Don Van Natta Jr.
Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
He remembered what Roger Goodell did on Spygate. And actually, Jerry wanted Roger out. He literally tried to take the commissioner out.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Well, Roger was up for a new deal. The compensation committee led by Arthur Blank at the time, the Falcons owner, wanted to give Roger a nice, healthy extension and pay him a lot more money. Jerry disagreed, had issues with Roger's performance.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And if you actually read some of our stories carefully and others, you could also raise some questions about Roger's track record, not just in the taking arrows for owners, but other things. Jerry felt that some of the revenue streams that he wanted to see were not growing at the pace that he wanted. So he had some business issues with him.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Oh, he was right. He was right in the mid 90s when he said the team should be allowed to have their own sponsorship deals. I mean, the Cowboys in the mid 90s, when Jerry took on all of his fellow owners, you know, they were actually responsible for about a quarter of all of the merchandise money. and yet they were sharing it with 31 other teams equally, and that's where this first started.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Jerry is all about monetizing everything, and he is a content guy. He's a storyteller, and that's why he wanted teams to be able to tell their own story, and they weren't allowed to do that. It made no sense to him. Look, I always say Jerry is the shadow commissioner. Jerry is the most powerful of all the owners. There's a lot of reasons to believe that.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
But in this particular moment, Jerry didn't get his way. Jerry was... He was prepared to take out Roger Goodell, and nobody had his back, particularly Arthur Blank and Robert Kraft and some of the other sort of power owners.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That got the New York Times' attention, got recruited there at the age of 30, and won two Pulitzers there, team Pulitzers, for explanatory journalism about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Well, to get back to my earlier point, Pablo, about the NFL being like a trade association, I mean, it is in the sense that these 32 teams, they don't necessarily like each other, but they share one goal, and that is more revenue. And in these meetings of this trade association, like any trade association, there's five or six or seven people that kind of
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
take the floor and take the reins and are heard. And that group, the people that have the most influence on the committees, on the compensation committee, on the finance committee, on the broadcast committee, the all-powerful broadcast committee, is Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, John Mara.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Stan Kroenke, the Rams owner. Clark Hunt, sneaky powerful owner of the Kansas City Chiefs and the team they're playing on Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles. Jeff Lurie also has quite a bit of power. And they flex it. And how they flex it is with Roger and Roger's lieutenants in finding ways to grow that revenue no matter what. And it's always about, do we have enough leverage?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Is there enough leverage here to take us to the next level in money? And almost every time they find ways to do that.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
I think that part of why Adam Silver said no is because of the membership, because you have to do what Roger Goodell does and manage these massive egos. Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft don't like each other very much. I mean, that's sort of a through line of a lot of the reporting that I've done. And do you want, if you're Adam Silver, to deal with that?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That's right. I always say that covering the CIA, the Pentagon, trying to get secrets out of there prepared me for covering the National Football League.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
A big reason why they stuck with Roger, reminding me, was because, yeah, who is out there? Who can take the place of Roger that can do what Roger does as effectively as him? And when they looked around, there was nobody.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That's right. And it's trust the devil you know more than the devil you don't know. And that was the prevailing attitude at that time and why Jerry's attempt at knocking Roger out failed.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It's very simple. Team valuations. The Dallas Cowboys in 2006, when Roger Goodell was hired to be commissioner, were worth slightly more than a billion dollars. today. They're worth $10 billion, according to Forbes, but arguably $12, $13, $15 billion somebody would pay for the Dallas Cowboys. I agree. The exponential growth of team valuations.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
One big benefit or side benefit of getting Dan Snyder out of the league, all the owners were thrilled because somebody was willing to pay $6.05 billion for the franchise in Washington. When those kinds of Checks are written for teams, the valuations for everybody go up. And Roger, whether he deserves it or not,
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
gets credit among the owners when they take the stock of whether they're going to re-sign him. His contract expires in 2027. I hear that he wants to be extended yet again. What they look at is they look at the popularity of the game, the stranglehold it has on American culture, but also they look at the team valuations.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And they continue to spiral exponentially, greater than any other sports league in the world.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Jerry is a master at promotion. Jerry is a master at keeping the National Football League in the conversation, and the Dallas Cowboys more specifically, in the conversation 365 days a year. Nobody does it better than him. He's constantly thinking about ways for his team to remain relevant when they're going eight and eight, three straight seasons.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That's right. The one thing he wants most of all is the one thing he can't buy, which is a Super Bowl title, and it'll be 30 years coming up this season. But what Jerry has proven is, look, he took them on. He came in as kind of the brat of— new owners in his mid-40s, this Arkansas wildcatter shows up at the age of 46, fires Tom Landry, hires his college buddy, Jimmy Johnson.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And immediately, a lot of the old guard owners are like, who is this guy? And in meetings, he's in their face. He found ways to make them richer. And wealthier. And that matters. And that's his superpower. And even at the age of 82, and, you know, Jerry's maybe arguably lost half a step, he still is going nonstop and thinking of ways, as he puts it, to grow the pie.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And that whole ethos that Jerry brought to the league is now the ethos of the National Football League.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
I don't think so, oddly. Right? It really doesn't. It's, you know, they share every dollar. It's this socialistic system. And whether you're successful on the field or not, you still get the same amount of national TV money every year. The salary cap is the same for all 32 teams, whether you do well or not. The only real meritocracy that comes out of...
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
how the teams play is the draft location, right? Whether you get the first round pick or the 32nd pick if you win the Super Bowl.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That's right. But there's not a relegation system like we see in European soccer, right? Where the bottom three teams have to win or they're going to go down to the lower division and three teams will come up. And so that's important. That's a really important distinction when you look at incentives here.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And do teams – I mean, I'm fascinated by the teams that don't spend every dollar of their salary cap that they could spend. You know, you say you're all in, Jerry Jones, as you said a year ago going into this past season that ended up 7-10. But you're not spending every dollar you can. It's a metric that you could actually challenge any owner. We don't have to single out Jerry here.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Any owner of how badly do you want to win? Does it really matter whether you win? To get to your question, which I think is a really good one, it doesn't. If you don't, and you don't even make the playoffs, sure, you have a fan base that's upset with you, but the dollars keep rolling in.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
He deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. There's no doubt about it. You look at the owners that have gotten in there, Jerry Jones, Pat Bolin, Eddie DiBartolo. Robert Kraft deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Why he is not there, there's lots of reasons. But one of them is because Robert Kraft so desperately wanted to get into the Hall of Fame that he actually made a deal with a book author
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
to give access for the Dynasty book that was written by an author by the name of Jeff Benedict, and kept the TV and audiovisual rights and film rights to that book, which then became the Dynasty docuseries on Apple+, which just so happened to throw legendary coach Bill Belichick under the bus.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It was actual business. It was a way that many people in sports now do of controlling the narrative. Oh, and I get it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It was because the book was sent by Stacey James, Robert Kraft's longtime PR head, to Hall of Fame voters. Like, this is the actual— Not quite subtle. It's not that subtle. This is the argument for Robert Kraft, for you to vote Robert Kraft in. Those voters didn't know that— Robert Kraft was a sort of secret partner with the author on that book that was very favorable to Robert Kraft.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Also, arguably, possibly minimized the role of Bill Belichick in those dynasty years. It was a Robert Kraft book. And so that didn't sit well. with what I understood with some of the voters. And again, this past fall, Robert Kraft was not selected yet again for the Hall of Fame. It's been, I think, 13 years now that he's been trying to get in.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And made it sound as if he had nothing to do with it. And, well, he owned the copyright to the docuseries, and he had more than a little to do with it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Well, Dan Snyder, when he bought the team, remember, this is the team that Dan Snyder loved as a boy. He first went and watched the Redskins play with his father at the age of six. And at the age of 34, Dan Snyder had enough money to write an $800 million check to buy the team he loved.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
A record price at the time. And Paul Tagliabue, then the commissioner, introduced Snyder by saying, this is the perfect person to own an NFL franchise. Fast forward 25 years later, and in our story, we quote Tagliabue telling a confidant, Dan Snyder is the worst NFL owner in history. And so how did that happen?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Well, very early on when Snyder first took over the team, he rubbed his fellow owners the wrong way repeatedly. He showed up at one meeting. He was supposed to be there at noon. It was of the broadcast committee. He showed up 10 minutes to five o'clock as everybody's getting ready to leave. He's in a tuxedo. He says, well, I'm going to an event tonight at Lincoln Center.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And he then wastes their time. So they stay for another 40 minutes talking about stuff that didn't matter to them.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Crimes against the membership, wasting their time, okay, is a big one. And so when the revelations came out about the toxic workplace culture, about Snyder himself allegedly sexually harassing a woman that worked for him, you would think that that would be enough.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And it wasn't. They hired Beth Wilkinson to do an investigation, which never came out. It looked for a while like Snyder might actually survive. And it wasn't until Seth and I actually reported a story that Snyder was running around telling people, including one of his fellow owners, that he had dug up dirt. on Roger Goodell, and on Jerry Jones.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Right. He's saying the NFL is a mafia, and I have enough information that I've gleaned about them that I can blow up the whole league if they try to take my beloved team away from me. And the fact that he had his hand in their pockets and was not sharing all the revenues that he was supposed to share from a team, by the way, that was last in local revenue.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
I mean, Washington is supposed to be one of the top franchises in the NFL, and they were last in local revenue and with the stadium crumbling. And it was basically Snyder was costing them money and was threatening to blow them up. It was Jerry Jones who was the final firewall of support for Dan Snyder. And I think the reason for that is because Jerry liked Snyder when he first showed up.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Jerry saw in Snyder a little bit of himself, this sort of renegade who was going to come in and shake up the National Football League. And so I saw it in 2014 when I did my profile with Jerry Jones. I spent the summer with Jerry when we drank the Johnny Walker Blue. And Jerry still has a flip phone or had a flip phone then. asking for advice about a stadium that never got built.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
He knew all the buttons to press with Jerry to ingratiate himself. And so when Snyder was on the ropes, Jerry held the line as long as he could. But then when he heard that dirt had been dug up on him by somebody he had looked after and held the line on, I think that was the final straw.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
He's like, he's on the run. He's on the run. So the last night when he's closing the deal, which we just reported, Seth Wickersham and I just a couple of weeks ago, he still doesn't want to give up his beloved team. Even though the deal is done, he has an agreement to sell it to Josh Harris and his fellow investors for a record $6.05 billion. In the middle of the night, Snyder is holding on to his
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
checking account banking information and won't turn it over. And in the days leading up to it, there was a thought of, well, maybe we can say that Snyder was drunk when a lot of these things happened. They were coming up with all of these reasons at the 11th hour to try to persuade people that he could keep the team. Think of the damage he did to the team.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Think of the anger of the fan base and his fellow partners.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Yes, that's right.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
The hero of the Redskins who won three Super Bowls, who Snyder himself hired to be a coach back in 2003, who actually had to come and say to Snyder, it's time. And because Gibbs was a hero of Snyder, I mean, Gibbs is the childhood icon. Childhood icon is the reason that finally Dan Snyder turned over the keys and went off to London and his super yacht somewhere in Europe.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It's an episode of succession.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
I remember that quote vividly. The NFL, you could argue, has been quite greedy since then. Quite hoggy. Quite hoggy. And all of the metrics are moving in the right direction from ratings to team valuations, which are maybe the most important to owners. But yeah, absolutely. 10 years later, Mark got that one wrong.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That's right. It was we got to get Dan Snyder out of here. We quoted people in our story saying Dan said every all the owners hate each other. And somebody, a senior owner, told me that's not true. We all just hate Dan.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Roger Goodell told a Hall of Fame quarterback the thing he fears the most is a player dying on the field. But he added the reason is because of what it would do to the business.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And yes, and then that night, that game, that Monday night game, Roger Goodell's worst nightmare happened. Jamar Hamlin stopped breathing. His heart stopped.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Absolutely. The story would have been very, very different if Hamlin wasn't brought back to life by those incredible paramedics on that field. I wrote the story, Pablo, that the league wanted to keep playing after that ambulance left the field in Cincinnati. Joe Buck said on the national broadcast,
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And it was the players. It was the two teams. It was the Bills and Bengals, their coaches on the field, who said, we're not playing. They told the NFL, we are not going to do what you want to do. You talk about how powerful, all-powerful the National Football League is.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
That's one of those occasions where from the field, literally from the ground up, the players made the decision of whether there was going to be more football that night.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
What does that tell you? It tells me that reflexively the games must go on, no matter what. No matter what. The thought of Roger Goodell and Troy Vincent, who was in the command center that night, is we got to continue. This is a horrible moment. And no matter how the players might feel about it, they're being paid to play. The games must go on.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
We absolutely should. And, you know, maybe Mark Cuban was 10 years too early in his prediction, but there's no doubt that football on Christmas, on a Wednesday, if we go to 18 games, if we go to 16 games overseas, and that window every week starts at 930 in the morning, look, there's going to be a lot of people that are going to love every minute of it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It's the one sport that is truly built for television. And it's a communal experience. The last one left, arguably, in America. And then on top of it, it's hardwired to nostalgia. So many of us, right, grew up watching football with our dads or our moms or our brothers. And it has this stranglehold on our emotions.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And so we check at the door any concerns about DeMar Hamlin and what happened that night, about the fact that, okay, maybe they are being a little too hoggy. And there's, you know, teams playing three times in 10 days, as we saw this season. And again, we don't like it intellectually, but emotionally, we're there. Emotionally, we're all in. And I think they know that.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And I think that's what, quite frankly, Pablo— Why Roger now looks so confident when 10 years ago he was the deer in the headlights is that he knows it and all the owners know it. No matter what happens, the game is almost, it feels like, indestructible.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Yeah, Dee Smith. Yeah, addictive, indestructible, and so far that bet has paid off.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It's great to be with you, Pablo. Thank you. See you in 10 years.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And they're going to surpass it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Absolutely. It's the communal viewing aspect of the National Football League, right? Why do the ratings on Christmas Day and Thanksgiving skyrocket? Is everybody hanging on every play and every commercial? No. The game is on because as we gather, that is what we can all agree on is the National Football League. And it's the sweet spot in the American culture.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Excellent question. It's a mixture. Certainly, they had somebody like Joe Lockhart, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration, come in and help with crisis communications. He got them through those very tough Colin Kaepernick stories. I know because I talked to him often during that period. They have had help from very smart people on the crisis communications side.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
But also, don't underestimate Roger Goodell. Roger Goodell, he often talks about protecting the shield. That's what he always wants to do. Roger Goodell's job is to be the shield for the owners. And he has done that job magnificently. I still remember Pablo during the Ray Rice scandal. And I was on that day in and day out on Outside the Lines with Bob Lee.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It felt several days a week talking about every development. Right. Roger was not truthful in that autumn. And I still remember the press conference where Roger looked like a deer in the headlights.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
No. He was hanging on it, looked at that moment by his fingernails for his job with the way he had mishandled this domestic violence case that became a major national story for weeks. And that's all anybody was talking about during the 2014 season. Correct. And he took every one of those arrows. Nobody talked or very few people.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
We did a story that raised questions about the Ravens handling of it and the owner, Steve Bishotti. Yes. But Steve Bishotti took very few arrows. Why? Because Roger took them all. And I know after the fact, after that story, talking to owners, they were proud of Roger. He did what he was hired to do. Why?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Because another slate of games are coming on Sunday or Thursday night, and Americans love their football. DeMora Smith, the former National Football League Players Association executive director said, I'll never forget it because he said it to me over lunch. He said, Americans are addicted to football like it's crack cocaine. And he just said it like it's just a fact.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
And it was said actually around that time, Pablo, come to think about 2015, 2016, it was after the Ray Rice autumn.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Absolutely. It's bread and circuses. It's even the ugly side of the game. Concussions. You know, what happened at Tua. Yeah. Think of the conversation. This season. Right. That weirdly, though, still enhances the appeal. It is the test of this sort of macro question of all of these scandals didn't stop the juggernaut of the NFL. And will this? Probably not.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
These guys are not, and I say guys because most of the owners are men, are not smart enough to pull off massive conspiracies. I mean, there's just a lot of groupthink when it comes down to it. I mean, look, the National Football League, they call themselves the membership, right? The 32 owners. They're the membership.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
It is the hardest and arguably the most gilded club in America. Yes. Hardest to get into.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Absolutely. No doubt about it. However, at its essence, it's really just a trade association of 31 owners and the Green Bay Packers who— Whose ownership is, yes, more democratically oriented. That's exactly—that's right.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
But really, they're— They have massive egos, most of these people. They don't like each other.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Yeah, the competing agendas when there is punishment, for instance, on Spygate. That was Roger Goodell's first moment where he was tested to dole out punishment for what was a pretty big deal. It's spying on your opponent's coaches in the game and using that to win. It was a cheating apparatus that Seth Wickersham and I wrote in 2015. It was far greater than anybody knew back in 2007.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
How did Roger handle it? He sent Jeff Pash, his general counsel, to Foxborough where there were videotapes, there was evidence, and Jeff Pash smashed them under his feet.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Underfoot, under his wingtips. I mean, you know, talk about a cover-up. This was a smash-up of real evidence. And Roger... according to the other owners who were watching all this, slapped Robert Kraft very gently on the hand with the punishment that he doled out. And then the question is why? Robert Kraft helped Roger Goodell get his job.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Roger went up against Jeff Pash and 10 other people for the commissioner job. It's a job Roger wanted desperately. Kraft was his patron. And so these billionaires, they're highly competitive. They felt the Patriots should have gotten much more punishment than they got. remembered that.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
So when Tom Brady and deflated footballs come around six or seven years later, we're wondering, well, why is the NFL so upset about that? Well, you had to rewind back to the way Spygate punishment was handled, and those owners wanted now, finally, there to be the punishment, the just punishment that should have happened with Spygate to happen on deflategate, and Tom Brady paid the price for that.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
But these are very, look, they're highly aggressive, highly stubborn players billionaires used to getting their way. And so they're not going to always get along. They're not going to like how Goodell handles one team versus the other if they feel he's playing favorites. So that in the back room is where a lot of the tension comes.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
The first Pulitzer was a public service Pulitzer, actually at the Miami Herald. It was covering Hurricane Andrew, the eye of the storm. I was in Florida City and 165 mile an hour winds were whipping around us in a Comfort Inn motel, which got torn apart. And I wrote a first person story on a Trash 80, one of these little Texas instrument computers about what it was like to survive the storm.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
There's tension about who deserves to get in the Hall of Fame faster. Oh, I want to get to this.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr.
Jerry Jones is furious that Roger punished Ezekiel Elliott, his running back, far greater than Jerry felt was right or just.