Will NFL ask Mary Jo White to investigate the Cardinals?
The most logical explanation for the stubborn insistence of NFL owners to defend and protect Commanders owner Daniel Snyder comes from the strong possibility that they don’t want to create a standard that could then be applied to one or more them in the fire.
And it possibly wouldn’t take much to end up in the crosshairs. A disgruntled employee makes a credible allegation that gains some traction, and the next thing you know Mary Jo White is investigating the organization.
For the Commanders, multiple credible allegations of troubling workplace misconduct prompted the original investigation by Beth Wilkinson. A specific allegation against Snyder sparked the followup from White. Along the way, more allegations and evidence have come to light.
The investigator is never in position to find unrelated problems if there’s no investigation in the first place. And in the same way that many sweat out the possibility of a tax audit, NFL owners have no desire to be investigated generally, or specifically, by someone hired by the league to take a closer look at whether policies are being violated or rules are being broken.
For Snyder, claims of financial irregularities emerged only after the allegations of workplace misconduct gained traction.
That brings us to the Cardinals and owner Michael Bidwill. Will the league dispatch White to explore whether and to what extent the allegations of impermissible contact with former Cardinals G.M. Steve Keim are true? Or will evidence on the issue be pursued, developed, and submitted only by former Cardinals executive Terry McDonough in his arbitration claim?
McDonough’s grievance sweeps far more broadly than the burner-phone incident, alleging that Bidwill engaged in various forms of workplace misconduct. Specifically, McDonough accuses Bidwill of “curs[ing] and berat[ing] a young African American employee in a racially charged manner,” “creat[ing] an environment of fear for minority employees,” “reduc[ing] to tears two pregnant employees as a result of his abusive and bullying mistreatment,” and “halted a 2019 corporate cultural assessment of the Cardinals organization that was being conducted by an outside consulting firm after an expansive initial round of employee responses criticized the Cardinals’ woeful culture and placed most of the blame on Bidwill.”
At paragraph 13 of his demand for arbitration, McDonough’s lawyer writes this: “Bidwill’s widespread workplace misconduct is significantly worse than the misbehavior of former crosstown Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver. Last fall, the NBA suspended Sarver for one year and fined him $10 million after the NBA’s investigation found that Sarver had demeaned women, bullied employees and used racist language. Sarver ultimately was forced to sell the franchise.”
So will the NFL investigate Bidwill the way it investigated Snyder? It may depend on the evidence presented during the arbitration. Even then, situations like these need to reach a critical mass, a tipping point before the league will get an investigator involved.
McDonough definitely has tried to create that kind of groundswell. Maybe that’s why the team responded in such an aggressive and unnecessary way to McDonough’s claim. The Cardinals perhaps hope to paint McDonough as wholly untrustworthy in order to avoid enough questions being raised to get Mary Jo White dispatched to the desert.
Will NFL ask Mary Jo White to investigate the Cardinals? originally appeared on Pro Football Talk
