Being a good owner of a professional sports franchise means wanting the staff and roster to know you’re there for support when needed. However, you also have to recognize your own limitations when it comes to sports operations. Unfortunately, men who own pro sports teams are usually billionaires, and those types of individuals are not generally known for their willingness to take a backseat when making major decisions.
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While speaking on Diana Russini and Chase Daniel’s Scoop City podcast on Tuesday, former NFL head coach Bruce Arians discussed this, which he clearly wasn’t a fan of. He made it even more clear after saying that he was a big fan of owners he “never saw.”
“The best owners I’ve been around, I never saw,” he quipped. “No, it’s true. I mean, Lamar Hunt, he knocked on the door to see if it was okay to come in the draft. We’ve got a new group of owners right now that are expecting—they think this is easy. They’re not family-owned teams anymore. They’re billionaires and they expect the quick fix. This is a hard game to have a quick fix, and sustain it.”
Bruce Arians has seen a lot, and coached all over the NFL.
He knows what it takes to be a good owner. And he doesn't know if this new wave of them has what it takes to succeed.
Listen: https://t.co/OW0CIp7ZXO pic.twitter.com/ZUbKHUr4xR
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) December 10, 2024
Arians made some great points there, but the most telling was his quick story on Lamar Hunt. Arians worked for Hunt as the Kansas City Chiefs running backs coach from 1989 to 1992. This is a man who not only founded the Chiefs but also the AFL and the MLS. His credentials were unmatched when it came to pro sports.
And yet, he still recognized his limitations when it came to football decisions. Instead of shoving himself into the decision-making process, he allowed the people he hired to do their jobs. He may have loved the game, but his family wealth derived from oil. He was more well-versed in business than in football, and he acknowledged that, despite his immense stature in the NFL community by the late 1980s.
As Arians points out, these types of owners (Art Rooney II of the Pittsburgh Steelers is another good example) are a dying breed, as more teams are bought by billionaires who “expect a quick fix.”
If you become a billionaire, you’re probably pretty confident in your own abilities, and most of the time, rightly so. However, that confidence, while an asset in most of their business ventures, can become an issue if they start butting heads with the football people in the building.
We have seen terrible owners come in and expect their magic billionaire touch to be the catalyst to a quick turnaround. Dan Snyder couldn’t keep his hands off his Washington Commanders, and they had one of the worst stretches of futility for the two decades he was at the helm.
David Tepper bought the Carolina Panthers in 2018. Since then, they have had one of the worst six-year stretches in NFL history. Tepper has been putting his hands in the football cookie jar all too often. The fact that he has had six head coaches since taking over should tell you all you need to know.
And then there’s the big cheese of over-active, know-it-all owners: Jerry Jones. He may have won three Super Bowls in the early 1990s, but he did it on the back of head coach Jimmy Johnson’s talent evaluation. Jones and Johnson had a falling out that hasn’t been patched up to this day.
Even when Johnson was inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor (which Jones waited until 2023 to do) he still didn’t seem happy to be near Jones. Johnson left in 1994, and the Cowboys won one more Super Bowl with his roster in 1995.
Since then, Jones—who is a (thankfully) rare owner who officially took the general manager job for himself and has yet to relinquish it in 30 years—has basically run the team into the ground. The franchise still makes tons of money—it is “America’s Team” after all—but the team has been a disappointment for three long decades.
As Arians said, the best owner is an invisible one. Billionaires buy these teams as toys or investments, not because they have a real passion for sport. The men working in the facility actually live and breathe the game. Football is their livelihood, and owners should leave them to do their jobs. The results when they do the opposite speak for themselves.
