When Shad Khan set out more than a decade ago to become the first member of an ethnic minority to own an NFL team, the Pakistani-American heard the scuttlebutt.
“The conjecture was, ‘You will never get approved, because you’re not white,’” Khan, now the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview this week.
His attempt to purchase a 60% stake in one club fell through, so “the narrative that people had been giving to me kind of got reinforced,” Khan said.
Undaunted — and, he says, encouraged by Commissioner Roger Goodell — Khan moved on and soon reached an agreement to buy the Jaguars. “Got approved unanimously,” Khan noted. “The conjecture and what was going on — and the reality — turned out to be different.”
Current and former players and others around the league have varying opinions about a key question that arose in light of the racist, homophobic and misogynistic thoughts expressed by Jon Gruden in emails he wrote from 2011-18, when he was an ESPN analyst between coaching jobs, to then-Washington club executive Bruce Allen: Just how pervasive are those sorts of attitudes around the sport these days?
