Woody Johnson, Madden, and the Meddling Owner Archetypes

My favorite type of palace intrigue story in sports is the meddling or incompetent owner storyline. It’s not so fun when it is driven by racism and sexual harassment like Donald Sterling with the Clippers, but the Woody Johnson story that The Athletic released yesterday hits all those incompetent checkpoints without most of the more sinister subplots.

On top of that, they lead off the story with a Madden anecdote that is nearly impossible to believe:

“Douglas [the NY Jets GM] told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources.”

It somehow gets even better later in the piece when Madden comes up again in relation to offensive lineman John Simpson.

“Another example came when Johnson pushed back on signing free-agent guard John Simpson due to a lackluster “awareness” rating in Madden. The Jets signed Simpson anyway, and he has had a solid season.”

When you’re not just going by overall rating, but you’re then digging into awareness ratings for your NFL transactions, you’re a level beyond cooked as a franchise. Plus, you’re not just taking a video game’s ratings as gospel for the real NFL, you’re not even a Madden player. We as Madden players recognize that both awareness ratings and overall ratings can ultimately be meaningless, so you’re not even targeting the “true” ratings we might care about like speed or what abilities they have.

It gets even better if you read the article and then recognize that Woody Johnson, already a fourth-generation heir to a Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical empire, is listening to his teenage son Brick — of course his name is Brick — a fifth-generation failson who follows thousands of OnlyFans girls on IG and is in fact feeding Woody Johnson these Madden takes that then get funneled to the GM of the team. Though, I suppose if I think about it, that makes more sense than the 77-year-old Woody Johnson himself going and digging through the Madden menus or just grinding Madden tape in coach mode.

The entire article is incredible and genuinely hilarious at many points, so if you have a subscription to The Athletic it’s a must-read — except maybe if you’re a Jets fan. But as I was reading this article yesterday, it made me think about our own franchise modes and the concept of a meddling owner.

An incompetent owner is not a novel concept in sports, and yet it’s not something we ever really concern ourselves with in our sports video games. While movies like Major League exist, this idea of a terrible owner doesn’t funnel down to video games. Maybe it’s due to the long-term licensing agreements and organizations like the NFL bristling at the idea of seeing incompetency showcased in their sports video games, but I find it to be a very alluring concept as a player of these games.

I wouldn’t want this sort of stuff prioritized over the in-game action or nailing all the salary cap rules, but the incompetent GM would fall under the same umbrella as implementing house rules to make recruiting harder in College Football. A bad owner is a roadblock, and sometimes we need roadblocks to keep things challenging in our franchise modes. It’s not just the gameplay that can become too boring and easy, it’s the day-to-day team management aspects that also start to lack any surprises. And while the NFL might stand in the way of a porn-obsessed son to a J&J empire vetoing your Madden trade, there has to be some middle ground that developers could find to add another layer of chaos to franchise modes.

So what I did was come up with some owner archetypes that could exist in our sports games. Most of them are of the “incompetent” variety, but I do think there is a scale to it all because obviously we can’t have 30+ trainwrecks running wild in our games.

The Erratic Owner (Woody Johnson - NY Jets, Dave Tepper - Carolina Panthers)

I’ve already been talking about Woody so he needs to be the example for his own archetype. This would be the hardest one to actually create and also the most challenging to deal with because things could change at any time. On top of that, how much control are you willing to give to the game? He could sour on your franchise QB after a couple bad starts and demand a backup be inserted, or he might decide he will not re-sign your best player because that guy didn’t kiss the ring when accepting his MVP award.

On OS, we have those threads where people can rate trades, and those discussions always revolve around whether something is “realistic” enough. Of course, the question itself is silly because it only takes one other person saying yes to turn an unrealistic trade into a realistic one. This is where the Erratic Owner lives.

I would love the challenge of the erratic owner, but this one might be a tough sell for those who just want to play the game and win some titles.

The Spend-Spend-Spend Owner (Steve Cohen - NY Mets, Jeffrey Lurie - Philadelphia Eagles)

I think one thing that sometimes gets misunderstood about our desire for a realistic salary cap or wanting the myriad rules that exist in these CBAs is that a lot of us just want contracts to matter. The albatross contract is a real thing, and while the NFL does get around this to an extent with front-loaded contracts, dead money, signing bonuses, and various other workarounds, it’s still a thing even in that league.

However, the Spend-Spend-Spend owner is going to stretch those limits. That owner will push you to go and find high-priced free agents — it would be be part of your job approval rating. That owner will give fat signing bonuses and expect you to use whatever loopholes you can to make contracts as enticing as possible.

As a GM of a virtual franchise, this sounds great, but it can also go very wrong. Those contracts can go bad in a hurry, and if you struggle that owner will still want you to get some of that money off the books at some point. Steve Cohen might have signed Juan Soto to a contract equivalent to the GDP of a small island nation, but Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, and Jacob deGrom also exited stage left in quick succession not long ago. The give and take is real here, and the reckoning will be painful if and when it reaches you.

There is a trickiness to this depending on the league because it would be easy to argue the Eagles give out a lot of the contracts they do because by giving out more cash upfront they are avoiding worse contracts down the line. Maybe the Saints are a better example here because of how they notoriously kick the can down the road on many contracts by just restructuring them for all-eternity, but this is also just down to the differences between something like the NFL vs. MLB or even the NBA.

The Win-Now Owner (Steve Ballmer - LA Clippers)

This is a simpler one than the spend-happy owner because there isn’t really a desire to ever go backwards or pay for your mistakes. It goes to another place than simply spending, the Win-Now Owner wants you to deliver deep playoff runs at all costs. He wants you to trade future picks, sign veterans, and worry about the repercussions never. Steve Ballmer maybe does it because he’s too rich to care and had a new arena he wanted to fill, while other owners maybe do it because they’re in the twilight of their lives. Regardless, the circumstances are irrelevant. It’s an archetype that exists in various forms in all professional sports leagues.

The Cheap Owner (Bob Nutting - Pittsburgh Pirates, John Fisher - Athletics)

I don’t think the leagues would go for the “owner buying a club just to move it” concept being in our official sports video games, so I’ll just put that sort of archetype under the “cheap” owner branding with other actual cheap owners. It would also be demeaning to classify this category as the “small market owner” archetype because there’s a big difference between a “small market” owner and the cheap owner.

The cheap owner is never going to spend even if your team is winning. A Jeffrey Loria with the Marlins might fake it for a season or half a season in pursuit of a singular World Series run, but that money ain’t sticking around. A small market owner is willing to spend, but they might just not be able to operate in the red for multiple seasons unless it comes along with deep playoff runs.

The idea of always being cash strapped is the epitome of a “house rules” concept, and it’s a major reason why we need contracts, salary caps, and other money-related rules to match up with the real leagues in our video games in order to pull this off as an actual game mechanic.

The For-Profit Owner (Mike Brown - Cincinnati Bengals)

I think the categories here are different because for as cheap and cutthroat as Mike Brown might be, there’s some semblance of an argument to be made that at least you can talk this owner into doing some stuff if you keep winning and bringing in those playoff receipts. This is the owner who just wants to operate in the “green” and will allow you to spend more if you make more.

This idea maybe makes more sense in the era when we cared more about setting the price of hot dogs and popcorn in our owner modes, but even if we don’t want to dive into obsessing over all the ways we make money with concessions, the business side of these games is still a place where so much more could be done if the developers wanted to expand the ways to interact with our teams off the field. Whether that’s through giving players themselves “marketing” values or doubling down on the idea of which markets themselves are more lucrative, there’s no doubt tons more could be done to expand the business side of owner/franchise modes.

The Image-Obsessed Owner (Jerry Jones - Dallas Cowboys)

Not only does this owner want big names playing for the team, they want to be the talk of the NFL. In a way, this is a fusion of a bunch of archetypes in one. You’re spending money, expected to win, dealing with an erratic personality, and you must always be kissing that owner’s ass.

More than any other owner, this might be the archetype that’s hardest to nail down in video games until you properly give players more weight than just their age or contract. While winning propels a Patrick Mahomes to the top of the marketing scales even if he’s not in a top-tier market, there’s players like OBJ who are great wide receivers at one point or another but have marketing values that outweigh their actual real results (or overall rating in a video game). We need to be able to better quantify this sort of player in our video games in order to give us reasons that they should be on our teams beyond just what they can do from a production standpoint.

Beyond that, we need more of the situations that you find to some extent in NBA 2K where you’re chatting with the owner and basically always walking on eggshells or making sure you’re puffing up their ego. It would be a fun cat-and-mouse game of sorts if you’re always trying to appease this sort of owner and make them believe any good idea you had came from them.

The Asshole Owner (James Dolan - NY Knicks/NY Rangers, Jerry Reinsdorf - Chicago White Sox/Chicago Bulls)

Again, we probably can’t call this the asshole owner archetype in a video game, but the idea here is this is someone players just don’t want to be around. It’s harder to sign free agents, and it’s easier to lose your players in free agency. Sure, maybe you can’t create scenarios where the owner is banning players or fans for life from entering the home arena, but there’s certainly ways to add values to a franchise that make it so current players and free agents are wary of being part of your team over a longer term.

This would be the archetype I would have the most fun dealing with year to year because you’re always concerned the owner might burn a bridge with a current star, and it might be harder than it needs to be to sign free agents.

The Cutthroat Owner (Bill Foley - Vegas Golden Knights)

This is the more positive version of the “asshole” owner. While the Vegas Knights are still a new franchise, they’re clearly about winning and nothing else. I don’t think they’re loyal to any one player. They might treat everyone the right way when they’re in the building, but behind the scenes they’re ready at the drop of a hat to trade anyone if they think that trade will get them one step closer to a title.

It’s not necessarily a negative, but on top of the expectations that you’re always in pursuit of a title or at least in the hunt, you will be expected to be involved in trades for any big players that hit the market. If the owner doesn’t think you were prepared enough to make an offer for that star player or that owner sees a trade for a player that they feel you could have beat, that’s a mark against you.

This would be the ideal archetype for those who always like wheeling and dealing in their franchises. You’re almost benefiting from making moves just to make moves, even if it maybe means your own players or free agents might be a little wary of your team.

Bottom Line

There’s plenty more archetypes that could exist if you simply wanted to spend a little more time on the “good” archetypes, but what’s the fun of that? Those are the archetypes we already play as anyway by being competent GMs of our squads in our various games.

We should be far more interested in chasing the incompetent because that’s what would open up so many more possibilities and stories to tell. It’s not enough to simply be a “rebuilding” team or a “win now” team as a basis for the moves teams are making in our franchise modes. We should have more layers to these owner and franchise modes, and I think starting with the blundering and the bungling is the right approach if you wanted to create those new experiences.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase