Jim Irsay’s Stunning Defiance Can’t Be Buried or Dismissed

The Colts’ owner is the first person involved with the NFL to show any semblance of backbone against Dan Snyder.

Take your pick: This infighting among NFL owners over the potential sale of the Commanders can be plain old good gossip, it can be wholly depressing or it can be some combination of the two, depending on how much you care that a person accused of myriad crimes, as well as good old-fashioned racism and misogyny, still gets to keep his football team while simultaneously running the on-field product into the ground.

But on Tuesday, as the league’s meetings kicked off, there is one thing we can’t argue much: The fact that Colts owner Jim Irsay came right out and said that Daniel Snyder should be removed as the owner of the Commanders was about the only action reminiscent of having a backbone that we’ve seen since this entire charade started. An on-the-record condemnation of a fellow untouchable billionaire is about as rare as a vaquita sighting. These guys protect one another and their deepest secrets like mafia consigliere, all aware that pointing a finger leaves their closet door ajar enough for some discomfort. When the league investigated Snyder, it allowed the entire report to be delivered orally and then vanish into thin air. When other owners wanted to voice their displeasure over Snyder before Tuesday, they did it anonymously to ESPN, in a lengthy Snyder takedown that preempted this latest round of who-can-stomp-their-feet-the-loudest.

Tuesday very well could be a tipping point, with Irsay’s comments at the league meeting :: Jenna Watson/IndyStar/USA TODAY Network

Irsay’s comments are stunning in their defiance. He addressed the ESPN report alleging Snyder has used private investigators to develop dossiers of compromising information on fellow owners by saying: “You can investigate me till the cows come home. That’s not going to back me off, private investigators or any of that stuff.” It’s hard not to appreciate that stance from someone whose path to this moment was not without its own dark periods.

It was loud enough to earn a response from Snyder himself, who called the comments “highly inappropriate” but “not surprising.”

In the hours that followed, we were presented with the kind of classic legal safeguards that seem to hurriedly get put into place when there’s a chance the NFL will be embarrassed in a court of law. Commissioner Roger Goodell said he didn’t have a problem with Irsay’s comments, though he wanted owners to reserve judgment on Snyder until the conclusion of yet another investigation. Formal discussion of Snyder was blocked and, as Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer noted from the scene, reserved for private text messages and clandestine whispers inside heated limousines.

However, Irsay made the kind of noise that can’t simply be buried or dismissed. Owners are the power brokers in this business, and rarely have to deal with situations where they’re publicly criticized or stood up to by someone to whom they’ll actually listen. Sure, fans can revolt, reporters can write columns and we can all dream, on social media, of the day one of our favorite franchises isn’t owned by a ghoul straight out of the superhero-movie-bad-guy universe.

In that way, we shouldn’t really care why Irsay did what he did. We shouldn’t really care about all the various campaigns and plots, all the three-dimensional chess being played and a Robert Caro volume’s worth of political maneuvering. We can acknowledge a lot of this is probably about money and revenue and maximizing one of the league’s once-proud franchises as an asset while still appreciating that someone was willing to walk across the country club floor and deliver an unceremonious middle finger.

Because that’s what the rest of us can’t do. The NFL doesn’t care what we think. The owner of our favorite franchise doesn’t care what we think, either. This is true with almost any big business or enterprise, where the person we’d most like to hear our complaints is so insulated from the trials and thoughts of the common person that they’re able to exist on something akin to another planet.

Irsay was, for one moment, a Trojan horse for every disgruntled sports fan to take refuge in.

We don’t know what will happen with Snyder from here. We don’t know who will own the Commanders a year from now, or whether this will be one of those flash grenades that simply occurs in the NFL world from time to time—moments of big noise followed by amnesia when the problem still exists decades later. But we do know there is a growing restlessness significant enough for one owner to decide he didn’t give a you-know-what anymore and wasn’t going to hide behind the previously agreed-upon gentleman’s code. We’ve had enough of that in politics. We’ve had enough of that in everyday life. We’ve had enough of it in sports. It’s nice to know that once in a while we don’t have to accept it as the norm.