The NFL initially said nothing about the news of the bombshell letter sent from the U.S. House Oversight & Reform Committee to the Federal Trade Commission. The NFL has since said something significant.
“We continue to cooperate with the Oversight Committee and have provided more than 210,000 pages of documents,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told multiple reporters in a statement. “The NFL has engaged former SEC chair Mary Jo White to review the serious matters raised by the Committee.”
The last sentence, conveyed with nonchalance, could deliver the death knell for Daniel Snyder. The league has implicitly acknowledged that White, who was specifically hired to investigate allegations made by former Washington employee Tiffani Johnston against owner Daniel Snyder, will more generally investigate the “serious matters” raised by the Committee.
Those matters include, as we now know, allegations that security deposits were withheld from season-ticket holders and that ticket sales that should have been shared with the NFL was kept by the team, via an alleged shell game that involved allocating revenue to non-NFL events.
If these allegations can be proven — and it appears based on the letter sent by the Committee to the FTC that testimony is backed up with documents — it undoubtedly will be the end of Snyder’s 20-plus-year tenure as owner of the team.