I agree with the major point that Snyder has been a very bad owner. And a bad owner is a significant and constant weight on a franchise every year. Snyder FEELS like the dark cloud that hung over the Orioles for 14 straight losing seasons — the cloud named Peter Angelos. They’re very different people but similar in their ability to undermine, and sometimes almost single-handedly destroy the outcome that they are trying to achieve. (And both spent/wasted a lot of money on players trying to achieve it.)

But, at least for fans who got some pleasure out of the team’s 9-7 and 8-7-1 seasons the last two years, it’s important to understand that the sports world is FULL of poor-to-awful owners. And many teams have won despite their owners. In fact, sometimes second or third-rate owners, like Angelos and Snyder, make decisions that end up being good for bizarre or even incorrect reasons.

How did the O’s get better? General Manager Dan Duquette and Manager Buck Showalter were both out of the jobs they were suited to hold. Their reputations were in a poor place, not because of their characters which are excellent, but just because they’d left their last jobs with a “knock” on them. Dan reportedly wasn’t a good people person, or good at dealing with the media members in a tough media market (Boston). Buck was supposedly wound too tight, etc. Buck took over a 69-93 team. Since then, in the last five years, the Orioles have won more games than any team in the American League. (I wish I had time to double-check that. I’m almost sure its right. Editor’s note: I checked it, Boz is right. O’s have the most victories by any AL team the past five seasons.) They’ve been to the playoffs three times and reached the American League Championship Series once. It’s not easy to win 93, 85, 96, 81 and 89 in a row.

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Did Angelos become a better owner? I doubt it. He stumbled into key people who were available. They helped add talent and change the clubhouse culture into one of the best in the game. No team gets more out of its talent than the O’s.

The Redskins may have stumbled into a pretty good coach in Jay Gruden and, for a while, it looked like they’d hit the Exacta with Scot McCloughan as a GM, too. Snyder and the Redskins got them both because they were VERY available. Had to give Gruden a five-year contract just to get an unproven head coach to take the notorious Redskins job. Scot had well-publicized demons and was totally available. Of all the things that have happened in the last week, the one that concerns me most be far is how McCloughan comes out of all this in terms of health. Wish him the best.

“Daniel Snyder is a poor-to-bad owner” and “The Redskins Will Never Again Have a Run of Good Teams” are not statements that necessarily go together. You can’t be a worse sports owner than Jeffrey Loria and he managed to complete the snuffing of the Expos in Montreal, then “traded them” for the Marlins in ’03 just in time to win a World Series.

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As I’ve said before, it’s important to look hard at owners and evaluate them accurately. But the quality of the owner and the W-L record of the team — while connected — are not indivisible. Thank heavens.

Extending Gruden has to help the Redskins’ chances of extending Cousins to a long-term deal because Gruden believed in him and stood up for him. It’s still very shaky. But I’d move the Redskins’ chances back up from an ugly 30-70, where I had them last week, to 50-50!

Sometimes crazy teams, like the Redskins, stagger into useful decisions for crazy reasons. Would they have extended Gruden if things hadn’t gone so nuts the last several weeks with McVay leaving at least a year sooner than expected and nobody with a “name” wanting to come to fill coaching vacancies? Would they have extended Gruden now if they hadn’t been getting so much nationwide bad PR about Cousins and about McCloughan not being at the combine for personal reasons? Maybe, maybe not. I tend to think they did the right thing — extend Gruden — for goofy reasons (OMG, we have to do SOMETHING.) That’s good for Gruden, good for the team, good for the fans.

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Come back in a few years and we’ll see how it’s all played out. But, for NOW, I’m a lot more interested what happens to the Capitals and Wizards over the next few months than to the Redskins.

It’s March. Not August. The Redskins are mighty good at stealing attention from others when they are, right now, the fourth best major pro team in town out of four. In fact, it looks like there is now even a significant gap from the Wiz back to the Redskins.

Caps

Nats

Wiz