To me the real test will be if Griffin acknowledges anything that he did wrong during his time with the Deadskins. Snyder was the most to blame for that dysfunctional situation, but it is not as if RGIII was totally innocent or didn’t contribute in any way. If he talks about things that he did then that he now realizes he could have handled differently, that will say a lot about him. If he paints himself only as a poor innocent victim, that will say a lot too.
Here is a good article on what happened with RGIII and that franchise during that time.
The part about where RGIII calls a meeting and lectures the coaches on what is and is not acceptable says a lot. He would have never done anything like that had Snyder not enabled him.
I said before that Griffin, while very talented, was also a bit of prima donna and had still had a lot of room to grow up and mature. He would have benefitted from a more structured organization that held him accountable and did not enable him. Landing in Washington with Snyder as the owner was probably the worst thing that could have happened for his career.
Never had that exact situation, but I had a similar one where after a reorganization at my previous employer my immediate boss got a new boss. They did not get along at all, and we all knew that my immediate boss did not have his boss’s support. That did not help morale in the department at all. The thing was, the higher boss had legitimate reasons to question some things about my immediate boss, but it went beyond those reasons and became personal.
More recently, I had a case where the official manager of the department was pretty-much a figure head while a senior subordinate ran the department. The higher management went to the subordinate all of the time. Everybody new that the department manager had reached his retirement date mentally and was no longer effective. He eventually did retire, and it is pretty much accepted that he was pushed out the door and did not retire on his own free will.
The Fords in Detroit have been lousy owners in terms of their team’s performance, but by all accounts they are decent people. The same thing can be said of Terry Pegula with the my favorite hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres. The team has been a dumpster fire under his ownership, but nobody has said that he is a bad person.
That is James Dolan. He and Snyder, on the other hand, are bad people with the way they run their businesses, treat people and the like. However, based on recent news they now have a competitor for the title:
And, you were thinking of Marge Schott, who owned the Cincinnati Reds back in the 1980s and 1990s before MLB forced her to sell the team.
I’d say this is mostly true. Wm Clay hired his former chauffeur, Russ Thomas, as the GM from 1967-1989. Thomas was a terrible GM and most players and fans absolutely hated him, and he has much to do win the losing mentality that the Lions just can’t shake. The Fords are just incompetent owners.
Shouldn’t there be a rule that incompetence over so many years gets you booted from ownership? Like, if over a 20 year period, you have 16+ losing seasons, you must sell? Call it the Ford rule.
Most owners are very loathe to take another owner’s franchise away from them. They know that that precedent could always come back to bite them in the rear-end. An owner has to do something really bad to get the others to force him or her (Schott) out.
I remember when Thomas was GM but did not know the story about him being a chauffeur. I was born the same year he was hired as GM, so that predates the time I was following football.
At the same time, Thomas has been gone for over thirty years, so I don’t know how much the losing culture can still be blamed on him. I would still put a lot of it on Matt Millen, whom I recall being hired with no qualifications for the job and being allowed to stay in that position long after it was obvious to everybody he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.
I once worked for guy whose father knew all the Lions’ team management, so I heard a lot of stories that weren’t in the papers.
Wm Clay also hired Matt Millan and he was the constant for 50 years. While still on the Board due to the family stock ownership, Wm Clay was out of active Ford management by 1960 and really never demonstrated any serious business acumen when he had management responsibility. His major achievement was developing the Continental Mark II as a separate product line in 1956. It was essentially a hand built car that retailed for $10-12K and competed with the Cadillac Eldorado. Ford merged the line into Lincoln in 1958 and Wm Clay was done at that point.
I never played team sports at a very high level, but there is a definite mentality about learning to win vs trying not to lose (ask the Sabres after so many first round draft picks). It is tough and I thought the Lions got their mojo back in the Barry Sanders era. But, that was only temporary.