Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris has a plan. In just under three weeks, Harris will likely make significant changes to the organization he and his fellow owners purchased for over $6 billion in July.
The Commanders are expected to move on from head coach Ron Rivera and general manager Martin Mayhew upon the season’s conclusion. Harris, who also owns the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers and NHL’s New Jersey Devils, has already begun making changes to the organization.
In October, the Commanders hired Eugene Shen to head the organization’s analytics department. Shen reportedly was involved in the compensation for the trades of defensive ends Chase Young and Montez Sweat at the NFL trade deadline.
In a new column from Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated, he mentions what he heard about Harris’ intentions at the NFL owners meetings last week and which NFL franchise Harris might want to model the Commanders after.
No surprise, it was the Baltimore Ravens.
Here’s this from Breer:
We’re all learning on the fly about Commanders owner Josh Harris, who was accompanied by one of his limited partners, Mitchell Rales, at this week’s league meetings in Dallas. And one thing I learned down in Texas over the last few days could at least color how the next couple of months go with the new owners and their team — Harris likes how the Commanders’ beltway rivals from Baltimore do business.
Here’s more from Breer on Shen’s hiring and the thought process behind it:
Seven weeks ago, Washington brought Eugene Shen aboard as its new senior vice president of football strategy, poaching him back from the world of finance, a world to which he’d returned in 2022 after serving as the Jaguars’ vice president of football analytics, and the Dolphins’ director of analytics between ’19 and ’22. For five years before that, Shen cut his NFL teeth helping to run analytics for the always innovative, always forward-thinking Ravens, who have gone so far as to build their own proprietary analytics systems.
