Panthers-Raiders game was the first time two NFL teams led by female presidents played each other

The Panthers and the Raiders are the first and only teams in the NFL led by women who aren’t part of an ownership group. Kristi Coleman was promoted to Panthers’ team president in February 2022, and Sandra Douglass Morgan—who is the only Black female president in the NFL—was named president of the Raiders in July of that year. The teams are part of different conferences and are guaranteed to play each other only about once every four years; this was their first matchup since both presidents started their jobs.

Douglass Morgan explains the role of an NFL team president this way: “Our jobs are to make sure the business is still running regardless of what happens on the field.”

Coleman rose up through the finance side of the Panthers organization, first joining the team 11 years ago after the Panthers were her client at Deloitte. Douglass Morgan is an attorney and longtime leader in the Las Vegas business community. The Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas four years ago, and owner Mark Davis tapped Douglass Morgan to rehabilitate the franchise following a workplace scandal and develop its fan base in its new home city. Since then, Las Vegas has hosted the Super Bowl, a process Douglass Morgan was involved in even before she joined the Raiders. Now she’s working to grow the Raiders’ local fan base.

Coleman, meanwhile, is working on a stadium renovation for the Panthers and even supporting efforts to establish girls’ flag football as a varsity sport in North Carolina. Both teams went through coaching and GM changes in a short time period and the leaders have turned to each other for counsel throughout those transitions. “We’re all competitive. We all want to win. We collaborate on business operations, but not necessarily football,” Coleman says.

Courtesy of The Carolina Panthers and Las Vegas Raiders

Coleman and Douglass Morgan were so busy in their respective jobs neither realized this milestone was approaching at first. “We know any given Sunday the matchup is going to be the premier attraction—and that’s what we want it to be. Neither one of us wants to distract from that, but we want to celebrate each other and we want to grow the game of football [including with] female fans,” Douglass Morgan says.

Both team presidents have observed—and occasionally been a bit jealous of—the female fans Taylor Swift has brought to the Kansas City Chiefs. Coleman says other football execs would like a Taylor Swift for their own teams. Douglass Morgan is a bit more reserved, given than the Chiefs are the Raiders’ direct division rival. “I’m not rooting for the same team she is, but it’s great…that we can get more people understanding and appreciating the game of football,” she says.

The team presidents hope that their historic game this weekend shows fans—especially women—all the ways they can get involved in the sport. “Women love this game. They want to be a part of this game,” Douglass Morgan says. “And there are so many different ways to do it.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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PARTING WORDS

“There is a huge cultural fixation with novelty and growth. Everything has to grow all the time. Get bigger, sell more and be different—novelty, reinvention. I don’t find that very interesting.”

—Author Sally Rooney, who says she is focused on each novel she writes and not the arc of her career