The Sports Sermon: Welcome to Snyderstan

Being a professional athlete can sometimes be a thankless job. Sure, they have their millions to console them, but athletes must contend with the fickle nature of public opinion, always knowing no matter how beloved they are, they are just one extended slump away from boos and cries for their exile.

But athletes accept this fate, knowing that the risk of public hatred is the cost of public acclaim. Coaches, too, are fully cognizant of their profession’s revolving door, which they choose to enter. You would think that team owners, the ones always holding the axe over players and coaches, would understand how the world of sports works. Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder, however, proves this is not the case.

If there’s any D.C. sports figure that needs to be put out to pasture, it’s Snyder. Since Snyder’s acquisition of the team in 1999, the Redskins have a losing record. Of course, it’s not just the losing record that makes Snyder such a colossal failure. It’s the way he’s dragged the franchise down, cursing them with his massive wealth. Snyder’s proven to be one of the National Football League’s most free-spending owners, and all there is to show for it is that the ‘Skins have the dubious distinction of doing less with more than any other NFL team.

But whatever trainwrecks Snyder has been responsible for putting on the field pale in comparison to his latest transgression: he’s started going after the fans.

Fed up with rooting for a team that cannot even beat the Detroit Lions, the Redskins fans who were still able to subject themselves to an afternoon of agonizing football at FedEx Field had begun to exercise their natural rights as paying customers—they booed, heckled, and complained. Of course, ‘Skins fans exhausted all possible bile they had for the players and coaches by week three. Now they turned on the man who masterminded the collapse.

Needless to say, sitting in his ivory luxury box, Snyder did not take kindly to being insulted by the commoners’ signs and chants. Actually, that’s a gross understatement—Snyder reacted to dissent about as well as Stalin.

Snyder didn’t like being portrayed on a sign as one half of “Dumb and Dumber” with general manager Vinny Cerrato, so he did the only reasonable thing—he banned all fan signs from FedEx Field. It doesn’t matter what the sign says; the state line is that they obstruct views and poke people in the head. So, no, you can’t bring in a sign saying “Hi to my husband in Afghanistan” (a real rejected sign). It would be too dangerous for your fellow fans.

The FedEx Field security team has even been trained as some kind of secret police, seeking out and removing seditious fans and materials, according to numerous fan accounts. One group claims to have been kicked out after starting a “Danny Sucks” chant. Another signholder (“Snyder B-I-N-GO F Yourself”) not only got kicked out, but had his information taken and written down in a “little black book.”

These tales of oppression have been chronicled widely on the Internet on ‘Skins forums and blogs, most notably The Washington Post’s D.C. Sports Bog, whose Dan Steinberg has turned in his press pass and gone in amongst the paying customers, an embedded reporter in Snyder’s war against the fans.

You know things are bad when these kind of analogies start to seem reasonable. A writer for the New Yorker compared the atmosphere around the team to “Zimbabwe—a failed state, an intractable dictator, and an impotent and suffering populace.” The events of the 2009 season have transformed Snyder from simply incompetent to outright megalomaniacal.

Unless Snyder changes something, and quickly, it looks like conditions will only continue to deteriorate. So it’s time to take the failed state analogy one step further—oppressed Redskins fans, stage your coup.