The Fifth Column: The Pause That Refreshes

They were all weird games, though. I saw quarterbacks throw the ball 30-40 yards downfield. And there were receivers waiting for the ball—and they caught it. When was the last time you saw something like that around here?

Most teams didn’t use their timeouts until they needed to. No players were seen sleeping on the bench. None of the home teams got booed as they were introduced. After the games, no second-rate players used Twitter to abuse fans.

And none of the owners seemed to be going out of their way to humiliate their head coaches or punish paying fans for expressing their opinions of the team. Only Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, he of the "reverse-Midas touch," is doing those things.

The Redskins opened their season with lame performances on the field, but the real downer was the revelation that Snyder’s ticket office had been selling seats at Fedex Field to third party ticket resellers, who then sold the seats at massive markups online, even as hundreds of thousands of fans—we are told—waited for their names to reach the top of a mysterious “season ticket waiting list.” The Snyder regime also admitted that they were in the habit of suing lifelong season ticket holders who were running late on their payments.

At that point, I had already lost faith in the franchise. Snyder has poisoned many fans’ connection to the Redskins. He has mishandled the team and disrespected its fans for a decade. And when I called on Snyder to remove himself from the equation, I was hardly alone.

Three weeks later, the Washington Redskins had become the punch line to 10,000 Monday morning jokes after losing to the Detroit Lions, a team that had been extending the second longest losing streak in NFL history (and has not won a game since beating the Redskins, by the way).

The fan experience at FedEx Field, which has always been horrible, was getting even worse, as Snyder decided he needed to crack down on tailgating. Nothing was done to improve the traffic and parking situation around the stadium, or the drunken riot that passes for “family fun” inside FedEx. Beginning to feel some of the heat, Snyder et al. put the word on the street: the real reason the team was struggling was sports reporters who were “out to get” the team and—you guessed it—“fake” fans weren’t “giving it up” for the team.

I reiterated: Daniel Snyder needs to sell the Washington Redskins.

Since then, things at FedEx Field have gotten downright ugly. During their last home game—another drubbing, this time at the hands of the Philadelphia Eagles—Snyder had his minions confiscate signs from fans. The Redskins claimed they were fulfilling an NFL mandate that signs which block other fans’ sightlines or “are inflammatory, derogatory or generally in bad taste” be removed. But in all fairness, what kind of signs does Snyder think he’s going to see as he looks down from Mount Doom onto the disaster he has created? “Nice Try”?

To anyone paying attention it is obvious that the only sincere sentiments a Washingtonian can have about the current state of the Redskins are going to be inflammatory, derogatory or generally in bad taste.

Worse still, it has been reported that Snyder had some fans ejected for booing the team or participating in chants that were inflammatory, derogatory or generally in bad taste. Among the chants clearly heard on the television broadcast were “Sell this team” and—yes, I’ll take partial credit for this one—“Dan must go.”

There are rumors going around that Snyder will once again open his wallet to bring in a big name head coach, maybe during the off season, maybe before season’s end. That’s part of the Chinese water torture that Snyder is dishing out to Jim Zorn.

But if we can look past the initial excitement that hiring will bring, in our heart-of-hearts we all know exactly where we’ll be one year later: exactly where we are right now. Because if Snyder can bring the Redskins franchise to its knees through his meddling and ineptitude, then hiring another head coach won’t help anything. It would be his seventh head coach and he’s messed it up with every one of them—even Joe Gibbs, that beautiful control freak who wears three Super Bowl rings but couldn’t find a way to make a Snyder creation work.

At this point, why is anyone spending a nickel to support Snyder’s regime? The experience at the stadium is nightmarish, even on those rare occasions when the team plays well. The owner is incognito; he has become the Howard Hughes of the NFL. The only evidence that we have that he is still alive is the increasingly frequent anti-fan commands he sends down from on high.

The Redskins problems go far deeper than play calling or quarterback controversies or punt returners or head coaches. The problem is the little man in the gigantic luxury suite at FedEx Field.

So, after wallowing in my own anger and frustration over Snyder’s kidnapping of the Redskins and taking into account the suggestions of all of the Redskins fans who have contacted me to vent their own frustrations—inflammatory, derogatory or generally in bad taste as they may be—I have put together a list of fan demands. If Snyder meets these demands, I can guarantee that fans of the team will return in droves. They will be happier, even if the team continues to lose games for some time, because they will know the worst roadblock in the team’s history will have been removed:

First, Snyder must sell the team.

That’s it. That’s all this team needs to get back on the path that took it to its glory days.

Oh – and while I’m at it, take that god-awful corporate logo off the ballpark. The name of the place is Jack Kent Cooke Stadium.