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Over at Dan Snyder‘s message board, extremeskins.com, a wiseacre recently reposted an old article from FoxSports.com going over players’ gripes about offseason workouts at Redskins Park. The gripiest quotes came from defensive lineman Phillip Daniels.
“I was a better player when I was doing my own thing,” Daniels said after the 2006 season. “When guys have been doing their own thing and been successful doing it, they probably need to go back and do those things that are best for this team to win.” (Daniels bitched similarly to the Washington Times at the time.)
Daniels’ old words are relevant again. They can and will be used against him. He’s been used by the Redskins lately to go after Albert Haynesworth — for not showing up at offseason workouts at Redskins Park.
“He’s got to be here,” Daniels recently told Mike Wise.
Why the change of heart? Well, Redskins management in the Snyder Era loves smearing people. Snyder has always depended on his employees, including those in the local media, to crank out the hate against any player or coach he turns on. (If ex-Snyder employee George Michael were still around, he’d be leading every sportscast with a rant against Haynesworth.)
The outrage over Haynesworth far exceeds the offense; as far as the NFLPA’s collective bargaining agreement with owners is concerned, the “O” in OTA stands for “optional.” But Haynesworth is just the latest of a long line of whupping boys that includes LaVar Arrington and Laveranues Coles and Gregg Williams and Jim Zorn. All of those guys got a tidal wave of bad ink washed over ’em once they got on the owner’s bad side.
Sure, Haynesworth presents badly. He’s both the fattest and the highest paid guy on the team, and nothing on the Skins’ highlight reel from the recent 4-12 campaign was more memorable than the clip of his huge ass being hauled off the field by golf cart in a loss to Detroit. He returned to the lineup a few series later. What fans initially and rightly feared could be a career-threatening wound ended up being nothing more serious than a lack of conditioning or desire.
And there’s all those alleged sightings of Haynesworth in Reston Town Center pounding his favorite drink, some vodka concoction called a skinny bitch on the rag.
But the extremeskins.com repost makes Daniels, who at 37 years old is one of at least 13 defensive linemen now on the Redskins roster, look like a phony and a Snyder toady. The Redskins, by the way, were coming off a 5-11 season when Daniels publicly railed against being forced to attend voluntary workouts. Of late, Daniels has toned down his diatribes against his missing teammate somewhat.
Yet his work as a footsoldier in Snyder’s anti-Haynesworth campaign is already done: Haynesworth’s been getting more time on local sportstalk radio this spring, even on stations Snyder doesn’t own, than Stephen Strasburg or John Wall or every Washington Capital combined. And about all of it’s been hateful.
But it’s May. The fat bastard can pound all the skinny bitches he wants. Again, what part of “optional” don’t the attackers understand?
As Casey Rabach said after the 2006 season: “I (know) that they have a lot of money invested in us and I can understand them wanting to keep a close eye on us. But we’re men.”