Bye, Dan Snyder…

Alright, let me play a quick sound bite and then we're going to get into our first guest. So as many of you know, we talked about it briefly yesterday, Daniel Snyder, the soon-to-be former owner of the Washington Commandos, has entered into a preliminary agreement to sell the team to Josh Harris, who is part owner of a lot of stuff in sports. Here's Eben Nove Williams, who is a business reporter for Sportico, on the one thing that was absent from the bidding was a competitive process. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, never really got involved. Some people, when this process started, thought Dan could get a number that began with a seven.

And he did not, I don't think, get the bidding war that he was hoping when this process began. But I think most people got an idea this was going to be a record number. It was going to be significantly more than what the Broncos sold for.

D.C. is a better market. It's a hit. It's a franchise that has, despite Dan's recent work, has a fantastic history.

It's one of those kind of blue blood NFL franchises. And that's really valuable. So for a lot of different reasons, I think we knew this was going to be fixed or higher. And to be totally honest, I think, you know, if Dan was being totally honest, I think he's probably or maybe a little underwhelmed by the final number. It's well, he's of course, he's underwhelmed because he wanted seven million for it.

But if I'm not mistaken, and Grant Paulson from the Grant and Danny show, one of six, seven, the fan in D.C. at Grant Paulson on Twitter, you can fill in the blanks here. Didn't Daniel Snyder buy the franchise for under a billion dollars, however, many years ago? Yeah, he bought it for eight hundred million, selling it for about six billion. So this is evidence that we should all be so lucky as to own an NFL team. You can do a really bad job running it and be loathed and a failure.

And it turns into a six billion dollar entity, despite your greatest efforts to tear it to the ground. And he boy, he made he gave it the old college try there. Grant Paulson, Grant and Danny, one of six, seven, the fan in D.C. So was there a parade? Was there some sort of a celebration, a rally on the mall after the news broke? Yeah, there were random acts of celebration last night. There were people outside the team's facility waving flags. Now, we as a radio station, I think, looked into the possibility maybe of trying to have some type of a parade. But it turns out it's difficult to close down the streets in the nation's capital.

And it's even more difficult to plan a parade when you don't have a very big staff. Having said that, I'm actually right now at a local brewery about five minutes from the team's facility where they're selling beers. There's a line out the door for people that are getting their hands on cans that say by Dan, we're broadcasting from here all day. There's going to be hundreds of people out here celebrating and cheersing to the fact that while the ink is not dry and it's not a done deal at this point, this is now all but official. I mean, he is going to be selling this team. And if it's not, you know, the preliminary deal basically means if he can't get a better offer than the one he's got in hand, it's going to be Josh Harris at the agreed upon money, which is being leaked at six point oh five bill. Right.

I've got reason to believe it might actually be a little bit under that, maybe more like five point eight five bill. I don't know who cares about that other than Dan Snyder. Certainly fans don't. But regardless. Right now, we know that the team is going to be sold. And if it doesn't go down exactly as it is currently written in pencil, it'll be because someone else makes a different bid or maybe he's able to get a little more money. But it's certainly not going to end.

It doesn't look like what Dan Snyder keeping the scene. Well, I having lived in the Washington area, having gone to the University of Maryland for my I'll say schooling, but it is barely that. So having spent 10 years in the D.C. Baltimore corridor, I understand what that franchise means to the people. So and I was in Baltimore even when when Jack Kent Cooke was still the owner of the team.

But when when did it turn on? When did Dan Snyder start getting the pushback from fans as the owner? Because he's a longtime fan and those people tend to care deeply about the franchise. He almost seems like he stopped caring about the franchise and cared more about him. So when did it turn? I think it was a slow burn.

Right. It was kind of a lifetime achievement award that he won over many, many years in terms of being hated and people checking out. I mean, there were a lot of early on little things that gave you pause right in his first year. He inherited a really good team in 1999 that won a playoff game. By the way, they only won one playoff game in the twenty three seasons with him after that. And immediately that offseason after they had the number two offense in the league and Brad Johnson had gone to a Pro Bowl and thrown for 4000 yards.

He decided he wanted out of Brad Johnson as the starter and he wanted to go get Jeff George, who he'd always liked. And that kind of fantasy football after a big year for a guy who would subsequently a couple of years later win a Super Bowl with the Bucks, by the way, and Brad Johnson gave people pause. He spent one hundred million dollars that first offseason and people were excited about that. In hindsight, it was on a lot of older guys at the end of their career with very little left like Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith.

And again, that was a moment where people said, well, this guy building a team sustainably good or is he just trying to sell tickets? He started a charge for training camp. No one had ever done that. He charged for parking a training camp.

No one had ever done that. He made it really difficult and at times made it illegal for people to walk to the stadium and tried to fight people from being able to do that so that they would have to drive and park or do other things to get to the game that would result in getting money. So there were just a lot of money grabs early on that I didn't turn people off stories about how he treated people very badly, bad interactions with either people in the organization or fans.

And over enough years of doing that, you know, people start to notice that, you know, maybe you're not the kind of guy they want to support. And you add in the fact that you run through coaches and you create a culture of toxicity and harassment, as we would later find out. And on the field where it was actually better than off the field, you know, you you win one playoff game other than a team you inherited in your first season. And Paulson, Grant H. Paulson on Twitter, Grant and Danny, one of six, seven, the fan in D.C., the whole the end seems to have been drawn out with Snyder, not just the sale process. But it's it's been obvious probably for the last four, maybe five years, that this was going to be the ultimate end, that whether the league was going to do it or his owners were going to do it, which really didn't happen until it became super embarrassing on a daily basis for Snyder to be there. They technically removed him as the day to day owner, even though it was his wife. And I can't believe that anybody fell for that.

So what has the last couple of years been like as a fan up there? Well, the only thing I would say and push back on is at least locally and certainly within this fan base, there was very little thought that he was ever going to sell until really the last several months, to be honest. I mean, that was floated at times. I remember the first time he was being investigated for the harassment in the workplace when The Washington Post came out with a bombshell story, an expose of sorts about, you know, kind of what Dan Snyder had allowed to fester. And I remember at that time, people thought maybe he would be forced out.

And what ended up happening was that the organization got fined a slap on the wrist amount of like ten million dollars, and he didn't even really get suspended. And at that point, it was pretty clear that he was not at risk, that the league was not going to do anything about how he was operating. It was not until November 2nd of this year when he actually with his wife announced publicly that they hired a bank to look into a possible sale could have been minor or major portion of the team. We didn't know at the time that people really opened themselves to this possibility. A lot of people the day before that, I promise you, November 1st of this year, this past winter would have told you, you know, they'll die and he'll still be the owner.

You're going to have to pry this out of his hands. So that was kind of the thought. I think a lot of people have talked themselves into and resigned themselves to the fact that if they wanted to support this team, it meant supporting him. Now, this was the number one attendance organization and the number three, I think, TV ratings organization in terms of NFL markets for a long time, even as they were losing with Snyder. And they've just fallen off completely in both regards. I mean, people don't go to games and it was dead last TV market numbers occasionally in the one o'clock window.

You get the Ravens or an AFC game on CBS out drawing Washington on Fox. He's completely gutted the fan base and sapped them of all their passions. And it's because people have sworn him off. They said, I'm not giving him a penny. I'm not going to games. I'm not supporting.

I'm not buying gear. And the hope is now with a new owner coming in here that maybe some of those people come back and I don't know if you can ever build this thing back into what it was as the Redskins, because there are plenty of people who just aren't going to buy in on this new name and feel like it's more of an expansion operation. But you got some hope that at least you can win and that you can watch your team without having to be the butt of jokes off the field again. I actually I have never called them by the actual name.

I call them the commandos. They've deserved that. And I actually liked Washington football team. I wish they would have leaned into that, especially as soccer has become so much bigger and bigger all over this country and all over the world. It's always been big all over the world.

But our awareness of soccer globally has changed. I wish they would have just leaned into Washington football team. I liked it. I'm also a fan of the head coach. And I think you and I talked when Rivera was hired, he was the perfect hire for that team because he's such a solid human being. And I hope this is good for Ron. And I hope it is good for I mean, I have many, many friends who are fans of that franchise. And I hope it's good for them because I think the NFL is a better place when Washington is a healthy franchise. And I know it's good for you, Grant. And I'm all about what's good for Grant Paulson. That makes two of us.

We both are in that boat. Yeah, I think business will boom here for everyone. I mean, yesterday we had listeners telling us that people were reaching out to them from their ticket office asking if the news had changed their mind on not wanting season tickets. So the team is not wasting any time. They know that on the other side of Snyder being out is its opportunity in a honeymoon period here to really put some hay in the barn. Yeah, they're there. Who knows?

There might be some celebrations going on there as well. Grant Paulson at Grant H. Paulson, Grant and Danny, 106.7, the fan of DC. Thanks. Drink one on me. Appreciate it. We will. All right, man.