Motley Fool Money - Domonique Foxworth on NFL Owners, Investing, and Keys to the Big Game

Episode Date: February 5, 2023

What's more challenging: facing off against a wide receiver or a room full of NFL owners? Domonique Foxworth made an impact on the field as an NFL cornerback for six season, and an impact off the field as the youngest player to be elected vice president of the NFL Players Association Executive Committee. Chris Hill caught up with him to discuss: - Negotiating with NFL owners - What led him to get his MBA from Harvard Business School - The enduring popularity of the NFL - What he will be watching during Super Bowl 57 to give him a sense of whether Philadelphia or Kansas City is in control of the game Host: Chris Hill Guest: Domonique Foxworth Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The football owners have to vote to accept a new owner into the club. So even if Dan Snyder wants to sell the team to whomever he wants, at whatever price he wants, he can't, they'll stop him. And that, like, helps to protect the culture that they want to continue to perpetuate and also helps to protect their franchise values. Because the last thing they want to do is Dan Snyder to sell his franchise for cheap. I'm Chris Hill, and we are kicking off a week of episodes related to the business aspects of Super Bowl 57.

And it starts today with the man you just heard. Dominic Foxworth is a writer and contributor for ESPN. You can see him on any number of television shows on the network. And he's the co-host of the podcast Debatable and host of his own podcast, The Dominique Foxworth Show. Two podcasts that are part of My Weekly Listening, by the way. After playing cornerback in the NFL for six seasons, he went to Harvard Business School to get his MBA. I caught up with him a few days ago to talk about that decision, his thoughts on the NFL's enduring popularity, as well as what he's going to be watching for during the big game between Philadelphia and Kansas City.

But I started the conversation by asking him about what is, to me, the most interesting part of his playing career. Because off the field, Dominique quickly established himself as a business leader among both fellow teammates and rival teams. He was the youngest player to be elected vice president of the NFL Players Association Executive Committee. And I wanted to know what it was like to face off, not against an opposing wide receiver, but against the NFL owners. You go into your first meeting with the NFL owners. What do you remember about that first meeting? Because, you know, as fans, we see the owners in their box every Sunday. There are always those shots of the owners.

But being in the room with them, what was your takeaway? The first impression was they aren't super geniuses, which I think I assume that they were. And this is probably you recognize or you would have known. this may be, but as a 23, 24-year-old football player, I assumed that given how successful, financially successful they were, they must have been just as intelligent as I was athletic. You know, like, and then I realized that, no, they aren't. And I don't mean that as like an insult. Like, it's not that they're dumb.

They worked, many of them worked hard. they're very smart, but I expected a room full of Bill Gates's, and that's not what I was met by, which was encouraging for me to realize that their luck or their success was a function of probably some hard work, a lot of luck and randomness, and that's why they're there, which to me meant that I wasn't going to be outmatched in those rooms. They obviously have more experience in certain places and I have more experience. and other places. So that was the first initial thing after the meeting,

and I was nervous a bit going in there. But after the first time sitting down with them and having conversations about league-wide issues, I remember leaving and being like, oh, okay, that'll be fine. Don't have to be so nervous next time around. Yeah, it was it? The nerves went away almost immediately because we would have these conversations,

and I would be like, oh, yeah, that seems reasonable. but like this isn't yeah and no matter you would and you always recognize that some people are comfortable in the weeds and some people aren't and there are many of them that weren't which again is not meant as a judgment of them but that was the place where I was least equipped at the time and I like I was cramming trying to figure out the things I needed to understand but it was interesting to see that they all had different skills, strengths and weaknesses. And there was no like charisma and was like the strength of some of them, which I hadn't expected. And like as I get older and I've spent time around other like people who run major companies, I've come to realize

how valuable that is. And we don't consider that. We think of all these other hard skills when And it seems like in many cases, the soft skills are the things that separate people. When your playing career was over, you went to Harvard Business School to get your MBA. At what point in your playing career did business school enter your mind as an option once you were done playing? So it's kind of a sad story, but I guess it was triumphant in the end. but I played, I got drafted out of Broncos. I played well there for three years, and then I was coming up on my fourth year,

and that's a contract year. That's kind of a pivotal year. If you have success and you can get a big second contract, then you're set. If you don't play well, you're likely out of the league, or your second contract is meager, and by comparison, obviously, and then once your career is over,

you're looking for other opportunities. So I got traded. on week one. Actually, that was the week Gene Upshaw died the prior week, and I was supposed to be headed to Gene's funeral when Mike Shanahan, the coach of the Broncos, called me up to the office and said that I was getting traded. So I instead was on a flight to Atlanta to play for the Falcons

the year after Michael Vick went to jail, and I thought they were going to be pretty terrible. So it became pretty clear to me that it was going to be hard for me to have the type of success I needed to get that second contract. that's when I was like, hmm, let's take a look at some business schools because I had decided already that I was not going to be the guy who's just like a, I don't know, a guy was just a journeyman grabbing a contract here or a contract there is not something that I wanted to do. So I was kind of contemplating what would happen if this season didn't go well.

And one of the options on the table was business school. The season ended up going while the Ravens paid me a big contract, and I had fallen in love with the idea of going to business school. So a few years after I played for the Ravens, I decided to follow through and go to business school. While you're at Harvard working on your MBA, what did you think you were going to do with it? Did you think in terms of the investing world,

the business world, what was the plan post Harvard? Funny enough, the plan was anything outside of sports and football specifically. That was the main reason I wanted to go because I kind of had some judgment of the people who couldn't break away from sports. And once you're done playing, you go talk about football, you're right about football, you go coach football. And I was like, no, I'm more than that. I can be something else.

I end up now back at ESPN doing those things. I think more than anything, it was just like insecurity that drove me there because I had made enough money to put me in neighborhoods and circles with people who had some professional success that kind of made me feel insecure, honestly. I'm at a point now, obviously, where it's like the things that I've accomplished in my life are nothing to be ashamed of, even if it hasn't been, like, through conventional means. But one of the most important things about going to Harvard for me, I can be honest about it now, was being able to go to, like, kids' birthday parties and chat with the parents and not feel like I'm the dumb job. It's like, just so you know. Yeah, before you start judging me as, like, because I'm younger than a lot of people in the circles, I'm blacker than a lot of the people in these circles.

And there's some insecurity that comes with that because there's a presumption of, of, of some bias and assumptions being made about me. And that was one of the driving factors for me going to business school. I ended up having a unique business school experience because I'm still competitive. So like my goal when I went there was to like turn the money that I made into like hundreds of millions of dollars. And surprisingly, I left business school less competitive and less like money hungry than I think I was when I went in. You've seen football from pretty much every side. You've played it.

You've been in the negotiating room with owners. You've seen and experienced the NFL warts and all. And you have also talked about and written about issues related to physical and mental health insofar as the NFL as an institution contributes to them. With all of that is set up, are you at all surprised? by the enduring popularity of the NFL, because I can think back less than a decade ago when concussions were coming to the forefront as a talking point in the media, and there were people predicting, you know, this is the beginning of the end for the NFL. And from where I sit, it's never been more popular.

Yeah, that's from where I sit also. I can't say that I'm surprised because we, I mean, we love it. It's a unique game, I think, is relative. If you think about, like, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, hockey, all those games are the same game. You know, if you think about it, it's like they're the same game. All the players on the field or court play the same position. Like, we give them different positions,

but they all are capable of catching, shooting, rebound and passing screen and all those things. And I think that leads to like some simplicity. And in football, it's not like that. Like I could never play offensive line, but I'm on the same field with them. And I could never play quarterback. And there are things about the complexity of the game

that makes it incredibly interesting to the most, like analytical minds. It like stimulates that part of you if you wanted to. Then there's also the like the physicality that we all, no matter how like thoughtful we want to pretend to be, we all like to watch a fight every now and then. You know, like no one's, no one's covering their eyes when they drive past car accidents.

Like we we like that brutality. It's not a coincidence that MMA is becoming more and more popular. Like those are things that we enjoy. And if you can have both of those things in one place and then multiply it by the genius accident of having all football games be on Sunday, like that communal feel, I think it's something that we also crave. It like feels like something that you need to do if you want to be a part. of like mainstream American culture.

Obviously not everyone watches football, but all of us know about it and we all know with Monday night football is we all know that they're games on Sunday. And it's part of, yeah, as we get like less and less, I think, connected in so many ways. I think that's one way that we still find ourselves coming together and connected.

So I think all those things together, like make it so, maybe in hindsight, It's obvious that football wasn't going to go anywhere and is not going to go anywhere. A few months ago, I was talking with Mark Cuban on the show. For context, when Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks, one of the things he did early on in owning that team was he sort of thought in terms of like, how can I, you know, how Can I, as the owner, help make this team a more attractive destination for free agents? He looked around the locker room.

He looked at the practice facilities and said, I can throw money at these problems. Very quickly, the Dallas Mavericks had top of the line locker room, state-of-the-art practice facilities. Where you and I live, Dominique, the local professional football team is reportedly up for sale. And let's just say for the sake of argument that Jeff Bezos decides he wants to own the Washington football team. Is there something similar that he could do if he wanted to take that approach? Or knowing what you know, having been in the rooms with NFL owners, is the culture of NFL owners as a group such that there's only so much a single owner can do to engraving.

himself or herself to players to make that team a really attractive destination for free agents. So football and basketball are different and the players are different. I don't think that those factors come up for football players nearly as often as they are for basketball players. And one of the things about being basketball players, their collective bargaining agreement has max contracts. So if there is no negotiations on how much you can make, if you're a star free agent, Like the max contract is the max contract. You might be able to make more if you stay home or if you stay at your team, but you can make the same amount no matter where you go.

You can argue places like Texas, the tax difference has some value and what they can pocket. But then you have to find other ways to compete. And that's like locker room or whatever. So in football, it's not the case. Like normally that stuff doesn't matter because you put another million on the contract and beat someone else out. And so with the salary cap, no matter how much money you have,

that advantage can't be gained. And I think that that's probably, certainly wouldn't argue against investing in your facilities, but that's not a real strong barrier. You know, like everybody can do that. You know, like you can invest in it. And to your point about the culture is they do want to, the owners would want to stop that because they don't want to get into this type of money war

where the coaches' salaries continue to go up, which they do continue to go up, where you think that you can buy a bigger staff or you can buy a better staff, you can buy better facilities. They all want to move together. One of the interesting things about the ownership, I assume the same is true in basketball. I'm pretty sure it is, is they, the football owners have to vote to accept a new owner into the club.

So even if Dan Snyder wants to sell the team to whomever he wants, at whatever price he wants, he can't, they'll stop him. And that, like, helps to protect the culture that they want to continue to perpetuate and also helps to protect their franchise values. Because the last thing they want to do is Dan Snyder to sell his franchise for cheap impact of value of the rest of theirs. I have one more football question that I would get to in a second, but just on the investing

side, to the extent that you are comfortable sharing this, how do you invest your money? Are you someone who's interested in the stock market, or is that not of interest to you? Yeah, it's not really of interest in me. I try a very, very confident person. And I'm a cornerback as like, if you know anything about football, you know that comes with the territory. But I'm also, I try to be honest with myself. And I don't have the time or the inclination to like fully engage in a way that I think would be fruitful. Like I believe all the studies that suggest that you can't beat the market. You know, like I believe them.

And I'm not trying to disprove them. Yeah. So I stick pretty close to what is suggested for someone of my income and age range and just ride it out. Kansas City in Philadelphia, I'm not going to ask you for a prediction on the game. I'm more interested. You as a former player, what is something you're going to be watching for in the game? And maybe something that wouldn't even necessarily get called out by the announcers. But what's something you're going to be watching for that you think is important to the game for either team that maybe gives you an indication of who has a better chance to win?

Yeah, I think it's line play, honestly, which is not fun or interesting. Chris Jones on the Chiefs, what the Eagles are going to be able to do with him, how well they can block him in the passing game. And probably more importantly, the running game, which is more important to the Eagles, or excuse me, more important to the Eagles offense than anything is the effectiveness of the running game. Then on the other side, Patrick Mahomes' offensive line is very good, but they haven't faced a defensive line as good as the one that they're going to be facing against the Eagles. And the one time I've seen Patrick Mahomes have a bad game. It was because his offensive line got destroyed in the Super Bowl against the Buccaneers.

And that offensive line was full of backups and was heavily depleted. And they were going up against a great defensive line. This is not the same. The chiefs learned that lesson and have invested a ton of resources improving their offensive line. But this D-line against the Eagles is going to be really good. So to figure out what happens there, and then you compound that by the fact that Mahomes has a bit of a bum ankle.

And I think that'll decide the outcome of the game. When you're done listening to this episode, use whatever podcast app you're listening on and check out the Dominique Foxworth Show. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.