“One thing people may not appreciate about sports is how much variation there is in the quality of ownership.” - Professor Cade Massey

At the root of every great franchise is a great owner, and the fish rots from the head of every dysfunctional organization. Owning a team seems easy—just cut the checks and get out of the way!—but that’s easier said than done. There aren’t too many enterprises where the head honcho is happy to fork over more than $200 million annually without having some say-so as to what happens with it. As Billick puts it:

 A good owner isn’t going to win the Super Bowl for you—any owner is too far removed from the film room and the field of play for his influence to be that decisive. But a bad owner can lose you one, either by undercutting or overruling his front office or coaching staff, or by being so impatient that he sabotages his own team.

That’s not to say the owner doesn’t have a role with the team. The owner has to keep his key folks—that’s the head coach, general manager, and quarterback, usually—happy. He represents the team in the media. And he’s accountable for all the non-football stuff, too—ticket sales, facilities improvements, league meetings discussions, etc. It would be ridiculous to say owners, who make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars from their stake in the team, have a “thankless job,” but conventional wisdom underrates their importance to the franchise’s long-term success.

“It was once said to me that there are 5 elements to a Championship team:

 

1. Owner
2. General Manager
3. Head Coach
4. Quarterback
5. Luck” - Dan Hatman, former NFL scout and Director of The Scouting Academy