Domonique Foxworth on NFL Owners, Investing, and Keys to the Big Game

Domonique Foxworth made an impact on the field as an NFL cornerback for six seasons, and an impact off the field as the youngest player to be elected vice president of the NFL Players Association Executive Committee.

Motley Fool host 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.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on February 05, 2023.

Domonique Foxworth: 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 and that 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.

Chris Hill: I'm Chris Hill and we're 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. Domonique 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 Domonique 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 in 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, Domonique 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. 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 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?

Domonique Foxworth: The first impression was, they aren't super geniuses, which I think I assumed that they were and this is probably you recognize or you would have known this maybe, but as a 23, 24-year-old football player, I assumed that given how financially successful they were, they must have been just as intelligent as I was athletic and then, I realize that no, they aren't. I don't mean that as an insult is not that they're dumb. Many of them worked hard and they're very smart but I expected a room full of Bill Gates 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 and say obviously have more experience and certain places and I've more experienced in other places. 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 leaguewide issues, I remember leaving and being like, that'll be fine. 

Chris Hill: Don't have to be so nervous next time around.

Domonique Foxworth: Yeah, the nerves went away almost immediately because we would have these conversations and I would be like, that seems reasonable, 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 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 charisma and was like the strength of some of them which I hadn't expected. As I get older and spend time around other 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 it seems like in many cases, the soft skills are the things that separate people.

Chris Hill: 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?

Domonique Foxworth: It's a sad story, but I guess it was triumphant in the end, but I played, I got drafted on the Broncos. I played well there for three years and then I was coming up on my fourth year and that's the contract year, that's 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. I got traded on Week 1. 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 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.

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 so that's when I was like let's take a look at some business schools because I had decided already that I was not going to be the guy who is just a journeyman, grabbing a contract here and a contract there is not something that I wanted to do so I was 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 well, the Ravens paid me a big contract and I had fallen in love with the idea of going into business school so a few years after I played for the Ravens, I decided to follow up there and go to business school.

Chris Hill: While you were 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?

Domonique Foxworth: Funny enough, the plan was anything outside of sports and football specifically. That was the main reason I wanted to go because I had some judgment of the people who couldn't break away from sports and once you're done playing, you'll talk about football. You are right about football. You go coach football and it's like no, I'm more than that, I can be something else.

I end up now back at ESPN doing those things and 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, in circles with people who had some professional success that 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 through conventional means but one of the most important things about going to Harvard from me, I can be honest about it now was being able to go to kid's birthday parties and chat with the parents and not feel like I'm the dumb jock, it's just so you know.

Before you start judging me 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 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 my goal when I went there was to turn the money that I made into 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.

Chris Hill: 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 in so far as the NFL as an institution contributes to them. With all of that setup, 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 this is the beginning of the end for the NFL and from where I sit, it's never been more popular.

Domonique Foxworth: Yeah, that's from where I sit also. I can't say that I'm surprised because we love it. It's a unique game, I think is relative. If you think about soccer, basketball, lacrosse, hockey, all those games are the same game. 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, we give them different positions, but they all are capable of catching, shooting, rebounding, passing, screening, all those things and I think that leads to some simplicity. Football, it's not like that. I could never play offensive line. But I'm on the same field with them and I can never play quarterback.

There are things about the complexity of the game that makes it incredibly interesting to the most analytical minds, like stimulates that part of you if you wanted to. Then there's also the physicality that no matter how thoughtful you want to pretend to be, we all like to watch fight every now and then. No one's covering their eyes when I drive past car accidents, we like that brutality. It's not a coincidence that MMA is becoming more and more popular. Those are things that we enjoying. 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.

That communal feel I think is something that we also crave. It feels like something that you need to do if you want to be a part of mainstream American culture. Obviously not everyone watches football, but all of us know about it and we all know what Monday night football is. We all know that their game is on Sunday. As we get less and less connected in so many ways, that's one way that we still find ourselves coming together and connected. All those things together maybe in hindsight, it's obvious that football wasn't going to go anywhere and is not going to go anyway.

Chris Hill: A few months ago, I was talking with Mark Cuban on this show. For context, when Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks, one of the things he did early on in owning that team was he thought in terms of like, 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, Domonique, the local professional football team is reportedly up for sale. 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 ingratiate himself or herself to players to make that team a really attractive destination for free agents?

Domonique Foxworth: 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 for basketball players. One of the things about being basketball players their collective bargaining agreement has max contracts. If there is no negotiations on how much you can make, if you're a star free agent, 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 in places like Texas that the tax difference has some value and what they can pocket, but then you have to find other ways to compete. That's like locker room or whatever. In football, it's not the case. Normally, that stuff doesn't matter because you put another million on the contract and beat someone else out. With the salary cap, no matter how much money you have, that advantage can't be gained. I think that that's probably certainly wouldn't argue against investing in your facilities. It's not a real strong barrier, like everybody can do that. You can invest in it. To your point about the culture is, 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, assume the same is true in basketball, I'm pretty sure it is, is the football owners have to vote to accept a new owner into the club. Even if Dan Snyder wants to sell the team to whomever he want, at whatever pricey he wants, he can't. They'll stop him. That 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 the value of the rest of.

Chris Hill: I've one more football question that I will 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?

Domonique Foxworth: Yeah, it's not really of interest to me. I try very, very confident person. I'm a cornerback as, if you know anything about football that comes with the territory. I try to be honest with myself. I don't have the time or the inclination to fully engage in a way that would be fruitful. I believe all the studies that suggests that you can't beat the market. I believe them and I'm not trying to disprove them. I stick pretty close to what is suggested for someone of my income in age range and just ride it out.

Chris Hill: Kansas City in Philadelphia. I'm not going to ask you for a prediction on the game. You as a former player, what is something you're going to be watching for in the game? 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?

Domonique Foxworth: 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 past game. Then probably more importantly, the running game, which is even more important to the Eagles often than anything is the effectiveness of the running game. Then on other side, Patrick Mahomes offensive line is very good, but they haven't faced Davidson line as good as the one that they're going to be facing as the Eagles.

The onetime, I've seen Patrick Mahomes have a bad game, it was because his offensive line got destroyed in the Super Bowl against the Buccaneers. That offensive line was full of backups and was heavily depleted and they were going up against a great difference of line. This is not the same, but she's learned that lesson and have invested a ton of resources improving their offensive line. But it's the line against the Eagles going to be really good. To figure out what happens there, and then you compound that by the fact that Mahomes has a bit of a bum ankle. That'll decide the outcome of the game. 

Chris Hill: When you're done listening to this episode, use whatever podcast app you're listening on and check out the Domonique Foxworth Show. As always, people on the program may have interest 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.