History makes turbulence feel worse
Snyder-era Redskins have tempted fans to overreact frequently
The great thing about football, when all goes well, is it allows you to overreact to single games and small sample sizes. The absolute worst thing about football, when all goes wrong, is it allows you to overreact to single games and small sample sizes.
And then the Washington Redskins, as is their depressing specialty, add another, more sobering layer to the experience: Riding the short-season seesaw once again while knowing there’s nearly 20 years of chaotic evidence to suggest this little dose of wrong will morph into a monster that kills another season.
The problem for the 2018 version of this team isn’t that it played such a bad second game — at home, no less — that it wiped away all the good feelings of an emphatic Week 1 victory. It’s that, as the players and coaches prepare for just the third of a 16-game slate, they also must deal with public doubt and disbelief, which are seemingly unconquerable foes for this franchise. They can’t just be one of about two dozen teams trying to figure out identity and consistency in a sport that lives off week-to-week mood swings. After so much failure and bad press and loss of faith, the Redskins are trapped in an existential crisis, and the burden is on this squad to get better, make the people following them feel better and do it before all the pent-up anger and pessimism pummels the hope that existed just a week ago.
It will be this way until Washington shows it can repeat success under owner Daniel Snyder. And it seems like the most important fight for stability in the Snyder era has begun. The fan base, or at least the paying portion of it, is eroding, and the team can’t mask it anymore. The empty seats at FedEx Field became a national story last Sunday when the crowd for the home opener was announced to at 57,013, the lowest season-starting audience in the team’s 21 years in the stadium.
Brian Lafemina, the new president of business operations, is trying to improve Washington’s game-presentation methods, and by being honest about some of the problems, he’s also appealing to the humanity of the burgundyand-gold population. Sometimes, it’s best to minimize the arrogance, come to the masses with humility and ask for help.
Right now, the team may seem like a laughingstock for having to own up to its problems, but in the long run, the transparency could be a good thing. But a piece of advice: Don’t recoil at the current criticism and get caught in a lie, trying to soften the negativity by inflating the home attendance. Such a tactic would ruin any goodwill that honesty could create.
On Sunday, the crowd will be a story again because Green Bay fans travel as well as anyone in sports, and if Washington doesn’t play well, they will be much louder than the Indianapolis Colts fans whose cheers stood out late in the game last week. But this is what happens when a franchise both loses and humiliates itself with drama and dysfunction over a long period of time. If the organization is finally serious about making a correction, there is no shame in admitting the truth and opening the curtains during the transformation.
Of course, the big picture doesn’t exactly concern the current team. It just wants a win to erase the negativity of that 21-9 loss to Indianapolis. The schedule is getting tougher: The next three opponents (Green Bay, New Orleans and Carolina) have playoff track records and superior overall talent. There’s a legitimate risk of a slow start that would turn the job statuses of coach Jay Gruden and president Bruce Allen into huge stories. But Gruden has done some of his best work during tense times, and it’s laughable to panic at this point.
“I don’t think anybody jumped to any conclusions after a Week 1 victory at Arizona,” Gruden said of his team. “We were happy about it, getting our first win, but we know it’s a long season, and a lot is going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of different types of adversity that we are going to hit throughout the year — injuries, wins and losses — and we’ve got to handle it better.
“We are still early in the season as far as finding our identity and what we are good at, especially on offense, but we’re working towards that.”
If you’re going to read too much into two games, it’s only fair to include this positive nugget: Washington, a bottom-feeding NFL defense for most of the past decade, entered Week 3 leading the league in total defense, allowing just 247 yards per game.
After two weeks, the only conclusion to make is that you should let more of the season play out before making any conclusions. That’s reasonable, but because Washington has been down for so long, it’s almost impossible.
So every unstable week feels like the future of the franchise is at stake. It’s the great thing about following a fickle team with a mercurial recent track record. And it’s the absolute worst thing about following a fickle team with a mercurial recent track record.
But, hey, if the franchise can still get you to watch — in the stadium or at home — that’s probably better than it deserves right now.