I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s ass for cheap clicks here, it’s been damn hard to write about the Washington Redskins this season or at least to write anything positive about the Washington Redskins. Everything about being a fan of this team sucks monumental ass.
The owner is a self-absorbed douchebag who has no intention of learning from two decades of mistakes and would certainly never do the fanbase the favor of selling the franchise.
He employs the least qualified general manager in the league in Bruce Allen, who gets credit for managing the salary cap better than Vinny Cerrato. If the best we can do as fans is applaud something better than Vinny Cerrato we deserve to suffer. And suffer we have done and continue to do at the behest of the most inept organization in all of sports.
This club can’t get anything right even by accident. A blind squirrel may find an occasional acorn but a blind, deaf, dumb, and willfully ignorant squirrel finds either a subsistence diet or a starvation diet and Redskins fans are finding both every year.
Simple Solution
The simple solution would be for the Redskins owner, Daniel M. Snyder, to admit he’s a great fan but a terrible owner and to sell the franchise as a favor to the history and tradition of excellence he has been unable to carry forth during his tenure.
It’s not a question of wanting to win or to do the right thing. It’s a case of not knowing what to do and not knowing or caring enough to find out what to do to return the team to a semblance of respectability. It’s a case of doing whatever the hell he wants, damn the experts, damn the evidence, and damn the torpedoes.
And so here we are, with a team no one wants to manage, coach, or play for on game days. Did the Redskins even take the field this past Sunday? Josh Johnson, who hadn’t played a game in five years, put up more points than Mark Sanchez, the team’s first emergency quarterback option. Signing Mark Sanchez was the team waving the white flag on the season. Yet another, “&@?$ it. We’ll try again next year.”
Evidently the team hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care about the dwindling number of fans. Jack Kent Cooke must be rolling over in his grave at the thought of a fan hearing his or her own voice echo in an empty home stadium.
Change
Everything about this organization needs a culture change from top to bottom. When you never get anything right you’re doing everything wrong. Since Dan Snyder won’t get the &@?$ out, nothing else may matter in the grand scheme of things.
If the intention is to keep any of the existing fanbase or to perhaps (gasp!) regain some of the recently lost fans then the team needs to remove Bruce Allen, whose only contribution to the franchise is cap management. The team already has Eric Schaffer, the individual who actually manages the cap and who offers far more to football management than does Bruce “I only have this job because my last name is ‘Allen’ by any reasonable measure.
Jay Gruden may or may not be a decent NFL head coach but his time as head coach of the Washington Redskins has come and gone. He and the team need fresh starts. The sign of a quality head coach is one who can get his team up for a “meaningless” game. Gruden can no longer motivate his team for games that still matter.
History
Fans are split on how to best effect the culture change of the Washington Redskins organization. It has a long-standing history and tradition of success and of racism. It has three Vince Lombardi trophies and three of the worst owners in the history of professional sports.
George Preston Marshall and Edward Bennett Williams couldn’t even sniff league approval to purchase the franchise in the year 2018, in a league very much dominated by old White men with good old boy values. Those values and a billion dollars will get you where Dan Snyder is: nowhere.
People get angry when it is suggested the team sign Colin Kaepernick. The flag is a bone of contention. To some Americans it means everything, to others it means nothing. Neither side will ever convince the other of their position. But the Redskins have tried waving the flag and giving fans the “land of the free and home of the brave” rhetoric and it is doing nothing to keep them standing at attention or saluting or even bothering to remove their caps. It’s time to try the Constitution, if Dan Snyder and company can even recall of what the constitution of the franchise consists.
Hope?
If liking players personally or agreeing with their personal actions in their personal lives was a requirement of signing teams would be hard-pressed to sign anyone. We as fans and they as a business need to set aside feelings about what people do outside actual gameplay. All we need to be concerned with is wins and losses. All we need to have is hope for a better future than the present. This franchise has been without hope for a very long time.
Even when we thought the team had a chance of making the playoffs we knew it had no chance of going anywhere once it got there. Fans are welcome to disagree with that statement, and some will, specifically with the RGIII year, before he got injured. Realistically, however, we hoped we had a shot at beating Green Bay. No one expected it to happen. And that’s the best we’ve been able to muster. Hope that we could win one playoff game. At least there was some hope.
New Philosophy
The team philosophy has failed and a new philosophy is needed. You may not like it but the team needs to change everything from the philosophy to the attitude to the culture and that means changing the team name, the stadium location, the fan experience, the management, the coaching staff, the roster, and the concern for who does what during the national anthem.
Make the Washington Redskins organization the land of the free and the home of the brave by freeing it from the chains of stupid people making dumb decisions. Leave football people free to make football decisions and football players free to do anything they choose outside the field of play.
Make the Redskins organization the home of the brave by signing the bravest player in the last several decades, one who was willing to give up his career for his beliefs. Good players will want to play for an organization that supports its players rights to be people outside of the job. It takes a brave organization to sign a brave player.
I welcome any criticisms, comments, or arguments but unless you have another viable solution to the “Redskins Problem” your speech may fall upon deaf ears.