As fans accused me of lapping up (and profiting from) Ashburnistan drama over the past decade, I’ve said it wasn’t by choice, but by necessity. When a house is burning down, you don’t ask a real-estate blogger to review the drapes. I’ve also told these critics that a boring but successful Redskins team would help us professionally far more than a spectacular grease fire; that a blandly productive team would be good for everyone.

The past few weeks have tested my faith. Barring a last-second catastrophe, the Redskins just completed an immaculate summer. The controversies? Who should start at left guard. The story lines? Just how much has the secondary improved. The color? Matching Tommy Bahama pastel shirts at a team luncheon. I think I liked the pink ones best.

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“It’s without a doubt the least amount of preseason buzz in the 20 years we’ve been doing radio,” Eric Bickel of the Junkies said.

“The grocery store clerk, the mailman, no one’s asking me questions anymore,” NBC Washington sports anchor Carol Maloney said. “The hot topic is how good they can be. It’s just so normal.”

“It’s whisper quiet,” 106.7 mid-day host Danny Rouhier said. “And it’s glorious.”

For fans of the team, it surely is. The PR office should be cracking nightly bottles of champagne. But the past few weeks have reminded me that drama has its own fan base, and that I’ve attracted countless readers who actually don’t like the Redskins but do enjoy seeing them flail. People like my friend Drew Magary, an avid consumer of Redskins negativity, who wrote on Deadspin this summer that they were the only NFL team not deserving of even a token compliment. Or my friend Peter Hassett, who reads our Redskins coverage more often when the team is floundering.

“I hate to admit it,” he wrote to me. “But yeah, when the team is terrible, on or off the field, I lap it up.”

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I don’t think he’s alone. The old Redskins were unscripted Trump: Whatever they did was compelling, whether or not you were a fan, and so the headlines (and talk-radio segments) were irresistible. The new Redskins are Trump with a teleprompter: likely more successful, but a helluva lot less interesting to casual observers.

“It’s funny because we’ve all been saying ‘I’m so sick of this, every day is drama, I just wish we were talking about football like people who cover the good organizations,’ ” said Carlin, the co-host of CSN’s SportsTalk Live. “Now that I have that, there is nothing to talk about.”

This isn’t easy to measure. People are still reading our beat coverage of the team. August ratings at 106.7 The Fan were actually up significantly, year-to-year. My friend Jamie said he is as optimistic about this Redskins team as any this century — that should benefit those of us who cover the team, starting next week. It’s more about the disappearance of strong feelings. No one is arguing which quarterback should start, or whether a conditioning test is unfair, or whether the coach is on the clock, or whether the GM is a buffoon. And — all due respect to Dashaun Phillips — it’s hard to get worked up over who should be the slot corner.

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“The enthusiasm is tepid,” John-Paul Flaim of the Junkies said.

“There are no [expletive] calls,” Jason Bishop added.

“We haven’t talked about them as much,” Bickel said.

“There’s no reason to talk about them, because there’s no drama,” Bishop said.

Don’t start bashing the media just yet. None of the people I spoke with said they missed the circus. Beat writers have told me they’re thrilled to be writing stories about football topics instead of soap opera plot lines. Maloney said the same thing; “While the team is boring, I’m not bored covering them,” as she put it. It’s easier on all of us when players in the locker room are happy — and when they’re not wary of drama vultures. Plus, I kind of liked my piece about Niles Paul.

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“We can still do good topics, and we did the kind of topics I prefer to do, which are football-related,” said 106.7’s Grant Paulsen, who called this the quietest preseason in the seven years he has covered the team. “How we measure things oftentimes is engagement — online, or via Twitter, or calls — and you’re going to get less of all of that. But I think that the content we like to do, we get to do more often now.”

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More importantly, there’s a sense that any short-term sacrifice in feedback or attention in August is a worthy investment if the payoff is a winning team in October or November. Everyone I talked to argued that covering franchise drama can offer a thrilling sugar high, but that it isn’t worth it if five years later all your teeth have fallen out.

“All the nonsense is short-lived,” Carlin said. “It fills a few minutes of the show, but it was way more fun spending nine days in New Orleans with the Ravens when they won the Super Bowl than all the day-to-day craziness that the Redskins were.”

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“If they’re bad, people care at a level 10 for a day or two, and then it goes to zero for a long time,” Rouhier said. “If a team is winning and there’s less drama, maybe the short-term spikes aren’t there, but talking about a relevant team in December and January is a blessing.”

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“Success and championships offer by far a higher ceiling for audience engagement and growth than disaster. Disaster is [only] fun for a couple of weeks,” added Chris Kinard, the program director at 106.7 The Fan. “If they’re successful at any level this year, I think there’ll be much more interest next year. So I don’t really worry about whether there’s a ton of interest in the middle of July.”

(The Redskins, who control rival station ESPN 980, declined to make employees of that station available for this piece.)

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And sure, I might be getting ahead of myself. Washington’s success over the past year has been modest, and there’s no guarantee it will continue. You wouldn’t enjoy one good trip on the red line and pronounce Metro fixed. And even if this is a productive but unflashy 8-8 campaign, something interesting will happen. Something always does.