Vinod Khosla’s charmed existence as an NFL owner was on full display Wednesday afternoon when the league’s 31 other owners unanimously approved his family’s bid to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion.
Piece of cake.
Khosla, best known for co-founding Sun Microsystems, serving as a partner at Kleiner Perkins, and as the founder of Khosla Ventures, one of the world’s leading venture capital firms, is worth a reported $13.7 billion.
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“You have great timing,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said, addressing Khosla during a press conference. “It’s not very often you can buy a Super Bowl championship team, but you’ve done that.
“Many of our owners struggle to find ways to get into a Super Bowl and win a trophy, and you’ll be walking into your new building shortly with a fresh, shiny trophy there for you.”
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Khosla, the new guy, wasn’t about to argue
.”We’re huge fans of football,” Khosla said, “and these opportunities, especially Super Bowl winning teams, seldom come along, so we were very excited to have the opportunity.”
What happened on Wednesday is evidence of how much the NFL has changed from its founding and even from what it was before the price of franchises rocketed.
This league was started by football men.
These people knew the game. Sometimes, they both owned and coached teams as George Halas and Paul Brown did. And that was the stamp the game wore for decades.
Eventually, football men like Brown, Halas, Art Rooney, Lamar Hunt and others passed their teams down to their families whose primary business was, well, football.
But since the turn of the century, the ownership pool has changed to mostly rich guys — billionaires — with minimal football credentials.
And because knowledge of the sport is barely a qualifying requirement for purchase while their ability to pay is what’s most important, you have fallout.
So, you get owners like Stephen Ross, who knows real estate development but has shown no ability to build a champion in Miami.
You get Jimmy Haslam, who founded a truck stop empire but hasn’t been able to find a quarterback in Cleveland.
And you get Dan Snyder, who made his fortune in marketing and communication, but as the Washington Redskins and Commanders owner, didn’t get the message that he was pointing a legacy franchise toward infamy that included an embarrassing congressional hearing.
Khosla, born in India in 1955, doesn’t immediately suggest he’s going to be like the other billionaires who have struggled. But we know he’s not really a football man, either.
Even he admits that.
“The task ahead is actually pretty simple — keep the winning streak alive, get another Super Bowl.” Khosla said. “That’s simple. In general, our approach is generally going to be long-term focused, that’s our inclination always.
“So, keep winning, take a long-term approach, and learn a lot. We don’t know enough. And the other owners have been incredibly welcoming and willing to teach us, so we’ll learn a lot.
“We’ll learn from management and see what they are recommending. We’ll just be in learning mode for quite some time.”
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