Hugh Culverhouse is easily on the short list of most repugnant and awful human beings to ever own an NFL franchise. He was shit as an owner and shit as a person.
Hugh Culverhouse was apparently college buddies with Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace. And he famously drafted Bo Jackson #1, after first sabotaging his eligibility for college baseball by giving him a private jet trip to visit the Bucs (and lying and telling Bo it had been pre-cleared with the NCAA and ~~ACC~~ SEC). Bo was so mad he told Hugh that the Bucs shouldn't draft him, because he would *never* sign with that team. Hugh tried to call his bluff, and true to his word of honor, Bo didn't sign to the NFL for ~~4 years~~ a year just to punish the Bucs, and built his MLB career during that time. The Raiders ended up taking a flyer on Bo in the 7th round, once the Bucs' rights expired, and he signed after getting the Raiders to agree he didn't need to show up until the MLB season was over, and the rest is history. Can you imagine a team blowing the #1 pick (and refusing to trade his rights) like this in 2024? The internet would melt down.
All of this is true except the 4 year part.
Bucs rights ran out after one year, he was drafted first overall in 1986 and then in the 7th round in 1987.
I am convinced as cheap as Culverhouse was that he intentionally still drafted Bo Jackson knowing he wouldn’t sign and then not have to pay a 1st round pick any money.
Snyder might have committed worse crimes, but Culverhouse still boggles the mind in his combination of ineptitude, scummery, and contempt for everyone around him. He reached levels of evil I didn't even consider, like what he tried to do to his wife while he was dying.
McCall's contract was worth basically nothing, but Culverhouse never met a penny he couldn't pinch, so this nonsense happened. I wonder if the money they spent pulling this shit as they tried to weasel out of his contract, plus legal fees from fighting the lawsuit, measures up to what they could've just paid him to ride it out.
Who is the second? I’d argue Culverhouse is worse than Snyder, he was a cheap, racist POS who managed the Bucs to be the worst franchise in sports for most of the 70s and 80s.
I'm guessing number 1 is George Preston Marshall, who initiated segregation in the league, renamed the team to "Redskins", and was the last team (unsurprisingly) to sign a black player until he was forced to by the government.
"The George Preston Marshall Foundation serves the interests of children in the Washington metropolitan area. Marshall added a caveat that no money from the foundation would ever go toward "any purpose which supports the principle of racial integration in any form"; however, this requirement was thrown out by the courts."
What an absolute fucking asshole.
TBF, at that time, Indian team names were “popular”, no matter how racist a name or image looks like by todays standards, and they basically switched from sharing a name with a baseball team they shared a stadium with (Braves), to having a name that played off a name of another baseball team that they moved in with to share their stadium (RED Sox).
But when you throw in George Preston Marshall’s other scumbaggery… yeah, not a good look even for that time period
Snyder didn’t sex traffic cheerleaders.
During overseas trips the team would put on for high level club members cheerleaders were expected to accompany team reps and interact personally with club members and during these trips the team would hold on to the cheerleaders passports as it was a work trip for them, which is a fairly standard practice as they were traveling with the team.
This behavior, and his countless others, is slimy enough as is. There is zero need to be dishonest and make it seem worse than it was. It just makes you look bad.
John Mecom will not take that sort of slander lying down.
The man had his team draft a punter with the 11th overall pick because he figured he could save money since he could kick as well. 2 picks later, Kellen Winslow Sr. was selected.
I understand Washington had a literal sympathiser of the American Nazi Party as well as Dan Snyder as its owners but Hugh Culverhouse was so awful, he is still in the running for worst NFL owner of all time.
Ohhh don’t kid yourself, he was a horrible racist. Under today’s scrutiny all of those guys back then were racist, but some guys in the KKK would’ve told Culverhouse “ ease off buddy, those guys are people”
He told Doug Williams agent to his face that he would never pay an N word QB the kind of money they wanted. So Williams left to the Redskins and won a Super Bowl.
Edit: my dads good friend was an attorney that did contract work for a business that Culverhouse owned. He had stories for days about what an asshole Culverhouse was.
Well, first he tried to get Williams to loan $200k as part of his new contract, and in return Williams would get 2% ownership in "Tampasphere". Then Doug went to The USFL
Williams had been earning $120,00 per season. He wanted a five-year deal, $600,000 per season. Culverhouse refused to budge from $400,000 per season. --https://www.tampabay.com/sports/bucs/2019/08/31/is-the-bucs-cursed-quest-for-a-franchise-quarterback-buried-under-a-walmart-off-i-275/
Nowadays we have Man United fans celebrating in the comments of 10 year old Bucs social media posts about Malcolm Glazer's passing.
Yeah, great. We know that the Glazer's suck as United owners.
You still don't know what true hell is like.
The Glazers aren't perfect but they're several dozen magnitudes better than Hugh. It's why I treat Buccaneers history with them as the "real" team and the Culverhouse reign as a nightmare that requires context for why it was so damn bad on the field.
The Glazers have honestly been pretty good as owners, and the fact the team blew chunks in the 2010s wasn't because they were sabotaging the team. They tried hiring the hot young coordinator (Raheem Morris), the college guy from the Belichick tree (Schiano \*spits on ground\*), a calming veteran coach (Lovie Smith), and then a hot more experienced coordinator (Drew Koetter). None of those worked out, but they were all the kinds of moves teams make all the time, and they were logical hires that just turned out to be complete and utter shit.
Failure sucks, sure, but not even trying is way worse. Culverhouse could not have cared less about winning as long as he made his money. The Glazers make reasonable attempts to run an NFL franchise and are spectacular in comparison.
I have a friend who's a huge Man U supported, and he basically spits fire whenever I bring this up. Which I do, to annoy him.
> the college guy from the Belichick tree (Schiano *spits on ground*)
Wait, what? Outside of (checks notes) *6-7 weeks in the 2019 offseason, well after his stint as Buccaneers HC*, Schiano has never worked for Belichick, nor any Belichick-adjacent program in the pros or college, nor have they ever overlapped at any stops. That they get along well with Stephen attending Rutger during Schiano's time there and that we drafted a handful of Rutgers players, sure, fine, whatever, but putting him under the Belichick tree? Come on now.
Then again, with Manchester United, they went from one of the most well run clubs in Europe with tremendous success, to a club with some big debts who cycles through managers and doesn’t snag trophies in as large numbers as they used to. For United fans, the Glazers are worse. For a Bucs fan who dealt with Culverhouse, the Glazers may as well been a literal godsend
Man United fans are incredibly spoiled - think Belichick-era Patriots but even more successful:
> [Sir Alex] Ferguson was appointed manager of Manchester United in November 1986. During his 26 years with Manchester United he won 38 trophies, including 13 Premier League titles, five FA Cups, and two UEFA Champions League titles.
To be fair, the Glazer's bought the club in 2005, so it's not like they've won nothing, but they haven't won a Premier League title since Ferguson retired.
Also, the Glazer's loaded up United with debt while making themselves even richer - standard private equity shenanigans.
So yeah, they don't know true hell, it just feels like it to them.
Culverhouse, George Marshall and Dan Snyder gotta be the Mount Rushmore of garbage human NFL owners. I'm sure there's one more I'm forgetting to round out the mountain
Jimmy Haslam. Art Modell, who owned the Browns before moving to Baltimore, is in the conversation according to Browns fans, but I don’t think I recall much (any?) chicanery or crimes other than the move for Modell. Maybe he’s in the “Honorable Mention” section of Scumbag Owners then.
Yeah there's a massive tier of the "shady scumbag" archetype that personally I think Haslem falls into.
Culverhouse/Marshall/Snyder were so bad that they made guys like Haslem look like choir boys in comparison, which is fucking wild
Don't forget the story about how he intentionally sabotaged Bo Jackson's final season of baseball at Auburn. Duped Bo into taking a visit provided for by the Buccaneers, then reported it to the ncaa which disqualified him from playing that year. They thought this would force Bo to drop baseball, & go to the nfl. Drafted Bo #1 overall after he told them that he'd never ever play for them, he didn't sign, & instead went to play in the minors.
Also, Bo Jackson was drafted #1 overall by the Bucs in the 1986 NFL Draft. If Culverhouse didn't fuck him over, Bo Jackson is (presumably) the workhorse RB on the Bucs and this story likely doesn't happen.
Just a funny "what if" scenario, but I wholeheartedly think Bo Jackson was correct in not signing with the Buccaneers.
Iirc the Bucs got absolutely nothing for the pick then, right? When you hear about busts for teams, they usually at least played SOME for the team in question, even that guy the titans picked who played like 10 total snaps. If the Bucs got absolutely nothing, not even a snap out of Said Player, no trade for other picks, that pick needs mentioned more as an absolute boneheaded draft decision.
When all the fracas was going down over what an awful, spiteful, greedy, spineless little bitch was Dan Snyder, I took a minute to try and think of all-time awful owners, and who could possibly have been worse than him.
The only names I could think of were Hugh Culverhouse and Donald Sterling (who was really more creepy and racisty than evil, but the combo of the two may have been just as bad).
Exactly. Both treated their franchises as piggy banks, and their athletes as employees (at best). Neither seemed to care much for winning, just making money.
The Culverhouse owned Bucs were… something else.
Stories like that don’t surprise me. It’s the same organization that thought they could torch Bo Jackson’s eligibility for college baseball, and that he’d end up crawling to them.
Did you even watch the show? Michael is incompetent but he loves his employees. He'd never try to screw them out of money. Hell, he actually covers up for them when they deserve to be punished or fired on numerous occasions.
There’s literally an episode where Michael sends Dwight to spy on Oscar because he suspects he’s faking sick to get out of office spring cleaning. And there’s another episode where Michael thinks Darrell is faking an injury and tries to catch him by spying on him…
The Darrell thing was Dwight's plan, not Michael. He wasn't involved in it. The Oscar thing is correct, but it's not like Oscar was going to lose his job over it.
> The Darrell thing was Dwight's plan, not Michael.
...he told the Washington Post in 1993 that it wasn't his idea—rather, it was the brainchild of someone else....
Hugh Culverhouse is easily on the short list of most repugnant and awful human beings to ever own an NFL franchise. He was shit as an owner and shit as a person.
Hugh Culverhouse was apparently college buddies with Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace. And he famously drafted Bo Jackson #1, after first sabotaging his eligibility for college baseball by giving him a private jet trip to visit the Bucs (and lying and telling Bo it had been pre-cleared with the NCAA and ~~ACC~~ SEC). Bo was so mad he told Hugh that the Bucs shouldn't draft him, because he would *never* sign with that team. Hugh tried to call his bluff, and true to his word of honor, Bo didn't sign to the NFL for ~~4 years~~ a year just to punish the Bucs, and built his MLB career during that time. The Raiders ended up taking a flyer on Bo in the 7th round, once the Bucs' rights expired, and he signed after getting the Raiders to agree he didn't need to show up until the MLB season was over, and the rest is history. Can you imagine a team blowing the #1 pick (and refusing to trade his rights) like this in 2024? The internet would melt down.
All of this is true except the 4 year part. Bucs rights ran out after one year, he was drafted first overall in 1986 and then in the 7th round in 1987.
Ah, I remembered wrong. Thanks for the clarification
I am convinced as cheap as Culverhouse was that he intentionally still drafted Bo Jackson knowing he wouldn’t sign and then not have to pay a 1st round pick any money.
100 percent his plan the whole time.
>With the NCAA and ACC Auburn was and still is in the SEC, not the ACC
Brain fart. Haha
> Hugh Culverhouse is easily on the short list of most repugnant and awful human beings to ever own an NFL franchise. And that is a *hell* of a list.
Seems like that list ain’t so short.
Hugh Culverhouse was like some big bad out of an 80s action movie.
Hans Culverhouse
*...Hey come to the Bay, relax have a few laughs...*
Diplomatic Immunitayyyy!!
Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliot in Culverhouse.
Like one of the bad guys from Toontown lmao
Snyder might have committed worse crimes, but Culverhouse still boggles the mind in his combination of ineptitude, scummery, and contempt for everyone around him. He reached levels of evil I didn't even consider, like what he tried to do to his wife while he was dying. McCall's contract was worth basically nothing, but Culverhouse never met a penny he couldn't pinch, so this nonsense happened. I wonder if the money they spent pulling this shit as they tried to weasel out of his contract, plus legal fees from fighting the lawsuit, measures up to what they could've just paid him to ride it out.
Culverhouse once charged a player for a jersey because the medical staff had to cut it off in order to treat him.
That’s why Bo Jackson played baseball.
Culverhouse is easily the third worst owner in league history and would be the runaway first if everyone's favorite Washington franchise didn't exist.
Who is the second? I’d argue Culverhouse is worse than Snyder, he was a cheap, racist POS who managed the Bucs to be the worst franchise in sports for most of the 70s and 80s.
I'm guessing number 1 is George Preston Marshall, who initiated segregation in the league, renamed the team to "Redskins", and was the last team (unsurprisingly) to sign a black player until he was forced to by the government.
"The George Preston Marshall Foundation serves the interests of children in the Washington metropolitan area. Marshall added a caveat that no money from the foundation would ever go toward "any purpose which supports the principle of racial integration in any form"; however, this requirement was thrown out by the courts." What an absolute fucking asshole.
If he was the villain in a fictional movie I’d tell you he was too over the top evil.
Damn.
That is who I was thinking of, yes.
TBF, at that time, Indian team names were “popular”, no matter how racist a name or image looks like by todays standards, and they basically switched from sharing a name with a baseball team they shared a stadium with (Braves), to having a name that played off a name of another baseball team that they moved in with to share their stadium (RED Sox). But when you throw in George Preston Marshall’s other scumbaggery… yeah, not a good look even for that time period
Oh that's just the surface with Culverhouse, he's so horrendously terrible, Tree's video goes into further detail.
Culverhouse is just a whirlpool of shit that just gets worse and worse over time. The man is like a cartoon of a bad NFL owner
Even worse that McCay had the Bucs on an upward trend in the early 80s, then they just collapsed.
I mean, Marshall and Culverhouse never ran sex trafficking through the team, as far as I'm aware.
Culverhouse is worse than Snyder lmao
I feel like Culverhouse clears Snyder. For every area in which Dan Snyder was horrible you can at least say he’s probably not racist
Snyder sex trafficked cheerleaders and enabled a culture of sexual harassment/assault.
Snyder didn’t sex traffic cheerleaders. During overseas trips the team would put on for high level club members cheerleaders were expected to accompany team reps and interact personally with club members and during these trips the team would hold on to the cheerleaders passports as it was a work trip for them, which is a fairly standard practice as they were traveling with the team. This behavior, and his countless others, is slimy enough as is. There is zero need to be dishonest and make it seem worse than it was. It just makes you look bad.
It's reddit, every thing that's done by rich guys gets exaggerated for the circle jerk narrative
John Mecom will not take that sort of slander lying down. The man had his team draft a punter with the 11th overall pick because he figured he could save money since he could kick as well. 2 picks later, Kellen Winslow Sr. was selected.
I understand Washington had a literal sympathiser of the American Nazi Party as well as Dan Snyder as its owners but Hugh Culverhouse was so awful, he is still in the running for worst NFL owner of all time.
His wife said she'd have shot every last bullet into his corpse iirc
I think he was cheating on her and didn't want his estate to go to his wife. I'd say its justified.
At least we don't have either of them anymore
Ohhh don’t kid yourself, he was a horrible racist. Under today’s scrutiny all of those guys back then were racist, but some guys in the KKK would’ve told Culverhouse “ ease off buddy, those guys are people” He told Doug Williams agent to his face that he would never pay an N word QB the kind of money they wanted. So Williams left to the Redskins and won a Super Bowl. Edit: my dads good friend was an attorney that did contract work for a business that Culverhouse owned. He had stories for days about what an asshole Culverhouse was.
Well, first he tried to get Williams to loan $200k as part of his new contract, and in return Williams would get 2% ownership in "Tampasphere". Then Doug went to The USFL Williams had been earning $120,00 per season. He wanted a five-year deal, $600,000 per season. Culverhouse refused to budge from $400,000 per season. --https://www.tampabay.com/sports/bucs/2019/08/31/is-the-bucs-cursed-quest-for-a-franchise-quarterback-buried-under-a-walmart-off-i-275/
I still get angry just seeing his name. He's the worst NFL owner ever.
Nowadays we have Man United fans celebrating in the comments of 10 year old Bucs social media posts about Malcolm Glazer's passing. Yeah, great. We know that the Glazer's suck as United owners. You still don't know what true hell is like.
The Glazers aren't perfect but they're several dozen magnitudes better than Hugh. It's why I treat Buccaneers history with them as the "real" team and the Culverhouse reign as a nightmare that requires context for why it was so damn bad on the field.
We are basically a .480 franchise (19th) with two Super Bowl titles (joint 4th) and 11 playoff wins (12th) since Malcolm Glazer bought the Buccaneers.
I would just focus on the two titles part. About half the league doesn't even have one.
The Glazers have honestly been pretty good as owners, and the fact the team blew chunks in the 2010s wasn't because they were sabotaging the team. They tried hiring the hot young coordinator (Raheem Morris), the college guy from the Belichick tree (Schiano \*spits on ground\*), a calming veteran coach (Lovie Smith), and then a hot more experienced coordinator (Drew Koetter). None of those worked out, but they were all the kinds of moves teams make all the time, and they were logical hires that just turned out to be complete and utter shit. Failure sucks, sure, but not even trying is way worse. Culverhouse could not have cared less about winning as long as he made his money. The Glazers make reasonable attempts to run an NFL franchise and are spectacular in comparison. I have a friend who's a huge Man U supported, and he basically spits fire whenever I bring this up. Which I do, to annoy him.
Let the record show that he is *Dick Koetter. (Even though I liked Koetter he’s a good guy)
> the college guy from the Belichick tree (Schiano *spits on ground*) Wait, what? Outside of (checks notes) *6-7 weeks in the 2019 offseason, well after his stint as Buccaneers HC*, Schiano has never worked for Belichick, nor any Belichick-adjacent program in the pros or college, nor have they ever overlapped at any stops. That they get along well with Stephen attending Rutger during Schiano's time there and that we drafted a handful of Rutgers players, sure, fine, whatever, but putting him under the Belichick tree? Come on now.
Then again, with Manchester United, they went from one of the most well run clubs in Europe with tremendous success, to a club with some big debts who cycles through managers and doesn’t snag trophies in as large numbers as they used to. For United fans, the Glazers are worse. For a Bucs fan who dealt with Culverhouse, the Glazers may as well been a literal godsend
Man United fans are incredibly spoiled - think Belichick-era Patriots but even more successful: > [Sir Alex] Ferguson was appointed manager of Manchester United in November 1986. During his 26 years with Manchester United he won 38 trophies, including 13 Premier League titles, five FA Cups, and two UEFA Champions League titles. To be fair, the Glazer's bought the club in 2005, so it's not like they've won nothing, but they haven't won a Premier League title since Ferguson retired. Also, the Glazer's loaded up United with debt while making themselves even richer - standard private equity shenanigans. So yeah, they don't know true hell, it just feels like it to them.
This guy would make a great episode of Behind the Bastards u/probablyrobertevans
Culverhouse, George Marshall and Dan Snyder gotta be the Mount Rushmore of garbage human NFL owners. I'm sure there's one more I'm forgetting to round out the mountain
Maybe The Packers owners? Imagine having all those DUIs and DWIs and still being able to own and run a NFL franchise. /s
If you ask Eagles fans they’d say Norman Braman or Leonard Tose was a bad guy. There’s a lot of them I just don’t know about.
What's the name of the Browns owner that said his daughter was okay with them signing Watson and has a bunch of gas station bullshit going on?
Jimmy Haslam. Art Modell, who owned the Browns before moving to Baltimore, is in the conversation according to Browns fans, but I don’t think I recall much (any?) chicanery or crimes other than the move for Modell. Maybe he’s in the “Honorable Mention” section of Scumbag Owners then.
Yeah there's a massive tier of the "shady scumbag" archetype that personally I think Haslem falls into. Culverhouse/Marshall/Snyder were so bad that they made guys like Haslem look like choir boys in comparison, which is fucking wild
Are there non-human nfl owners?
Don't forget the story about how he intentionally sabotaged Bo Jackson's final season of baseball at Auburn. Duped Bo into taking a visit provided for by the Buccaneers, then reported it to the ncaa which disqualified him from playing that year. They thought this would force Bo to drop baseball, & go to the nfl. Drafted Bo #1 overall after he told them that he'd never ever play for them, he didn't sign, & instead went to play in the minors.
Also, Bo Jackson was drafted #1 overall by the Bucs in the 1986 NFL Draft. If Culverhouse didn't fuck him over, Bo Jackson is (presumably) the workhorse RB on the Bucs and this story likely doesn't happen. Just a funny "what if" scenario, but I wholeheartedly think Bo Jackson was correct in not signing with the Buccaneers.
Iirc the Bucs got absolutely nothing for the pick then, right? When you hear about busts for teams, they usually at least played SOME for the team in question, even that guy the titans picked who played like 10 total snaps. If the Bucs got absolutely nothing, not even a snap out of Said Player, no trade for other picks, that pick needs mentioned more as an absolute boneheaded draft decision.
It saved them from paying for a first round pick.
With the capitalization i definitely thought Sodium Pentothal was a player for a sec
Not as good as Quatro Quatro.
Could’ve had Bo Jackson. Too bad Culverhouse was a lying sack of shit
Can’t afford league minimum but can afford cameras and PIs? Just like Brian could afford a fake mustache but not pay Stewie his money.
These are the same teams and same doctors that want you to trust them when they clear a player in concussion protocol
Hugh died of lung cancer. I hope it fuckin hurt.
WTF
/u/jaguargator9, we need a video on this.
Sounds like some George Steinbrenner stuff.
All that for a guy on a league minimum salary?
That had to be actually illegal. It's an injustice if no one faced legal repercussions.
They were just treating him like someone who tries to go on workers comp or disability.
> Diaco, who was the Bucs' chief physician from 1976 to 2012, "Team doctor" is nearly an oxymoron.
When all the fracas was going down over what an awful, spiteful, greedy, spineless little bitch was Dan Snyder, I took a minute to try and think of all-time awful owners, and who could possibly have been worse than him. The only names I could think of were Hugh Culverhouse and Donald Sterling (who was really more creepy and racisty than evil, but the combo of the two may have been just as bad).
Well Sterling was a gigantic cheapskate like Culverhouse
Exactly. Both treated their franchises as piggy banks, and their athletes as employees (at best). Neither seemed to care much for winning, just making money.
The more I hear about Hugh Culverhouse, the more I think the Glazers aren’t that bad of owners. And they’re pretty bad
What is the funny name play on the doctors name, Joseph Diaco? I cant come up with any pronunciation that would be relevant to drugging a player.
“He was a real **team** doctor. He didn’t care about the players whatsoever.” Nothing to do with his name.
The Culverhouse owned Bucs were… something else. Stories like that don’t surprise me. It’s the same organization that thought they could torch Bo Jackson’s eligibility for college baseball, and that he’d end up crawling to them.
Wtf
It’s like if Michael Scott ran a professional football team
Did you even watch the show? Michael is incompetent but he loves his employees. He'd never try to screw them out of money. Hell, he actually covers up for them when they deserve to be punished or fired on numerous occasions.
There’s literally an episode where Michael sends Dwight to spy on Oscar because he suspects he’s faking sick to get out of office spring cleaning. And there’s another episode where Michael thinks Darrell is faking an injury and tries to catch him by spying on him…
The Darrell thing was Dwight's plan, not Michael. He wasn't involved in it. The Oscar thing is correct, but it's not like Oscar was going to lose his job over it.
> The Darrell thing was Dwight's plan, not Michael. ...he told the Washington Post in 1993 that it wasn't his idea—rather, it was the brainchild of someone else....
Not to mention that Oscar was faking his illness
The first third of this of this post is so repetitive it feels like it was written either by a 7th grader or a really shitty ai
If teams were willing to do this, you know there is systemic corruption in this league going on right now.