No Redskins fan needs the latest FanPulse results to tell them about the confidence they have in the direction of the franchise: it is non-existent.

The fan base has had its spirit broken — not by a few losses on the field of play, but by the consistent destructive decisions and embarrassing actions of the owner, Dan Snyder, and the incompetent yes-men he has employed to insulate him from the previously angry, but now simply apathetic fans that used to be the backbone of this once-proud franchise.

This is what Redskins fans were like in 1982:

Redskins fans in 1982 Posted by Bill Horgan on Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Nowadays, opposing fans usually outnumber Redskins fans at FedEx Field. The Week 17 finale against Philadelphia last season looked like a home game for the Eagles, as the stands turned into a sea of green.

Is there something inherently wrong with Redskins fans? Are they so brittle and fainthearted that a few losses make them give up on the team and stop supporting the players?

After a long Sunday at the game and while traveling back to DC, I was thinking about how #Redskins fans have to be some of the most loyal fans in sports to witness what they have over the past 20 years. You guys don’t owe any apologies to anyone for your frustration. — Lake Lewis Jr (@LakeLewis) September 30, 2019

No. That’s not what’s happening in Washington. The fans haven’t given up on players who have lost a few games; the fans are rebelling against an owner who either lacks the will or the skill to stop making terrible organizational decisions that antagonize and alienate the team’s own fan base.

Consider this editorial commentary from Ken Meringolo, the managing editor of the SB Nation fan site, Hogs Haven:

[T]here have been few teams over the decades that have had as positive a love affair with their city as the Redskins have had with the district. This city hasn’t always known a winner either—the Redskins have had their share of historically bad periods (I am too young to have experienced the 60’s but I am told it was...rough). Through it all, the city identified with its team. The locals and fans of the team wore their fandom like a badge of honor. I have argued that even after Snyder first bought the team—and we sucked—fans still flocked to FedEx and still sang the fight song and still wore the colors proudly year-round. What Redskins fans and DMV citizens are waking up to these days is removed even from that beginning part of the Snyder era. Not only is the fanbase staying away from FedEx, but...they are losing overall interest in the team that was once at the heart of everything in the [Washington DC area]. And THAT has led to a diminished interest in one of the best products in American business today—the NFL. Dan Snyder has successfully monetized the passion and loyalty of the Redskins fanbase. I always wondered how long it would take to complete that mission of his. The answer is: just about 20 years. It’s done. The majority of people attending games at FedEx are not even Redskins fans. They are there to troll the minority of Redskins fans in attendance. [Redskins fans] are deliberately NOT buying jerseys. They are deliberately NOT buying licensed products because they feel like they have already given Snyder all the money they will ever give to him. The Trent Williams story is meaningful on this point. There haven’t been many players who have put more on the line personally over the last handful of seasons as Trent. He has played injured for his teammates a LOT. His willingness to blast Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen specifically as the cause of his holdout matters. To say it hasn’t factored into the hearts and minds of some of his teammates this season would be disingenuous. When the best player on the team—a guy who has repeatedly answered the bell for his brothers—throws his hands in the air and says, “I won’t do it for Dan and Bruce,” guess what? It matters. The environment at Redskins Park is not one where anyone can succeed because the guy in charge—Dan Snyder—is the opposite of a leader. He has slunk into the shadows of Redskins Park to watch his business twist in the wind. The Washington Redskins [franchise], under the stewardship of Daniel Snyder has been, and continues to be, the perfect place to come and fail.

Kennedy Paynter, a football analyst and long-time Redskins fan, wrote a personal commentary this week about the 20-year journey as a Redskins fan slowly coming to understand what is happening under the stewardship of Dan Snyder and his current chief henchman, Bruce Allen:

As an almost 33 year-old human, I have gone from an obsessive, this-team-runs-my-life mindset that now has dissolved into what many are aptly calling ‘hate-watching.’ I will follow this team, I will watch this team, and I will suffer with this team for eternity. I just don’t believe in any of their counterfeit promises or fraudulent luster anymore, and I have freed myself from the hex that fewer and fewer other humans remain bewitched by. I will follow. I will watch. I will hate every moment of it until Bruce Allen is gone.

Perhaps the voice that has best-encapsulated the voice of Redskins fans this week is that of Craig Hoffman, a local sports reporter.

Gruden not playing Haskins isn’t because they hate Haskins. It’s because they’re trying to protect him. It’s also not an indictment on Haskins, who is coming early and staying late and taking extra meetings. He’s trying. It’s just not happening at a speed that’s suitable for him to currently be playing NFL football at an acceptable level. It is an indictment on Allen and Snyder, for going against the wishes of the experts they pay to make these kinds of decisions and then sticking them in the situation to figure it out. To make it worse, they do this while taking no accountability, in terms of public interviews, all while their coach gets hammered from every corner of media and social media for something he can’t really explain without throwing the future of the franchise quarterback or his bosses under the bus. This is not surprising. This is how Allen and Snyder have operated for most of the near decade that Allen has been in charge of the team. This is my fifth season covering the team. I have been to zero Bruce Allen press conferences where he fields questions from the press pool in Ashburn. It is not because I have missed any. It is because there haven’t been any. He is the organization’s primary decision maker. Most organizations do not do this and especially not the good ones. Other NFL teams regularly open their chief decision makers up for questioning. They especially make themselves available after major events or when answers are needed. This is not about the press being self-indulgent and putting on a show in a press conference. It is about getting answers for fans who are the backbone of any organization. To me, the criticism is fairly simple and straightforward: If the people making decisions are scared to answer questions about their decisions because they are not defensible, they should not be making those decisions in the first place. If they do not feel they owe their fans any explanation of their decisions, they also should not be allowed to make them. When I finally got the chance to talk to Allen in the spring in a one-on-one interview at the NFL’s Annual League Meeting, I asked him what he’d learned in nearly a decade with the Redskins. He said that was “a better question for my brother. He’s a shrink.” He laughed. I didn’t. The answer seems to be [that Bruce Allen has learned] nothing. He has continued to freelance, and, in turn, has a 60-88-1 record (.402 winning percentage) to show for it. There have been few executives in sports history who have had as poor of a record and as long as a tenure, which is why some of this ire has to go towards Snyder. It is the owner who allows Allen to keep running his franchise. It is the owner who has talked to the press exactly zero times in any on-the-record capacity in the last five seasons. It is he who could change anything he wants with one fell swoop and does not. Instead, the status quo continues. The status quo of the Allen/Snyder era is losing. It is losing games. It is losing fans. It is losing employees. It is losing respect around the league. It is losing hope. We often use the phrase “once-proud franchise” to describe the Redskins. The problem seems to be the men in charge are still proud of what they are, despite what they are: a losing franchise with no clear direction for the future.

A Tampa Bay writer wanted to make his readers feel a little better by assuring them that no matter how bad the Glazers were as owners, Dan Snyder was worse:

Here is the owner who charged fans to get into training camp. Here is the owner who, after Sept. 11, with a nation mourning, leaped into action and began adding a “security charge” to ticket prices. Here is the owner who once allowed stadium vendors [to] sell peanuts that were past expiration dates, having once been the property of a defunct airline. Here is the owner who once sued the team’s season ticket holders. Here is the tone-deaf owner who still clings to his team’s nickname when it clearly has no place in sports or today’s America. ”We’ll never change the name,” Snyder told media five years ago. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use all caps.” Snyder — and Allen — have been steadfast in their opposition to the name change. These two would dig up Geronimo and stand him in front of the stadium if they could, then sell the shovels as official team merchandise. Another recent disaster: A New York Times report on claims that Washington used team cheerleaders as escorts on a Costa Rica trip where suite holders and sponsors — males, by chance — were allowed to see cheerleaders topless. He’s the WORST, all caps.

Dan Snyder, for all his shortcomings, will periodically do something to give Redskins fans hope. Each time the fan base responds with support, but somehow, every promise of a new and improved Dan Snyder Redskins franchise leads to a new disappointment. The list is long and well known to Redskins fans, but let’s hit on just a few highlights among the lowpoints of the past few years.

The RG3 trade and the salary cap dump

It has been widely reported that when Mike Shanahan was the coach, Dan Snyder dictated that the organization would draft Robert Griffin with the #2 overall pick in the 2012 draft, acquired from the Rams for a King’s ransom of draft picks (3 first-round picks and a second-rounder) that crippled the Redskins drafts for years. All of this, reports have said, was in direct conflict with Shanahan’s wishes, putting the organization in the situation of having a huge investment in a young QB that the coach didn’t really believe in. To make the situation more untenable, Snyder developed a close relationship with RG3, undermining Shanahan’s authority.

In the “uncapped” year of 2010, the Redskins tried to exploit the situation and get some cap relief by manipulating a contract or two. The league responded by penalizing the team a total of $36m in cap space, spread over two seasons (2012-13). The net result was that the team — already crippled by a lack of draft picks — was also crippled by a severe cap reduction, taking away both free agency and the draft as viable options for maintaining the roster.

Of course, the organization seemed to mishandle Griffin’s knee injury, ruining his career along with the team’s chances of building a winning team.

Kirk Cousins and the franchise tags

Amazingly, when RG3’s career went limp, the team had a backup plan in 4th round draft pick Kirk Cousins. New head coach Jay Gruden put Cousins in a position to maximize his middling skills and turned him into a statistical top-10 passer. Snyder and Allen, however, misplayed the contract negotiations with Cousins, failing to either commit fully to Cousins and secure his services, or to acquire a veteran or drafted QB to replace him. Eventually, the clock ran out after two franchise tags, and Cousins left in free agency.

Scot McCloughan

If there’s been one recurring theme throughout much of the past two decades, it has been that the organization needs to bring in “football people” to run the team, leaving Dan Snyder to simply take care of signing the checks. Unfortunately, the two attempts that Dan has made to put a “football guy” in charge have been named Vinny Cerrato and Bruce Allen. Vinny was simply incompetent. Bruce Allen is much worse - a smarmy yes-man political type who seems to put his own self-interest above all else.

In 2015, Bruce Allen, according to reports, personally recruited Scot McCloughan, a well-known talent evaluator, to join the Redskins as the GM. Finally! A “football guy” in charge!

Even today, ‘Skins fans can look back at the 15-month tenure of McCloughan and recall a change of attitude around the team — a toughness and enthusiasm that didn’t seem to exist before, and which has seemed to fade following his departure.

McCloughan may have had faults. The drafts he was responsible for have not stood the test of time well, and there may have been other problems as well. Whatever was happening, about 15 months after Bruce Allen recruited McCloughan to the Redskins, Scot was fired in a scene that unfolded like a slow-motion car crash, with conflicting daily reports hinting at a breakdown in Ashburn. Within hours of McCloughan’s being fired, anonymous sources began to leak reports to the Washington Post of Scot McCloughan drinking at work and often being drunk at the office, on the practice field and at games. It was a sleazy smear campaign designed to taint McCloughan’s image and manage the public perception of McCloughan’s firing.

Brian Lafemina

Another high profile hiring took place ahead of the 2018 season. Brian Lafemina is a marketing professional with a sterling reputation who was reportedly pursued for a year or more before Snyder and Allen managed to get him on-board as the President of Business Operations and Chief Operating Officer.

Lafemina had spent eight years at the NFL, leading Club Business Development and building the team that works to create and share best practices across all of the NFL’s 32 member clubs. During his tenure, the league saw significant growth in game day fan satisfaction, season tickets sales, suite sales, local sponsorship and media revenue. In addition, Lafemina led or played key roles in league-wide initiatives on fan experience, ticketing strategy, Super Bowl strategy, Pro Bowl strategy and stadium development.

The plan was for Lafemina to report directly to Dan Snyder, and for he and his team to improve the gameday experience, build ticket sales, and help plan for the new stadium. Expectations were that it would take two years, at a minimum, for Lafemina’s work to show results.

Less than eight months into the job, Lafemina abruptly resigned, along with key members of his staff amid reports that he and Dan Snyder were clashing. Reports at the time indicated that Lafemina may have been a bit too honest with his boss about what was wrong with the organization and how it needed to be changed to help re-build the fan base.

FYI: Requested an interview with Bruce Allen about today's news. The Redskins have declined. Statement: "He is not available to talk about this. We don’t discuss personnel matters." — Grant Paulsen (@granthpaulsen) December 26, 2018

The hiring of Lafemina had been accompanied by public statements from Dan Snyder and lots of fanfare, but when the end came abruptly, Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen were both unavailable for comment. Like the ugly departure of Scot McCloughan in 2016, the fan base was left bewildered and asking questions that got no answers from the Redskins. They had to rely on media speculation and news reports based on anonymous sources.

Injuries and Trent Williams

In 2017 and 2018, the Redskins had a combined total of 54 players go onto Injured Reserve, and the gameday rosters often featured players who were significantly injured taking the field in an effort to win games (for example, Trent Williams played a few games with a broken thumb in a cast). Following the injury-plagued season of 2017, Jay and some staff went to Europe to talk to some soccer team trainers and medical staff about the types of training and recovery methods they used to prevent injuries. That led to the establishment of a new ‘state of the art’ recovery center at Ashburn.

When the injuries did not improve, but actually got worse in 2018, Bruce Allen hired outside consultants to come in and assess the Redskins training and medical practices and make recommendations. These outside ‘experts’, we were told, basically ascribed the Redskins historically high level of injuries in Jay Gruden’s tenure to “bad luck”, meaning that nothing of any significance was changed.

Starting with early off-season workouts, the Redskins star left tackle, Trent Williams, held out. Four games into the season, he is the only NFL player still holding out.

Neither Trent nor the front office has spoken on the record about why Williams refuses to report, though there has been tons of speculation and reports based on anonymous sources to indicate a number of different and sometimes conflicting underlying causes for the holdout. The most reliable reports suggest that Williams has deep concerns about the training and/or medical staff.

Bruce Allen did speak on the record at least once, saying that he had spoken with Trent, that he (Bruce Allen) knew what Trent’s issues were, and that Trent would not only play football in 2019, but he would play for the Redskins.

Regardless of the right and wrong of the holdout situation, Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen have failed to resolve the issues by either satisfying Trent’s concerns and getting him to report, or, failing that, trading him to another team and salvaging some value.

All the while, the front office (meaning Bruce Allen and Dan Snyder) — in its usual style of hanging Jay Gruden out to dry as the single voice of the organization but not the person responsible for the decisions — have refused to say anything meaningful about the situation or what they are doing to resolve it, except to repeat that they expect TW to report and that the team refuses to entertain trade offers for him.

Dwayne Haskins and Jay Gruden

This situation is a bit harder to discuss because it is a developing story this week.

Basically, the situation is eerily and disturbingly similar to the RG3-Mike Shanahan tale.

Reports say that the Redskins rookie quarterback, Dwayne Haskins, was targeted draft pick of Dan Snyder, while Jay Gruden and his coaching staff didn’t really want him.

Of course, we know who won that disagreement. But it is the coaching staff, the players and Haskins himself who are paying the price.

This is hardly the first time a head coach was forced to work with and develop a player he wouldn’t have chosen himself, but when you consider, first, that this appears to be a “win or you’re fired” year for Jay Gruden, and, second, that the franchise just went through this situation with RG3 from 2012 to 2015, it seems indefensible that Dan Snyder would do it again.

0 - 4, playing terrible football, with a shattered fanbase

The Redskins look like the worst team in the NFC, and possibly in the entire NFL right now. They are 0-4 with 3 losses inside the division. The New England Patriots are coming to town on Sunday.

The Redskins will be 0 - 5 on Monday.

Sports fans can weather a storm. If a team loses for a week or a month or a season, fans continue to support them because of the opportunity for the storm to pass and for things to get better.

Redskins fans have given up hope because our storm is named Dan Snyder and he is the worst owner in the NFL. This article has hardly scratched the surface of his many sins against the NFL, the franchise, the team’s players and its fans.

It has become horribly and depressingly clear over the past two decades that there is no silver lining, and no dawn that will follow the darkness. Dan is with us. He has been with us for 20 years. He is 54 years old and appears healthy and content to continue into the future in exactly the same manner as he has stumbled through the past, lurching from crisis to crisis.

The Redskins ownership and front office are a continuous slow motion train wreck on an infinite loop, crashing again and again, like a repeating humorless real life version of Groundhog Day where Redskins fans are trapped in a hopeless cycle of failure, hope and disillusionment.

And we have finally all given up.

#FireBruceAllen

#SnyderHasToGo

Make your voice heard!

Click here to participate in the weekly FanPulse surveys