Susan T. Spencer is tough. Tough. She served as the general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1982-85, and she did it despite the chauvinistic attitude of the owner—her own father, Leonard Tose. But that’s the effect being raised on sports can have—a drive to succeed despite obstacles. Football’s been part of Spencer’s life since she was 2: “[Notre Dame football coach] Frank Leahy used to visit my house. I knew all the coaches.” Now, she has her own sports radio show in Las Vegas, Not Just Sports, on KDWN 720-AM (Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-noon), and she’s unapologetically candid about her life and the sport she loves.

On gambling on sports: “Never. My dad was a big gambler. He lost $30-$40 million over the course of his life. The [Atlantic City] casinos took him down for most of what he had after he sold the team. I never wanted to do it.”

On team loyalty: “I’ll always bleed green, but I don’t want to root for a team with a quarterback who I feel has no moral scruples. I would never have hired a guy like Mike Vick. Right now, I can’t get into that team.”

On San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh: “He is a great coach, but he goes beyond the line of what I think is ethical. You don’t announce that your quarterback is the elite quarterback in the NFL when you know you’ve got kind of a small dog there.”

On Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones: “He butts in too much. He doesn’t let a coach run the team, and you can see that it’s not productive. They won more games when [Tom] Landry was there because he wouldn’t let him interfere.”

This year’s Super Bowl winner: “The Baltimore Ravens, because they have the best coach in the NFL.”

The worst: “The Ryan brothers. They are way out of their league.”

Ironically, despite her lifetime interest in the gridiron, Spencer actively tried to avoid any connections with the Eagles in her professional career. “I always wanted to create my own identity, and I was always rebelling against having to be under someone else’s identity.” But when she began reading front-page headlines about the team’s financial woes in the late-’70s, Spencer, then in law school, offered her father legal services for a significantly reduced price. “He didn’t hire me because I was family. He hired me because I worked cheap!” she says, laughing.

Despite her father’s mandate to “not get into the business,” Spencer immersed herself in the organization, rising to the rank of GM and making decisions that made her extremely unpopular—replacing the press’ filet mignon meals with hot dogs, raising ticket prices and switching from jumbo jets to regional ones. Sometimes she had to wait hours before leaving the stadium, because fans would throw eggs and tomatoes at her car.

But Spencer, 69, remains thankful for the lessons she learned over her three years as GM. “I got to put my dad in the proper context and not judge him as harshly as I used to.” Their relationship did not improve after Tose sold the team, but Spencer blames herself for that. “I had to be very submissive, and it didn’t come with my DNA. I couldn’t make myself into some little fluff.”

She subsequently started a meat processing company (another male-dominated business—go figure!), published Briefcase Essentials, in which she gives women advice for succeeding in the business world, and launched her radio show in April.

Spencer got the idea after radio shows nationwide asked her to speak about the NFL lockout in 2011 (the last lockout was in 1982—when she was with the Eagles). “None of them knew what they were talking about,” she says, “and I thought I could do it better, because I was prepared.” She asked around local sports stations, offering her take. “And they all said, ‘We’re not interested.’ Was it out-and-out discrimination? No, but the message was clear to me—women can’t be on the radio talking about sports.”

Spencer is currently the only woman regularly talking about sports on the radio in the Las Vegas Valley, and as with any other endeavor in her life, it’s a means to an end. “My focus has always been, ‘How do I further women’s credibility in any field they want to go into?’ So if I can inspire one person to get the next person in, then I’ve done something.”