Swearinger is already looking forward to playing the Texans, another one of his former teams, this week. Like his teammate Josh Norman, who voiced his disappointment with Washington’s home crowds after Sunday’s game, Swearinger is less than thrilled that the Redskins’ next game is at FedEx Field.

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“I would rather play on the road, too,” Swearinger told 106.7 The Fan’s Grant Paulsen and Danny Rouhier on Monday. “Most definitely.”

The Redskins are 3-1 on the road, with their three wins coming against teams with a combined record of 6-20. They’re 3-2 at home, including wins over the Packers and Panthers. Asked what he prefers about playing away from FedEx Field, Swearinger mentioned that it’s easier to communicate with his fellow defensive backs. (That may be true in Tampa Bay and at half-empty MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands, but the Redskins had plenty of communication breakdowns during their trip to the Superdome last month.)

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“You don’t have to worry about fans booing you,” Swearinger continued. “You ain’t gotta worry about seeing the other team’s jersey everywhere. You know it’s going to be the other team’s jerseys, because you’re away. Home games, that’s some of the worst things I’ve seen. I’ve played on four different teams, never seen it that bad, with other team’s jerseys in the stands, the boos, whatever it may be. I’ve never been a part of nothing like that.”

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On Sunday, Norman also mentioned the boos and large numbers of visiting team fans among the reasons he doesn’t feel all warm and fuzzy when Washington plays at home.

“We go into the homestands, and it’s like an open bubble,” Norman said. “Like the other team’s turf or something. You hear more of them than you do us. Then if something bad happens, they suck. They sit back in their seat, and they boo. I don’t know. This year, I’m starting to see that.”

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“It affects you to the point where you want to get the crowd involved,” Swearinger said. “I recall when I was in [Arizona] or in Houston, I would always waive my hands up, just to get the crowd up. But you know if I do it here, it’s like blah. . . . They don’t see us getting the crowd up. I guess that’ll take time because we haven’t won, but you can’t really say that because I’ve been in Houston and AZ where they haven’t won, where those die-hard fans would go out win, lose or draw. It’s no excuse of losing. Every NFL team loses. No NFL team wins the Super Bowl every year.”

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With all due respect to Swearinger, who is correct that no team wins a championship every year, the Texans have won four division titles and three playoff games since 2011, and the Cardinals have won five playoff games and been to a Super Bowl since 2008. The Redskins have three playoff wins over the past 26 years and happen to play their home games in one of the league’s worst and least accessible stadiums. Norman and Swearinger make valid criticisms of the game day atmosphere at FedEx Field, but there are good reasons that more and more Redskins fans have decided to stay away.

Speaking in the Redskins locker room on Monday, linebacker Mason Foster suggested that the fans at FedEx Field have provided a home-field advantage at times.

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“At the end of the day, the fans play a big part in the way defenses can play and the atmosphere out there,” Foster said. “Like the Dallas game, the Panthers game, you get those guys going crazy in the stands, it’s hard for quarterbacks to communicate. It’s hard for them to audible at the line. When you get that going, I think it’s a tough place to play at FedEx.”

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Swearinger struggled to explain why Redskins fans haven’t packed the stands this season, even with Washington surprisingly atop the NFC East.

“I really don’t know,” Swearinger said. “I always say I guess because we’re in three different states. We’re the Washington Redskins, but we don’t play in Washington; we play in Maryland. We live in Virginia, so I don’t know if that has anything to do with it, if the states matter. . . . I don’t know if we have that full support of loyalty [from] the fans. We may have a lot of Redskins fans, but the loyalty, I don’t feel the loyalty.”

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After the Redskins' 38-14 blowout loss to the Falcons at FedEx Field in Week 9, former Redskins cornerback Fred Smoot offered a theory that rings true. Essentially, it’s going to take more than half a season of winning more than they lose for these Redskins to overcome the bitterness that’s festered among the fan base over the past quarter-century.

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“I think my generation of Redskins ruined it for these Redskins,” Smoot, who spent seven seasons in Washington between 2001 and 2009, said, according to Paulsen. “People came out to watch us play and we had no chance to win.”

Swearinger, though, dismissed that idea, arguing that fandom shouldn’t depend on wins and losses.

“I’ve been liking teams since I was a kid, regardless of their record,” he said. “I’m still going to be that fan, I’m still going to be die-hard for the Lakers. I’m not going to change that. That’s how I feel about basketball. . . . That’s just how I see it. If you’re a fan of something, you can’t be a bandwagon, you can’t jump off that bandwagon. You gotta be loyal through the ups and downs, through the thick and thin if you’re a true fan. That’s what you call a true fan. If you’re a fan that just likes the colors or like whatever you like, you may get discouraged. Twenty-five years is a long time, but like I said, if you’re a true fan, a true fan is going to be loyal to whatever you believe in.”

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Norman and Swearinger aren’t the first Redskins players to comment on the home crowds this season. After Washington’s loss to the Colts in the home opener, running back Chris Thompson said he wasn’t a fan of the boos he heard from the crowd.

“It’s one of those things you have to sit down and see what [Norman is] really saying,” Thompson said Monday. “If you can understand what he’s saying, he’s not, again, just like me, not bashing the fans. We want everybody to come out and support us. That’s what it comes down to. At the end of the day, we want our stands to be full of us. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. I get as fans it’s frustrating.”

In a tweet on Sunday night, Norman challenged Redskins fans to make FedEx Field a place that opposing teams fear by being “terrifyingly loud” and “menacing.”

“All the responses I see all the time is, ‘We’ve been fans for 10-plus years, we’ve been fans for 25 years, whatever the case may be, and we haven’t gotten any results,’” Thompson continued. "'The Redskins have been terrible.' I’ve been here for six years. I understand. I know. I’ve been to one playoff game in six years. But, my thing is, I feel like we’re doing good right now. We have a really good team. What it comes down to is, myself and Josh, we want it to be packed out and we don’t’ want it to feel like it’s 50-50 when we’re at our home field and they have as many fans as we do. I know that’s exaggerating because that’s never the case, but sometimes certain situations we’re down and we’re losing and their fans are super loud and we can’t quiet them. That’s obviously based of us having a poor performance. We just want everybody to be there. That’s it. That’s it.

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“We want our fans to be out there and just have our backs. It’s really like, we don’t know year-in and year-out, if we’re going to get to a Super Bowl. But all 63 people in here want to win a Super Bowl. And that’s our ultimate goal. We just want everybody to come out and support us through this journey. If you’re a real fan, you’re going to support your team through this journey not only if we come out and this season we’re 9-1 or 8-1 or whatever. We’ve dropped the ball and got killed in the three games we lost. It hasn’t even been close. But we still want your support. I don’t think any of the Super Bowl teams were undefeated, but they still got the support. That’s all we want. That’s it.”

Kareem Copeland contributed to this report.

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