How and why a Browns reserve running back became the president of the Washington Football Team

Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland.

For the four seasons of the era of Phil Savage as GM and Romeo Crennel as head coach, Jason Wright toiled for the Browns in virtual anonymity. He was a backup running back and special teams core player.

But the 931 total yards, two touchdowns and 12 tackles attached to Wright’s record as a player don’t adequately measure the impact he had on teammates.

“Jason was one of the best teammates I had in 21 years in the league,” said Browns kicking legend Phil Dawson. “Super intelligent guy, full of integrity, faith-based man. I mean, he’s the total package.

“Jason was one of those rare individuals that looked to form relationships with those around him. He looked to make people’s lives around him better. He had all the same pressures that the rest of us did -- fighting to keep a job, fighting to make a living, fighting to carve out a career, but he somehow took the time to take interest in others. He certainly did that for me and I’ve always remembered that.”

Turns out that Wright had a higher calling.

Ten years after he retired from football at the age of 28 to pursue a career in the business sector, Wright has emerged in one of the most prominent positions in the NFL.

In August, he was named president of the Washington Football Team by owner Dan Snyder. He is the first African-American to hold that position in the NFL and also only one of four former players to carry the title of team president.

Wright is taking over a sports organization besieged by sexual harassment allegations by former female employees. The franchise also recently relented to massive public pressure to retire its racist nickname after insisting it would never do so.

The workplace culture is so toxic and dysfunctional that minority partners of Snyder reportedly are distancing themselves and seeking to unload their 40 percent share of the franchise. That percentage is valued at about $1 billion.

Wright, 38, was seemingly a shocking hire by Snyder to lead his franchise’s culture turnaround, until you consider his qualifications and passions for diversity, inclusion and intellectual curiosity.

A graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in psychology, he earned an MBA in operations and finance from the University of Chicago. For the past eight years, Wright was a partner for the managing consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he advised Fortune 100 companies on diversity and changing their culture.

Wright’s hire makes him a pioneer, of sorts, but also puts him under a magnifying glass as one of the most powerful team executives in the NFL, charged with rescuing one of the most storied franchises in NFL history.

Wright agreed to an interview this week prior to returning to Cleveland in his new role to watch Sunday's game between his former team and present one. Excerpts of the interview were edited for brevity.

You were lucky to play your four years with the Browns under the same GM and head coach. That’s the longest time the Browns have not made changes at those positions in their expansion history. Was there anything you learned about running an organization during that time?

Yes, there was. I’d say a couple things. One, there was a connection between the club in Cleveland and its fans that was substantial and different. The fans of the Cleveland Browns are connected to that franchise in an emotional way and almost a spiritual way. Where the emotion and the energy of the whole metro area sort of rose and fell with the performance of the Browns and the excitement of the offseason moves. It really was a centerpiece of culture and the fan psyche in a way that I hadn’t seen before. It actually was really helpful for me to learn as a player how you engage with fans and that environment, how important it is to have a positive external voice of the club to show commitment to the community – all things I think the franchise has done well over that period. And I got to work with wonderful people. All these folks really had that eye for the community. That’s a paradigm I see is really relevant to the Washington Football Team.

You played for a different starting quarterback in every one of those seasons. In fact, six different quarterbacks started games in those four years. That had to be maddening to players.

Let me tell you a story. It was 2008, and we were down to our fourth quarterback, Bruce Gradkowski. He was new at the time. We were playing the Bengals. I cracked my ribs in that game. We were in the two-minute offense and Bruce was so new that he didn’t yet know the two-minute play-calls, so he would tell me what he wanted to run and I would sign it to the receivers. (Laughs.) That’s how bad it was. The multiple quarterbacks from a performance on the field standpoint is obviously not good. But I did get to work with some immensely talented and charismatic, fantastic people. [He rattled off the names of quarterbacks Trent Dilfer, Charlie Frye, Derek Anderson, Brady Quinn, Ken Dorsey, Gradkowski]. Just getting to know those individuals is a richness for me, as a person. That’s the thing I missed so much about football and I’m glad to have recaptured.

You scored a touchdown in your first game for the Browns in 2005. It was the first of your career. You also scored your only other TD in your career with the Browns in 2007. Are those special memories? Do you have the footballs from those touchdowns?

I do have the game balls at home. I think about the one against Tennessee, in particular, because Coach Crennel and Dave Atkins, who was our running backs coach … It took a while to find some people in the NFL who believed in me. Dave Atkins and Coach Crennel believed in me. It was a pretty good run that I scored on in Tennessee. It was a moment for me, a bit of validation of their trust in me. By that time, I’d been cut at least six or seven times over two years of trying to make it. Them teeing me up to be the guy in a game like that really was meaningful for me. I remember the sense of pride especially Dave had in seeing me play well. That meant a lot and made me feel very a part of the franchise, and I was very loyal to them from then on out. In ’07, we had Anthony Lynn [as running backs coach] by then and Coach Lynn was probably the best all-around coach I ever played for, as a football mind. To be someone, again, that he trusted and tee it up to play a meaningful role in the offense meant a lot. I never played as meaningful a role as I did for the Browns those years.

You retired at 28. If you were asked at that time what you expected to be doing in 10 years, what would’ve been your answer?

Not this. Not at all. First of all, when I retired, I didn’t realize how hard it was to make a million dollars a year in the real world. I might have had some second thoughts back then. But I’m glad I did what I did. I actually didn’t know what I wanted to do, I just knew the football chapter was closing. I really wanted to learn about how capital flowed, how money was made. During my time as a union rep for the Cardinals during the lockout [in 2011], I saw that those who understood how this business made money, they could talk in a different way. They could understand what made a difference for the players and the franchises in a different way. I thought, I care about a lot of these social causes, I care about folks in the locker room, and folks who come from such diverse backgrounds. But if I’m going to do right by them, I need to know how this money works. So I was excited to go to business school to learn. I didn’t have a predetermined destination. I knew I wanted to do something, and work for organizations or build organizations, that had the opportunity to have social impact. I really just wanted to learn that craft.

I’m so grateful I landed here because it’s an opportunity for me to bring my identity as a ballplayer, which for the most part I set aside for the last decade. And then the side that was more repressed when I was a ballplayer and that’s myself as an analytic thinker and a problem solver. This allows me to bring those two things together for an organization that has said both through word and action ‘it’s time for us to go to a different direction from a culture standpoint.’ It’s a direction that’s in line with my values. And it was in the city I was already living in. So for me, it sort of dropped out of the sky and something I was very excited about though I knew it was going to be very challenging, because we do have real problems. But I’m encouraged that I have all the support I need and also encouraged that while the problems are real, the solutions are simple. They’re not easy, but the solutions are simple. So that makes me excited to take it on.

So where do you see yourself 10 years from now at age 48?

Ha ha. No clue. Man, I am deep in the weeds of this organization.

As a reserve player with the Browns, you seemed to keep a low public profile. You were rarely interviewed. Since you were named to this position, you’ve been one of the most interviewed men in sports, if not America. Obviously, you’ve been holding back. Now that you are in a very public position, do you feel pressure to say the right things?

That’s a good question. I don’t feel pressure to say the right things. I feel the responsibility to be authentic. Because I haven’t been the face of anything in sports before. I was more of a spokesperson in my last job. I’m learning it. It’s an interesting landscape. But I know that for me to do it right, I’ve got to be authentic and I’ve got to say things that I really mean. And I want to say things that not only are true to me but are also meaningful. I am most interested in giving a unique perspective that comes from my personality, that comes from the lens of the organization we’re trying to create. I think over time, especially as we reset the culture here, I want to be and I want others in the organization to be more open and transparent with the external world and I want us to be a mouthpiece for the values and culture we’re establishing. I want it to be so ingrained that people won’t have to think twice about what the Washington Football Team stands for -- inclusion, transparency, professionalism, innovation.

You were hired to change the culture of a sports organization that has been described as toxic and dysfunctional. In your previous job with McKinsey & Co., did you achieve that for any companies that were as big as the Washington Football Team?

Big, in the sense of their notoriety or public facing? Yes, some. I can’t talk about who they are. But most were substantially bigger in size. That’s the interesting thing about football franchises. They’re not actually that huge a business when it comes to the number of people that work for them. One of my other big clients in a similar spot like this that I worked with was 25,000 employees. But the difference is, in that role, I was very heavily involved, at times I played an interim role but mostly I was an advisor to them. I worked with the CEO, the head of the people, but what I would give them was a strong nudge in the right direction with data, with insights, with a plan. But they had to go and execute. It was their call. Now I’m in the operator’s chair. And I really enjoy it. And I’m making sure I get good counsel around me.

You’re the first African-American man to hold the position of president of an NFL team. You’re also the fourth former player to hold the position. How does your playing experience factor into your role now? How involved do you expect to actually get in football?

At first I thought ‘hey, he’s got the football background, so that really matters’ was maybe a little true but mostly a gimmick. But it’s actually very true and I’m pleasantly surprised that it’s very helpful. I’ll give a couple examples. The first one is one that applies to business overall. Anyone who was a student-athlete in college or a pro player has this skillset – the ability to thrive under pressure, the ability to make decisions in a moment with limited information and to own those decisions and move forward with boldness. A lot of people also have the ability to not only work well in teams but get teams to perform to a greater degree than they would on their own. That’s the benefit of sports for leadership writ large and that’s something that helped me accelerate my career in the business world. And I notice in former athletes, the first time you’re working for a big company, or for me at a professional services firm and you get told that you suck, ‘hey, your model was crap’ or ‘the client is really unhappy with how you presented things in that meeting,’ a lot of people can crumble in those moments. Their confidence is shot. They’ve been straight-A students from an Ivy League school for forever. But for the student athlete or the former pro athlete, it’s water off a duck’s back. You take the feedback and you improve. Because I’ve fumbled in front of 80,000 people and been booed. So the vice president of sales yelling at me is not that big a deal. I’m going to learn from it and do something better next time. So for me, it was a stabilizing set of character traits that have helped carry me through I bring those to this and it’s very helpful on the business side.

Secondarily and more tactically, it helps me to really dimensionalize and understand in a deep way the business decisions that cross over to the football side. I’m looking at our practice fields. We’re in the middle of a capital investment. They’re on a flood plane. They stay wet a very long time. Our players can’t be out there as often. When the football side brought that to me, it was easy for me to start to quantify the business case in my head. So I was able to be a better business thinker because of it, and there’s a series of other decisions just like that.

America has become so much more aware of racial injustice in this year of 2020. Do you see that alone as progress? Do you think we’ll ever see America united on the issue of race rather than divided?

That’s a good question. It’s a deep question. I definitely think it is progress overall. I come from a background where my family was heavily involved in civil rights. So I have a history. I am both very knowledgeable about racial history in the U.S. and as a result quite cynical about it. But you are hard-pressed, even if you’re a hard-core cynic about race progress and racial equity, you can’t help but see a national dialogue that has had sustained focus on the disproportionate outcomes – especially, for me, the ones that are the economic ones – for certain segments of our society versus others, you can’t help but see that as a positive thing. Even if it is fiery or tumultuous or difficult, at times. I can’t help but see it as a positive. Where I want us to move to the next level, I’m eager to see more and more action. I’m eager for myself to continue to play a role, for our players to play a role in that, for our franchise to play a role in that and for the entire community we represent to take action on these things. So I am excited that the narrative is what it is. I’m eager for action and for me I’m most interested in those that pull the economic levers.

I understand the changing of the Washington team name is a sensitive subject and involves layers of research and planning. But deep down, do you have a favorite name you’ve stowed away in your mind that matches your vision of the franchise’s culture change?

That’s the best bait question I’ve gotten on this topic because you tied it to the culture and the values, which I obviously have a ton of passion for. I am going to resist the urge to roll with that and pontificate with you. I’ll say this: It’s not my decision, nor should it be. It’s not Dan’s decision, nor should it be. It’s going to be a decision that we come to as a community. It will be with the substantive input of our fans that have been with us a long time, our newer fans, our future fans, our alumni, our active players, our staff, our sponsors and even the leaders of our community. I’m excited about the process that we’re going to undergo, but we’re also not going to rush it. It is a big decision. It’s going to shape the way we deal with the media. It’s going to inform the way messages and narratives come out of this building. Who we are behind the curtain. So we need to do it right.