I’m hearing that yesterday ESPN jumped on the BeerInTheBathroomsGate™ bandwagon with a story of its own. I knew this was viral…
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You don’t need to read the Washington Post;s redesigned weather page to forecast the perfect shitstorm that is heading for Raljon on Monday evening.
The rest of the paper has all the evidence. There’s no section of the Post that doesn’t hold horrible news for Dan Snyder.
Mike Wise fills up the front page of Style with a profile of The Man Who Would Be Snyder, John Kent Cooke.
Some of the bitterness from Cooke, whose birthright to become owner of the Redskins was never exercised:
“Dan Snyder destroyed the reputation of this franchise,” Cooke said. “I sure as hell don’t like the way he gutted the organization after we left. And he commercialized the Redskins like my father would have never commercialized the Redskins. People brought cushions and pennants to the games. You know how they got those? My father gave them out at fan appreciation days.”
Cooke also took issue with recent controversy over tickets. “Suing season ticket holders?” he said, incredulously. “My God, it’s embarrassing. We would have never done such a thing.”
(AFTER THE JUMP: Mike Wise dusts off Bobby Beathard to throw some jabs at Snyder? The Post’s Business section tells readers that Snyder’s a lousy businessman, just for the hell of it? The bingo caller line, again? The bingo caller last called plays for the Detroit Lions? How much would you have to get paid to go to a Redskins game? Eastern gets its first and last win? )
Better still, Wise dusts off long-ago general manager Bobby Beathard to unload on Snyder. While pretending to be saying how the younger Cooke would have been good for the Redskins, Beathard’s really getting back at Snyder for giving him a low-ball offer to return to the team as GM in 2002, as Marty Schottenheimer was getting shown the door:
“I think he learned so much from his father [that] John would have been a great owner,” Beathard said. “His dad wasn’t a hands-off guy, but he wasn’t a meddler. He didn’t want to come over and want to watch films or tell us who to take.”
Instead of paying Beathard a decent wage, Snyder rehired Vinny Cerrato.
Then, if you jump over to the Business section, Steven Pearlstein writes a few fab and devastating paragraphs about Snyder. And everything Pearlstein says is as easy to understand as, say, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
“What do you call a business that consistently overcharges its customers for an inferior product, hires the wrong people and pays them above-market wages, and yet still manages to be one of the most profitable and valuable franchises in its industry?
Here in nation’s capital, we call it the Washington Redskins.
Economists, however, have a more generic name for such an enterprise. They call it a monopoly.
It should be apparent at this point that, whatever his other virtues, Dan Snyder isn’t the business whiz he’s cracked up to be. From the traffic jams and drunken crowds to the soggy hot dog rolls and the endless TV time-outs, a Redskins game at FedEx Field may be one of the worst entertainment experiences you can buy at any price. And that’s not even taking into account the opera buffa now playing out on the field and in the locker room.
But for the fact that Washington football fans have no other choice, the Redskins by now would be in bankruptcy court, right alongside Snyder’s other big fiasco, Six Flags.”
The brutalest part comes later, when you realize Pearlstein’s story is about an upcoming Supreme Court case, and all the Snyder hammering, beautifully written and dead-on as it is, is totally gratuitous!
Then there’s the Post‘s sports section, which is full of the theme that all national reporters will use when the Philadelphia Eagles visit for “Monday Night Football”: The latter-day Redskins are the most messed up franchise in the NFL, and maybe in all of professional sports.
This has been said a lot lately, and will be said a lot more over the next week, but can’t be said enough: Dan Snyder just promoted a bingo caller to be an NFL play caller, a job he last held in 2004 with a horrible Detroit Lions team.
Despite all Snyder’s wacko meanness, it looks like Jim Zorn ain’t gonna follow the owner’s plan and quit. So unlike the last two Redskins coaches, Joe Gibbs and Steve Spurrier—-both of whom walked away from contracts worth millions—-Zorn’s going to get paid.
Take THAT, Mr. Snyder!
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Last week, the The Great Dan Steinberg reprinted a Craigslist ad he’d found before the Kansas City Chiefs game, in which a Redskins fan said he wouldn’t go to FedExField—-unless somebody paid him:
Don’t want to go to the game? ME NEITHER. I will, however, watch my beloved Skins for a fair price…I’ll only attend if the compensation is adequate.
Earlier this week, I tracked down the fan who placed that ad. The good news for Dan Snyder: That fan, Mike Stuart, says nobody offered to pay him to go watch the Redskins/Chiefs game.
“I did not get any offers, at least for what I was asking for,” Stuart tells me via e-mail. “Instead, I was offered plenty of tickets FOR cash, the most laughable being ‘I have 2 tickets in 417 row 15 for the Eagles on Monday Night for $150 for the pair and 2 in 133 row 21 for $260 for the pair.’ I think he may have gotten this game confused with a Caps playoff game from last season.”
Stuart says he’s mad at his friends who used their tickets, and that he doesn’t intend to go to any more games this season, and is looking forward to watching the franchise bottom out and start over.
“I don’t see single winnable game the rest of the way,” he says. “Funny, even though I’ve bled burgundy and gold my entire life, I actually see that as a good thing.”
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Have-Nots Update: In last week’s Bowl for the Bottom, host Eastern defeated Spingarn, 38-12. That means Spingarn, now 0-6 and having been outscored 285-18, will be the city’s only winless football team this season, barring something crazy. As for Eastern, the Spingarn game might be the last win in the school’s history. Next school year, because of a DCPS reorganization plan, Eastern Senior High School will have only 12th graders, and therefore likely won’t have enough players to field a team. And after that, DCPS plans to close the school at least temporarily, and some folks think permanently.
But, if Eastern is indeed going out, they didn’t go out on bottom…
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