As Commanders owner Daniel Snyder continues to ponder selling the team, unless he isn’t, the reports regarding the involvement of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are covering all bases.
After a pair of weekend reports indicating that Snyder won’t sell the team to Bezos, A.J. Perez of FrontOfficeSports.com reports that Bezos remains in the mix. The report cites two unnamed sources; one of those sources said that the reports indicating Snyder won’t sell to Bezos are a ploy to get Bezos to overpay.
Perez also suggests, as we’ve speculated in recent days, that Snyder could ultimately keep the team.
He reportedly wants $7 billion. The bids made to date fall short of that. How short the bids have fallen vary with the publications reporting those numbers.
And while the real news on this subject relates to whether Snyder will sell and if so to whom, it’s becoming more and more clear that different camps are leaking different news to different publications. That’s no surprise; for a transaction of this magnitude, Snyder will have people talking to certain reporters, and Bezos will have people talking to certain other reporters.
Complicating matters is the fact that Bezos owns the Washington Post. Although the Post adds a disclaimer to that effect to every Bezos/Commanders story, the Post hasn’t breathed a word regarding the reports that Snyder has frozen Bezos out. It’s becoming more and more conspicuous; at some point, Bezos’s newspaper needs to address the issue — even if only to dispute it.
Yes, that’s part of the dance. Bezos seems to be tiptoeing on eggshells regarding this specific aspect of the story, concerned that anything the Post says can and will be used against Bezos’s bid. But is the paper that he owns truly serving its audience if it continues to pretend that multiple major publications haven’t written in no uncertain terms that Snyder won’t sell to Bezos?