Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments on Biden’s student loan relief plan; Marianne Williamson will run for the White House again; and the new president of the Las Vegas Raiders is a die-hard supporter of her hometown and its community. Have a productive Monday.
On the field. The Tuesday after the Super Bowl, Sandra Douglass Morgan was having trouble with our Zoom call, and she had nearly lost her voice. The president of the Las Vegas Raiders had had a busy few days. She’d attended the Super Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., to study up for next year’s contest, which Las Vegas will host.
“If we’re not in it, it’s about as good as it’s going to get,” she told me of her Super Bowl LVII experience.
Douglass Morgan is a Las Vegas native and a longtime leader in Nevada’s business and policy communities. A former Las Vegas city attorney, she had chaired the Nevada Gaming Control Board. After the Raiders football franchise moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020, the team’s owner tapped Douglass Morgan to serve as the team’s president in 2022.
The appointment made Douglass Morgan the first Black woman to hold such a position in the NFL. It wasn’t something she sought out, she says; the NFL wasn’t a specific career goal of hers.
But she already knew what NFL life was like before taking the job. Her husband, Don Morgan, is a former NFL player for the Minnesota Vikings and Arizona Cardinals. Being part of a football family has given her insight into some of the needs of her players’ and staff’s families. “It’s very similar to military families. Not just the players but coaches and scouts, they can be pulled out very quickly and dropped into a new city, a new environment. And when that employee comes to join the team, it’s not just them, it’s their family,” she says. She’s rebranding a “wives” support program to “families” to help new members of the Raiders community settle in to Vegas.
Last spring, Douglass Morgan’s predecessor Dan Ventrelle was fired by team owner Mark Davis after reporting the franchise to the NFL for a hostile work environment. That summer, the Las Vegas Review–Journal reported that former employees said the Raiders franchise enabled a culture of harassment, both in Oakland and Las Vegas. One former female employee called the Raiders a “boys club and the mob wrapped in one.” Douglass Morgan was announced as the team’s new president just weeks later. The NFL said it would investigate the allegations. Davis later said the team “started to make those changes that are necessary to get the culture back to where we feel we can all be positive.”
Douglass Morgan declined to discuss the allegations directly but pointed out that in her previous job leading the state’s gaming control board, she introduced new discrimination and harassment policies. “[Raiders owner] Mark Davis knew that I passed that law before I came to the Raiders,” she says. Her résumé suggests that everyone who hired her should know she would “hold people accountable here,” she notes.
She’s also determined to provide better outreach to the 50% of football fans who are women; they may be looking for a more casual game-day experience than what a football stadium typically offers, she says.
Since taking the job, she’s become even more of a die-hard supporter of her hometown and its new team. The Raiders play at Allegiant Stadium, which opened at the same time as the team’s move in 2020 (except for closures during the pandemic). The 65,000-seat stadium provides a new kind of venue for Vegas; it will host both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift concerts this year. “I remember growing up and wondering why Michael Jackson never came to Las Vegas,” Douglass Morgan remembers. “And it’s because there wasn’t a venue large enough.”
Douglass Morgan is already planning ahead for Super Bowl 2024. During the Super Bowl, Las Vegas usually hosts more revelers than whatever city is hosting the game, so she’s preparing for an unprecedented number of visitors to flood Las Vegas when the game takes place in the gambling capital.
“Everyone has a voice,” she says, “to continue to grow Raider Nation.”
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe
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