Diddy is one step closer to becoming an NFL owner. On Sunday (March 11), a letter of intent to purchase the Carolina Panthers was sent to the league offices by billionaire Michael Rubin whose purchasing group includes the REVOLT TV Chairman, as well as all-star Golden State Warriors point Steph Curry.

A week before Christmas, Diddy tweeted that he wanted to buy the Panthers and Curry replied on social media that he wanted to join the business and music impresario in his quest. The Panthers have been put up for sale after their current owner Jerry Richardson who went under investigation late last year for using racial slurs against employees and sexually harassing women. According to reports, formal bidding for the team will happen within the next couple of weeks.

At least one Panther is pulling for Diddy to sit in the owner’s box. During the CIAA tournament in Charlotte, N.C. earlier this month, REVOLT caught up with the team’s defensive end Charles Johnson while he was attending a celebrity basketball game.

“If Diddy can buy the team, let him buy the team,” Johnson said at the Grady Cole Center. “Anytime you look at the owners of the NFL, you don’t see not one black owner. So, if he can even remotely try to get in with a team or with a group that’s gonna buy the team, that still would be a win for us in the situation because there’s no Black owners, period, in the NFL.”

At the time, Johnson wasn’t aware that Rubin and Diddy were teaming up, but he did have thoughts on another high-powered purchasing partner for the King of Ciroc: JAY-Z.

“They can,” he opined about Puff and Hov buying a franchise. “Out of a billion dollars, you onlty gotta have 20-percent to put up, to show up. So, it ain’t like you gotta have that much–I mean, not for us. For them, they’re billionaires..So, to each his own. I wish it can happen and I hope it can happen.”

The Panthers are currently valued at just north of two billion dollars. As for Diddy’s partner, Rubin already has strong ties to sports as a co-owner of the New Jersey Devils and Philadelphia 76ers. He also has an allegiance to hip-hop culture as he is best friends with Meek Mill’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina and has been an avid supporter of getting the popular lyricist free from prison.

Just yesterday, Rubin was present at a Town Hall that took place at the University of Pennsylvania. Tacopina, Reverend Al Sharpton, Meek’s mom Kathy Williams, and Meek himself (via phone) were all among those who spoke out on not just what they feel is a “perversion of justice” in Mill’s case, but are many other gross miscarriages of justice in the Pennsylvania judicial system concerning black men and women.