Saturday night’s bombshell could indeed be the last straw for the NFL and Daniel Snyder.
A.J. Perez of FrontOfficeSports.com reported last night that Congress is exploring whether the Washington Commanders withheld money that should have been surrendered to the league’s visiting-team pool. As a league source with knowledge of the dynamics among owners told PFT, this would become Snyder’s “death knell” as an owner, if it’s proven to be true.
There also would be an effort to force Snyder to make his payments, whether through the court system or an internal arbitration.
NFL teams don’t keep all of their ticket revenue, and they don’t directly share any of the money from each given game with the opponent. Instead, 40 percent of the gate from every game goes into a league-wide pool that goes in equal portions to all teams. (Home teams deduct 15 percent of the total ticket revenue for expenses, making it basically a 66-34 percent share of the gross and a 60-40 split of the net.)
So, if this is true, Snyder got 1/32nd of the 40-percent payments generated by the other 31 teams — and he failed to pony up all of the 40-percent chunk that should have gone to his partners.
His partners have protected him when it comes to the investigation regarding workplace misconduct because, indirectly, they are protecting themselves from having similar allegations threaten the hold on their franchises. If it can be proven that he has been picking his partners’ pockets, his partners quite likely will be kicking his ass out of the house.