not going to back me off, private investigators or any of that stuff.”

     Ultimately, what might turn the vote against Snyder is his mishandling of the Washington franchise. His team now generates the league’s lowest revenues, thanks to a decrepit stadium that has little chance of being replaced because Snyder has alienated politicians and clout brokers who could make it happen. He is costing the other 31 owners substantial sums, and, sorry to say, most of them care more about money than protecting aggrieved women. Jones would flip on Snyder in a Texas two-step if he knew that, say, Amazon king Jeff Bezos — who owns the Washington Post, which has done the most published damage to Snyder — was seriously vying to buy the Commanders and build a $5 billion mega-stadium. For now, Goodell is protecting the league from Snyder’s legal bulldogs.

     “There’s no reason for there to be any speculation at this point in time or discussion until we have the facts. That was my message to ownership,” Goodell said. “Speculation without facts is not a very positive thing to do. I think everyone deserves to have the facts and to make sure those decisions are made with facts, and the membership will have that opportunity.”

     Until then, Snyder will try to lobby his fellow owners. He wrote a letter to  all 31, condemning the spy details in ESPN’s story as b.s. “That is patently false and intended to erode the trust and goodwill between owners that I take quite seriously,” he wrote. “I have never hired any private investigator to look into any owner or the commissioner. I have never instructed or authorized my lawyers to hire any private investigator on my behalf for any such purpose. And I never would. … Falsehoods and lies being spread about any of out organizations hurts our league, our players and our fans, and we simply cannot let them go unchallenged.”

     What he didn’t deny is considerably more important: His workplace was akin to a gentlemen’s club after midnight. In due time, White’s report will eliminate the gray areas and shed light on Snyder’s shattered, filthy empire. You might remember when Detective Dan said his team’s name would be changed only “over my dead body.” He continued to live when the Redskins became the Commanders. But the sense is growing that he’ll be carried away in a body bag soon enough.

     Jim Irsay, bless him, can be the lead pallbearer.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.