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Should Ron leave after the season?


88Comrade2000

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Anyone think Ron knew this was coming down the pipe?  I think by the time this all gets done he will be gone or the new owner(s) will have a huge decision to make. The team is going to be in the hurt locker for at least a year.  

 

Edit: They have been in the hurt locker for decades, duh. Disregard last sentence!

Edited by tmandoug1
Correction to obvious idiotic statement.
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12 hours ago, bowhunter said:

A GOOD owner would sit back and be an absentee owner. He most likely won't be a football guy and honestly won't know who would qualify as a "competent GM" yet. So IMO, he should guarantee all of the upper staff their jobs for a full year while he evaluates. I really don't want to see another owner who thinks he knows football try to be overly involved. I've seen how that story ends

This would be the worst case scenario though. I don’t think you can leave Ron and Co can be allowed to stay if the new ownership is in by 2022 end. If it’s March it would have to be A standing mandate that no major moves up or large FA signings or trades. 
 

A staff that is obviously “on their way out because of new ownership” can’t be allowed to act like a wild animal cornered fighting for their survival. 

Edited by Zim489
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1 hour ago, Idaho fan said:

1. New owner

2. Owner hire real GM

3. GM hire Coach.

 

Doesn't really matter in my mind if Ron stays or goes during the transition period.  We will be in limbo till that happens.

Let's hope that #1 realy happens.  Then we can get the review/evaluation period.

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40 minutes ago, Zim489 said:

This would be the worst case scenario though. I don’t think you can leave Ron and Co can be allowed to stay if the new ownership is in by 2022 end. If it’s March it would have to be A standing mandate that no major moves up or large FA signings or trades. 
 

A staff that is obviously “on their way out because of new ownership” can’t be allowed to act like a wild animal cornered fighting for their survival. 

I would think that whether the sale is done prior to the 2023 draft/FA or not - both parties (Snyder or new owner) would not want RR taking on major FA acquisitions or trading future draft picks.  Not without some sort of higher approval anyway.  

I have no idea how that works with Ron’s contract though…

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55 minutes ago, Zim489 said:

This would be the worst case scenario though. I don’t think you can leave Ron and Co can be allowed to stay if the new ownership is in by 2022 end. If it’s March it would have to be A standing mandate that no major moves up or large FA signings or trades. 
 

A staff that is obviously “on their way out because of new ownership” can’t be allowed to act like a wild animal cornered fighting for their survival. 

Unless a miracle happens; doubtful team is sold and new ownership takes over by start of free agency.

 

I figure the front office will operate as they originally plan to.  Look back to what happened in 1999 when team was for sale.

 

I wouldn’t expect any big moves anyway in free agency since the money won’t be there.

 

 

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1 hour ago, tmandoug1 said:

Anyone think Ron knew this was coming down the pipe?  I think by the time this all gets done he will be gone or the new owner(s) will have a huge decision to make. The team is going to be in the hurt locker for at least a year.  

 

Edit: They have been in the hurt locker for decades, duh. Disregard last sentence!

Id imagine Ron had an idea that it was, I also think there's a whole lot of behind the scenes stuff that he has been sitting on for various reasons. Wonder how much will eventually come out?

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13 hours ago, Warhead36 said:

Unless he's coming off a playoff birth I think a new owner will just clean house completely.

I'll use this as my jumping off-point to a larger point:

 

Assuming there is a sale of the team, which I think there will be, I don't think Dan is doing this just to get minority owners, or the messaging would be different, it would be HIGHLY unlikely there is a new owner in place before the new league year starts in March.  It's probably April at the earliest this is finally settled.  And at that point, it's probably too late to make a coaching staff change for the 2023 season.  

 

Even if Elon Musk or Anthony Bezos came to Dan and said, "Cash good?  I'll have it wired tomorrow" there are SO many complexities of a deal of this size, they take time.  And the lawyers, accountant and consultants all need to make their money on the transaction as well, which takes time...

 

At a minimum, here is what generally happens with a sale of a multi-Billion dollar legal entity (This is somewhat simplified...):

 

1. The seller announces it's intention to sell by hiring an Investment Bank (IB).  Check.  That happened, announced yesterday.  BofA Securities.  To our knowledge, this is the only thing which has happened, and it happened recently.  

2. The IB is going to take the team to market.  They will prepare financial and operating decks which they will send to prospective buyers.  This takes some time to compile.

3. This is going to be a complicated deal.  Because this is an NFL Franchise, they are going to be somewhat complicated, since the team owns the franchise, the real-estate, stadium, merchandising, sponsorships, etc.  There is the union component, and a variety of other things the IB is going to outline in the seller decks, outlining the current financial situation, valuation, defense of the valuation and the forecast.  Even though everybody knows the team, there's just a ton more stuff which has to be included in the sale of a multi-billion dollar entity.  It's somewhat mind-blowing.   

4. Once the seller, or management decks, are sent to prospective buyers, there will be a period of meetings with prospective buyers.  They will have the opportunity to interview management, most likely Jason Wright and the CFO, marketing and sales leads.  They will submit questions, and then the team will have to turn around answers.

5. Then there will be a period where bids are submitted.  This can be a couple week period after the management meetings.

6. Often there is a down-selection process.  So, if there are 2 or 3 bids which are considered, and the seller goes back to them to tell them they are in the final running, and there are another series of negotiations.

7. Then a "winner" is selected.  The "winner" signs a "Letter of Intent" which is a legal document laying out the terms of the sale.  For an NFL team, this is going to be complex for the reasons outlined above. 

8. Then there is typically a 2-3 month period, but I've seen it last up to 6 months, of "due diligence" and legal stuff.  The buyer now will hire several firms to go over every single aspect of the business they are buying.  Financial, operational, marketing, they will go through agreements and current negotiations on the stadium, absolutely everything.  It's like a colonoscopy for a business.  Rather unpleasant to go through.  

8a. And with the Commanders, it might take longer than with other team sales because of the 8,937 investigations they are involved with. The new buyer will want to make sure all of that is settled and closed before they take on ownership of the team.  

8b. During this time, the legal documents of the sale are also drawn up.  If you've ever signed mortgage papers, that's a TINY example of ownership transition.  This is for a multi-billion dollar, vast entity.  These things are huge.  They will get reviewed by both sides legal teams multiple times.  This takes time.  

9. Then they set a date and close the deal.  Money will be transferred to Dan and whoever his lenders are.

10. Then the new owner can can do what they want.

 

A couple additional NFL specific things also have to happen:

1. The buyer has to be vetted

2. The finance committee has to approve the transaction

3. I believe full ownership has to vote and approve by some margin the new owner.  

 

I'm not suggesting those things will be hard, but they will also take time.  The logical time for all of that would be the owners meeting in March.  But it could be sooner.  

 

To preempt a question I get sometimes, "you know who the buyer is, why not let them start making decisions before the deal officially closes?"  the reason is it is traditional the new ownership NEVER starts to do anything with the business until after deal close. Because there are a million points along the way the deal can fall through.  So until deal close, you're not even going to ask the new person "what should I do with Ron?"  Because if new guy for some reason can't buy the team, you're stuck with a decision you didn't make. And more importantly, a decision a different buyer might not want, if you have to start over.  

 

We even have an example of a potential acquisition which fell through for this franchise: The Milstein group, where Snyder was a minority party of, was the front runner to buy the team from the Cooke estate.  And they were in the diligence period, and the deal fell through.  Then Snyder put together his group, which ended up closing the deal.  Deals fall through all the time.  

 

Needless to say, all of this stuff takes a lot of time.  For reference when the Broncos were put up for sale after all the court battles, it was Feb 2022.  Walmart (rather, the Walden family) bought it in June.  That's 5 months.  And the Walton's are like the Bezos' and Musk's of the world, they could just pay cash for it. They are SUPER rich.  And it still took 5 months. And that was probably a simpler process because the lack of all the extracurricular stuff we have going on with Dan.

 

Now, could a Bezos or Musk or somebody literally not care about any of this and just write a check and get it done much faster?  Sure.  Fire-sales happen.  But I doubt that's going to be the case here.

 

So, where does that leave the team from a leadership perspective?  I think, unless he retires, Ron is 100% coming back.  Good, bad or indifferent, doesn't matter.  Dan will not fire Ron with the team up for sale, and lock in a new coach and coaching staff who would require long term deals.  I doubt any coach would take a job either knowing ownership was changing.  So, unless the deal closes by early Jan, I doubt there's any change for the team this off-season.  It would be rather odd for a new owner to come in and fire Ron in March-April, because so much of the off-season would already have started.  The draft would be around the corner.  They could bring in some new folks to supplement, change roles, but doubtful they would upset the apple cart at that point.  ** Going back to the Broncos, they did hire Hacket on Jan 27th.  But that was actually before the team was officially put up for sale.  It was still owned by the trust, and I think they were still in court, so they had to keep operating the team as normal.    

 

If Ron does retire, Dan almost has to name JDR (or somebody on the current staff)  interim HC for a year to give the new owner the option to do what they want to do when they buy the team.  Again, this is because you don't want to add more complexity and lock in a buyer, because it's bad for the deal.  The buyer could ask for financial concessions in case they want to fire the coaching staff Dan just hired.  In the context of a $6Billion dollar deal, it might not seem like much, but if the buyer is like, "You just signed a new coaching staff to $50m guaranteed, I want $40m off the sale price if I need to fire them all this year."  And even in the context of a deal this size, $40-50m is real money.  

 

That was really long, but hopefully if you've made it this far, it was somewhat interesting and you didn't lose brain cells reading it.  

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1 hour ago, Zim489 said:

This would be the worst case scenario though. I don’t think you can leave Ron and Co can be allowed to stay if the new ownership is in by 2022 end. If it’s March it would have to be A standing mandate that no major moves up or large FA signings or trades. 
 

A staff that is obviously “on their way out because of new ownership” can’t be allowed to act like a wild animal cornered fighting for their survival. 

Yeah, as I said in my post above, I don't think this thing is completed until March or April, and it could be even longer.

 

In that scenario, they kidnof have to operate in a modified "business as usual" mentality.  They can't take on significant new contractual deals into the future, because that changes the finances of the deal.  However, they also can't do nothing, because they will have to field a team in 2023.  

 

The big question will be whether the deal is completed before or after the draft.  If it's before, then the new owner should get, at the very least, a new personnel guy to help run the draft.  It will be too late to replace Martin and the scouts.  But the new owner might want a consultant, who could take over as GM after the draft.  It's just tricky timing.  All, or at least the majority, of the pre-work will be done before the deal closes, even if the deal closes before the draft. There won't be time to bring in an entire new group for the 2023 draft. 

 

Honestly, the "safest" thing to do, unless he comes back and falls on his face again, would be to bring back Wentz and draft the best QB they can get. Wentz would be the stop-gap (better than TH) and he's easily off the books in 2024 with no cap hit.  It doesn't really "cost" you anything to do that, at least not long-term.  I guess you could re-sign TH and save the $26m, but I think we're going to see in the next 2 weeks that's not really viable either.  

 

They won't be able to go out and trade for QBX or sign big-dollar FAs.  Because that will effect the deal.  

 

If Dan has a skill, it's making deals.  It's how he built his original fortune.  He can't RUN anything.  But he knows the deal process, what buyers and sellers all want.  And he knows how to maximize his investment.  I don't trust Dan with much, but I believe he's not going to let Ron and company rack-up extended guaranteed money on contracts because it would hurt his valuation.  

 

The draft is another beast, though.  He's not going to give a crap what they do in the draft because he won't own the team and draft picks themselves carry no financial value. So if Ron wanted to sign a kicker in the first, he's not going to care.   

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27 minutes ago, 88Comrade2000 said:

Unless a miracle happens; doubtful team is sold and new ownership takes over by start of free agency.

 

I figure the front office will operate as they originally plan to.  Look back to what happened in 1999 when team was for sale.

 

I wouldn’t expect any big moves anyway in free agency since the money won’t be there.

 

 

What im terrified of is Ron and Co trying to prove themselves trying to get the "miracle" season to keep their jobs just to give up a bunch of picks and future assets to save their jobs. Its just making the next staffs job more difficult when they inevitably finish with 7 wins.

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2 minutes ago, Voice_of_Reason said:

  It will be too late to replace Martin and the scouts.  But the new owner might want a consultant, who could take over as GM after the draft.  It's just tricky timing.  All, or at least the majority, of the pre-work will be done before the deal closes, even if the deal closes before the draft. There won't be time to bring in an entire new group for the 2023 draft. 

You would unlikely be able to find some one in beyond late january. Almost have to make a mandate (as your first move unfortunately) to over rule your football people. No trade ups. No QBs. Yada yada yada. Just puts everything into an awkward spot. You almost have to run the draft yourself to try and just collect future picks. 

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If he wants to keep Scott Turner, he can hit the door. Still not sold on RR as a high-calibre HC. This experiment has gone on long enough. Granted, he's had to put up with a lot of unfortunate health issues and team/ownership-related nonsense. Coaching decisions, though, have left far too much to be desired, for my taste at least. Game and time mgmt, player personnel and staff decisions........too many damn ex-Panthers, etc, etc.

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8 minutes ago, Voice_of_Reason said:

Honestly, the "safest" thing to do, unless he comes back and falls on his face again, would be to bring back Wentz and draft the best QB they can get. Wentz would be the stop-gap (better than TH) and he's easily off the books in 2024 with no cap hit.  It doesn't really "cost" you anything to do that, at least not long-term.  I guess you could re-sign TH and save the $26m, but I think we're going to see in the next 2 weeks that's not really viable either.  

 

I think the safest thing would be just Run it back with Howell and Taylor. No tagging of Payne. Cut everyone you can with the low dead cap high salary. Wentz Fuller Logan pre 6/1. You can do two post june 1 on Curtis and Leno. 

 

Treat it as a tank year. You can do your GM search immediately following the draft. Thats when Front offices are built.  A good portion of the bad cap numbers are gone. You leave yourself with roughly 75 mil in cap space before 2024 offseason. A clean fresh slate. 

3 minutes ago, skinzplay said:

If he wants to keep Scott Turner, he can hit the door. Still not sold on RR as a high-calibre HC. This experiment has gone on long enough. Granted, he's had to put up with a lot of unfortunate health issues and team/ownership-related nonsense. Coaching decisions, though, have left far too much to be desired, for my taste at least. Game and time mgmt, player personnel and staff decisions........too many damn ex-Panthers, etc, etc.

Scott and JDR are likely staying if Ron is. Not going to be able to hire anyone from outside of the organization knowing that the coaching staff is likely out at the end of the 2023 season. 

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18 minutes ago, Zim489 said:

What im terrified of is Ron and Co trying to prove themselves trying to get the "miracle" season to keep their jobs just to give up a bunch of picks and future assets to save their jobs. Its just making the next staffs job more difficult when they inevitably finish with 7 wins.

 

That's always the danger with these older Good Ol' Boy coaches...they have to win NOW to keep getting hired, at the expense of developing a team. Problem is, it rarely works. Shanahan wasn't much for developing players either, and he's been unemployed since 2014.

 

It's the same problem with former head coaches who are now coordinators, OC or DC. Del Rio is one of them. Instead of being patient and trying to develop talent, they want to prove their system works so they can get hired as a head coach again.

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3 minutes ago, Zim489 said:

Scott and JDR are likely staying if Ron is. Not going to be able to hire anyone from outside of the organization knowing that the coaching staff is likely out at the end of the 2023 season. 

 

Yep, them's the breaks, unfortunately. Maybe Scott will be lured away. Might be best to leave and get started elsewhere than be stuck in coaching purgatory when the new ownership group dumps all the sand outta that hourglass.

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10 hours ago, method man said:


It is weird to me that the best OC gig Jay could find after getting fired was JAX and that he can’t find an OC gig now. These guys murdered his rep

Jay was on with Keim yesterday.  Pretty interesting takes,  also interesting that several current and very successful head coaches came from his staff.  I think Jay was just lacking in the "leadership" department.  But he did talk about how Kirk was very detail oriented and Jay himself wasnt.  Kinda makes you wonder how you could be a good OC/Head coach if your not detail oriented. 

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7 hours ago, Bacon said:

Give him a real GM and let him do this thing for another season.

Ron personally picked the GM and the rest of the FO, so saying he would be better if he had a real GM doesn't fly.

We need to go back to the original JKC structure, where the owner hires the best GM possible, and that guy decides on a coach.

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Why would a new owner come in and fire a respected head coach?  Especially if we actually made the playoffs. Im not a hardcore Ron guy or anything but damn, are we not going to act like Dan wasn't the problem the entire time?  I think we would have found success over the last 20 years with some of these coaches if Dan wasn't the owner.  

 

Some of you old heads have been down right ridiculous with your expectations of "tank"  2023 already???  What a joke....I swear Jerry Jones must have a ton of user names on here.

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1 minute ago, NeverSurrender said:

Why would a new owner come in and fire a respected head coach?  Especially if we actually made the playoffs. Im not a hardcore Ron guy or anything but damn, are we not going to act like Dan wasn't the problem the entire time?  I think we would have found success over the last 20 years with some of these coaches if Dan wasn't the owner.  

 

Some of you old heads have been down right ridiculous with your expectations of "tank"  2023 already???  What a joke....I swear Jerry Jones must have a ton of user names on here.

 

Weeelllll, Jerruh Jones did that exact thing with Tom Landry. He was so classless about it that Landry found out from watching TV. Landry had been the coach for 29 seasons and admittedly the team was fading, but he didn't deserve to get canned like that.

 

And this is the guy that Snyder has always looked up to.

Edited by BringMetheHeadofBruceAllen
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1 hour ago, Voice_of_Reason said:

I'll use this as my jumping off-point to a larger point:

 

Assuming there is a sale of the team, which I think there will be, I don't think Dan is doing this just to get minority owners, or the messaging would be different, it would be HIGHLY unlikely there is a new owner in place before the new league year starts in March.  It's probably April at the earliest this is finally settled.  And at that point, it's probably too late to make a coaching staff change for the 2023 season.  

 

Even if Elon Musk or Anthony Bezos came to Dan and said, "Cash good?  I'll have it wired tomorrow" there are SO many complexities of a deal of this size, they take time.  And the lawyers, accountant and consultants all need to make their money on the transaction as well, which takes time...

 

At a minimum, here is what generally happens with a sale of a multi-Billion dollar legal entity (This is somewhat simplified...):

 

1. The seller announces it's intention to sell by hiring an Investment Bank (IB).  Check.  That happened, announced yesterday.  BofA Securities.  To our knowledge, this is the only thing which has happened, and it happened recently.  

2. The IB is going to take the team to market.  They will prepare financial and operating decks which they will send to prospective buyers.  This takes some time to compile.

3. This is going to be a complicated deal.  Because this is an NFL Franchise, they are going to be somewhat complicated, since the team owns the franchise, the real-estate, stadium, merchandising, sponsorships, etc.  There is the union component, and a variety of other things the IB is going to outline in the seller decks, outlining the current financial situation, valuation, defense of the valuation and the forecast.  Even though everybody knows the team, there's just a ton more stuff which has to be included in the sale of a multi-billion dollar entity.  It's somewhat mind-blowing.   

4. Once the seller, or management decks, are sent to prospective buyers, there will be a period of meetings with prospective buyers.  They will have the opportunity to interview management, most likely Jason Wright and the CFO, marketing and sales leads.  They will submit questions, and then the team will have to turn around answers.

5. Then there will be a period where bids are submitted.  This can be a couple week period after the management meetings.

6. Often there is a down-selection process.  So, if there are 2 or 3 bids which are considered, and the seller goes back to them to tell them they are in the final running, and there are another series of negotiations.

7. Then a "winner" is selected.  The "winner" signs a "Letter of Intent" which is a legal document laying out the terms of the sale.  For an NFL team, this is going to be complex for the reasons outlined above. 

8. Then there is typically a 2-3 month period, but I've seen it last up to 6 months, of "due diligence" and legal stuff.  The buyer now will hire several firms to go over every single aspect of the business they are buying.  Financial, operational, marketing, they will go through agreements and current negotiations on the stadium, absolutely everything.  It's like a colonoscopy for a business.  Rather unpleasant to go through.  

8a. And with the Commanders, it might take longer than with other team sales because of the 8,937 investigations they are involved with. The new buyer will want to make sure all of that is settled and closed before they take on ownership of the team.  

8b. During this time, the legal documents of the sale are also drawn up.  If you've ever signed mortgage papers, that's a TINY example of ownership transition.  This is for a multi-billion dollar, vast entity.  These things are huge.  They will get reviewed by both sides legal teams multiple times.  This takes time.  

9. Then they set a date and close the deal.  Money will be transferred to Dan and whoever his lenders are.

10. Then the new owner can can do what they want.

 

A couple additional NFL specific things also have to happen:

1. The buyer has to be vetted

2. The finance committee has to approve the transaction

3. I believe full ownership has to vote and approve by some margin the new owner.  

 

I'm not suggesting those things will be hard, but they will also take time.  The logical time for all of that would be the owners meeting in March.  But it could be sooner.  

 

To preempt a question I get sometimes, "you know who the buyer is, why not let them start making decisions before the deal officially closes?"  the reason is it is traditional the new ownership NEVER starts to do anything with the business until after deal close. Because there are a million points along the way the deal can fall through.  So until deal close, you're not even going to ask the new person "what should I do with Ron?"  Because if new guy for some reason can't buy the team, you're stuck with a decision you didn't make. And more importantly, a decision a different buyer might not want, if you have to start over.  

 

We even have an example of a potential acquisition which fell through for this franchise: The Milstein group, where Snyder was a minority party of, was the front runner to buy the team from the Cooke estate.  And they were in the diligence period, and the deal fell through.  Then Snyder put together his group, which ended up closing the deal.  Deals fall through all the time.  

 

Needless to say, all of this stuff takes a lot of time.  For reference when the Broncos were put up for sale after all the court battles, it was Feb 2022.  Walmart (rather, the Walden family) bought it in June.  That's 5 months.  And the Walton's are like the Bezos' and Musk's of the world, they could just pay cash for it. They are SUPER rich.  And it still took 5 months. And that was probably a simpler process because the lack of all the extracurricular stuff we have going on with Dan.

 

Now, could a Bezos or Musk or somebody literally not care about any of this and just write a check and get it done much faster?  Sure.  Fire-sales happen.  But I doubt that's going to be the case here.

 

So, where does that leave the team from a leadership perspective?  I think, unless he retires, Ron is 100% coming back.  Good, bad or indifferent, doesn't matter.  Dan will not fire Ron with the team up for sale, and lock in a new coach and coaching staff who would require long term deals.  I doubt any coach would take a job either knowing ownership was changing.  So, unless the deal closes by early Jan, I doubt there's any change for the team this off-season.  It would be rather odd for a new owner to come in and fire Ron in March-April, because so much of the off-season would already have started.  The draft would be around the corner.  They could bring in some new folks to supplement, change roles, but doubtful they would upset the apple cart at that point.  ** Going back to the Broncos, they did hire Hacket on Jan 27th.  But that was actually before the team was officially put up for sale.  It was still owned by the trust, and I think they were still in court, so they had to keep operating the team as normal.    

 

If Ron does retire, Dan almost has to name JDR (or somebody on the current staff)  interim HC for a year to give the new owner the option to do what they want to do when they buy the team.  Again, this is because you don't want to add more complexity and lock in a buyer, because it's bad for the deal.  The buyer could ask for financial concessions in case they want to fire the coaching staff Dan just hired.  In the context of a $6Billion dollar deal, it might not seem like much, but if the buyer is like, "You just signed a new coaching staff to $50m guaranteed, I want $40m off the sale price if I need to fire them all this year."  And even in the context of a deal this size, $40-50m is real money.  

 

That was really long, but hopefully if you've made it this far, it was somewhat interesting and you didn't lose brain cells reading it.  

Lets hope 8a. doesn't cause a huge delay. That should all stick to Dan.

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