The Las Vegas Raiders announced an ownership succession plan--could the goal be to keep Tom Brady from buying the team?
The Las Vegas Raiders have announced their ownership succession plan, but owner Mark Davis won’t be selling the team. If that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, rest assured that you’ve got plenty of company.
The announcement turned up in ESPN and multiple other outlets, and the basics have minority owner Egon Durban, who’s also the co-chief executive officer of Silver Lake, the option to buy a majority stake in the Raiders if the 70-year old Davis decides to sell, which he has no plans to do. NFL owners have to vote on this given that Durban needs approval to become the new controlling owner, so that’s the gist of the announcement on the surface.
A juicier interpretation was provided by Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, who has a sharp talent for reading between the lines.
He sees it as a way to give Durban the right of first refusal to buy the team from Davis, and Florio also added that, “As a practical matter, it blocks Davis from selling controlling interest in the team at a grossly below-market number to Tom Brady. Which would sound ridiculous, if Davis hadn’t already sold a minority stake in the team at a grossly below-market number to Brady.”
That interpretation makes sense if you look at the results on the field lately. Davis essentially gave Brady the keys to the kingdom, but Brady ran the franchise aground last year with the disastrous Pete Carroll hire that led to a 3-14 record. If there are two things we’ve learned about Brady in the last couple of years, it’s that (1) he likes to have his fingers in a lot of money-making pies, and (2) he’s more than a little power-hungry.
This move strips Brady of some of that power, potentially, if Brady does make an attempt to become majority owner, which seems entirely possible.
The other part of this is about the imminent non-sale of the team. (Yeah, that last sentence was hard to write, too.) Florio also mentioned that the equity sale that comes with this announcement has a valuation of $10 billion, and Davis is frequently mentioned as the most cash-strapped owner in the NFL. As Florio notes, though, “Whether a price for Davis’s controlling interest has been set is not mentioned in the report.”
What’s also not mentioned here is that the report doesn’t provide any real clarity in the Raiders’ chain of command. Is Brady on the outs now? Is GM John Spytek really running the show for the product on the field, or is Davis now more heavily involved in that side of the operation? We won’t know more about that until additional details are reported, but for now this is basically business as usual for the Raiders.