As the NFL’s owners prepare to take a trip to Arizona for the annual meetings, there’s a question as to whether enough votes exist to send Daniel Snyder on a trip to Belize.
According to Josh Kosman of the New York Post, the league currently lacks the requisite 24 “aye” votes to force Snyder to sell.
The details are thin, and it’s hard to know how 32 owners currently feel about the situation — unless the source has polled each of them and gotten a truthful answer.
From the moment the NFL clumsily, but obviously, hid the results of the Beth Wilkinson investigation, it became obvious that the league was protecting Snyder. And it’s surely not happening because he’s beloved by his brethren. Whether they don’t want to create a precedent that would potentially apply to them or they fear scorched-earth litigation that would expose their own potential entanglements or whether some of them like having a cluster of dysfunctional owners anchoring the dregs of the league, they’ve been treating Mr. Snyder with kid gloves.
Except for Jim Irsay. Although he doesn’t have the juice to lead his colleagues toward flipping from no to yes, he has the ability (as we saw in October) to say enough things to get the fans and media to grab torches and pitchforks.
Snyder’s announcement regarding his apparently willingness to sell took steam out of a situation that was approaching critical mass. The lingering question is whether he’s truly serious about selling, or whether he’s simply trying to run out the clock.
If the latest report is accurate, the simple truth could be that the clock isn’t even ticking.