The Sports Curmudgeon®

Usually, being a curmudgeon is easy. All you have to do is to give in to the basic cynical instincts within yourself and write down want comes to mind. The sporting world – and society in general – provides lots of material to play off. Usually, this is not a difficult gig.

This one is a lot more difficult because – let me say this from the outset and I’ll repeat it several times herein – I don’t believe this is going to happen. But if I am going to maintain any curmudgeon credentials as the Doyen of Darkness, I have to take a shot at this one too. Danny Boy Snyder did the absolute right thing in getting Joe Gibbs back to coach the Redskins; I do not foresee perennial mediocrity or failure for the team with Gibbs at the helm. But in the euphoric field of dreams that has captivated the Washington area for the last week, might there be any doomsday scenarios? Yes there are – remote possibilities as they might be. And interestingly, the potential costs in light of a doomsday scenario could be very large for Danny Boy Snyder.

Remember, I don’t think this is going to happen, but just suppose that next season is not a playoff year for the Redskins. Maybe the pampered players on this team don’t “get it” quickly enough; maybe there is insufficient talent at the positions that Joe Gibbs needs on a team to make it very successful; maybe there is a wave of injuries that no team could overcome. But suppose there is another variety of “failure” next year – the kind that leads to head knocking between the coaching staff and the front office. That part of the scenario could happen. Now comes the dire part. Suppose that Danny Boy acts as the arbiter of this potential contretemps and sides with the front office or inserts himself back directly in the football operations of the team – or worst of all pisses Joe Gibbs off sufficiently that it becomes widely known in the Washington area.

In that situation, Danny Boy Snyder will need – at the very minimum – to hire a food taster. People living in other parts of the country – or the world – do not understand the level of esteem in which Joe Gibbs is held in this area. I know that there have been no Presidents or Senators or Mayors that have enjoyed anything near his icon status in the Washington area for the last 35 years. In fact, it’s not even close. Perhaps you would have to go back to the end of W.W. II and the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur in Washington to match the fervor of the town and to present the folks here with an equivalent hero/icon.

So, the important thing for Danny Boy and his henchmen to realize is that the people in this town will not take kindly to anyone or anything that is perceived – rightly or wrongly – to thwart Joe Gibbs’ quest for excellence. The fans here were on the down slope and picking up speed in their dislike for Danny Boy and his front office. He had milked profits out of the fans by pulling a legal raid on their wallets; he had tried to bring in a latter day “over-the-hill-gang” by signing lots of high priced former All-Pros; he had brought in the tough TV analyst/coach and put him in charge; he had gotten the hottest college coach in the land; he had meddled in the player selections and the player relations. Most of all, he had teams that had lost more games then they won and teams that just did not give it their all on the field.

How much had the support for Danny Boy’s Redskins slipped? Certainly not enough to make them a money-losing venture; but consider that in a town that is monomaniacal about its pro football team these things all happened in the past year or so:

When a Skins game was on FOX, the local CBS affiliate chose to televise a Ravens game as its game of the day – opposite the Redskins game. That had not happened here in Washington in the time I’ve lived here.

Columnists in the Washington Post – sometimes mistaken as an adjunct of the Redskins’ PR Department – were writing that this particular Ravens’ game was the most interesting sports event in the area that weekend.

Fans sued Danny Boy successfully over his attempts to prevent people from using a free parking area near the stadium and walking to the stadium. He got the local politicians to get the police to block the walkway citing a “safety concern” and that happened in a less than “open process”.

The club seats at FedEx Field had never been sold out and this year there were significantly more empty “yellow seats”.

The number of “Cowboys fans” and “Eagles fans” at Fed Ex when those teams came here was huge. For the final game with the Eagles, it seemed as if 40% of the crowd was cheering for the Eagles and as if 25% of the crowd was dressed in green.

So, my hypothesis is that Danny Boy has brought in the franchise savior and did a really smart thing in getting him here at this time. Now, Danny Boy has to morph into a character he has yet to show anyone that he is capable of being. He has to be the supporting actor; he has to be the facilitator; he has to be the sous chef; he has to be the underboss. Because if he “bigfoots” any of his bad decisions on Joe Gibbs, this town will not tolerate it. And make no mistake about it, Danny Boy has not shown any ability at all to do any of his “bigfooting” in the background and making it look as if he had no hand in the matter.

What might be the consequences to Danny Boy if he is such an assclown that he drives Joe Gibbs out of town in disgust?

[Aside: Joe Gibbs seems to be far too much of a class-act to leave town and say that Danny Boy is the sole reason that he is leaving town and that the only justice in the world would be for Danny Boy to be nibbled to death by ducks. But imagine the situation where he stops just short of that!]

I was only joking about hiring a food-taster above – because Danny Boy has probably already had to do that. But if Joe Gibbs becomes the anvil on which his hammer lands, Danny Boy might be looking at:

A fan revolt where season tickets are no longer possessions prized so much that they are contentious items in divorce proceedings.

Small protests seeking boycotts of Redskins’ paraphernalia purchases at the myriad Redskins Stores in every mall in the area.

Top-flight coaches and administrators in the league may decide that even with the inflated salaries he offers, he’s not worth working for.

And that word can spread around to players’ agents too. For comparison purposes, see: Bidwell, William.

This move has come at an important time. The Redskins have been bad since Joe Gibbs left town eleven years ago and the fans are more than restless. Fed Ex Field is relatively new, but it is hardly a “destination stadium”. Of all the “newer stadiums” around the league, Fed Ex is at or close to the bottom of the barrel. I doubt that Danny Boy will be happy to see The Vet imploded because as long as The Vet is there, he does not have to bother dealing with the massive upgrades that Fed Ex Field will need in the next 5-10 years. And the money for such expenditures would probably have to come from ticket price increases, which are programmed in for 2007 – when the current seat licenses expire. Some tickets will double in price then - - but not if the team had been allowed to continue to stink out the joint.

Joe Gibbs can make the Redskins into a playoff team quickly if he is allowed to bring in the players that he needs in order to make his “system” work. He can’t make it work if he has players going around his back to Danny Boy to plead their case to the owner for something that Joe Gibbs thinks is an obstacle to winning. He can’t choose to make some cuts just before the season starts only to have Vinnie Cerrato decide that something else needs to be done to the roster and to have Vinnie take that dispute to Danny Boy for adjudication. He can’t be handed a player or two and told to make it work with that player – as was Marty Schottenheimer with then QB, Jeff George.

Former Redskins’ tight end and local sports radio yakker, Rick “Doc” Walker tried to heap praise on the hiring of Joe Gibbs, but showed that he too may have a dark side to his personality. Said Walker right after the announcement, “They finally found a navigator for the Titanic.”

Memo to “Doc”:

The Titanic didn’t even finish its “first season”.

It killed a lot of folks and is still at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

And unfortunately for all of humankind, Celine Dion’s direct ancestors were not on board…

I am confident that Danny Boy is intelligent enough to understand all of this and to have come to an intellectual conclusion that this is how he needs to run his organization from this point forward. He is not a stupid man by any stretch of the imagination. I am pretty confident that Danny Boy is strong in his resolve to resist the temptation that he will surely feel to “get in there” and to “make things happen” as he has – singularly unsuccessfully – in the past.

If he does not resist those temptations, he risks having the football fans of Washington march on his house during a night of the full moon with torches lit and pitchforks in hand. And that is what I – as the Doyen of Darkness – can foresee as a remote possibility about 3 years in the future. Like I said, this one isn’t easy to go on the dark side with because it isn’t likely to happen; usually, a walk on the dark side is a piece of cake.

The local sycophants – er, Washington Post columnists – are busy urging Danny Boy to find some other toy to play with and to let St. Joe run the team and return glory to the franchise. I’m not urging him to do that; I’m warning him that he better damned well do that.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…