Some people are fans of the Washington Redskins. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Washington Redskins. This 2017 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
Your team: Go fuck yourselves.
Your 2016 record: 8-7-1, featuring one of my favorite interceptions of all time. Witness:
[furious fapping noises]
Oh, baby. Oh, I LIKE THAT. I like that a whole, whole lot. FACT: That was the only good thing that happened in the NFL last season. The rest of the season was miserable, but that pick? HEAVENLY. You guys were really feeling yourselves after destroying the Packers, weren’t you? Only made it sweeter when the Skins bombed against a Carolina team that was already mailing it in, and then were finally eliminated on the above play. The Giants weren’t even playing for anything. GLORY TO GOD. I despise this team. Every indignity they suffer is a victory for mankind. They belong in the dumpster with their awful playbooks.
By the way, the Skins are gonna pay the man who threw that pick $24 million this season. I’m over the moon.
Your coach: Jay Gruden. Again, Jay Gruden sounds exactly like a handyman running you through an estimate. Once you hear it, it cannot be unheard. “Yeah so, we’ll just tear out some of that drywall there and fix it up good, yep. Patch it up with some joint compound and then you’re set to go. Looking at around, eh, let’s call it $200.” Remember when he truthered one of his own player’s concussion problems? That was fun. I have no confidence in this man to do anything useful. Any success of his is a clear accident.
Elsewhere on the staff, Sean McVay fled to the Rams and the team dropped defensive coordinator Joe Barry after his masterful strategy of NOT putting his best corner on Antonio Brown backfired. And how did Gruden fill both these vacancies? On offense, he promoted Matt Cavanaugh, whose greatest claim to fame is presiding over the worst Super Bowl-winning offense in history. On defense, the team conducted a bizarrely drawn-out search (can this team ever not bungle a hiring process?) that included also-rans like Gus Bradley and Mike Pettine before they were forced to meekly elevate Greg Manusky to the job. I love it when the Skins get spurned by every possible outside candidate before turning around, finding some pud already in the building, and then being like, “Well this was CLEARLY the man for the job.” But they did manage to bring in one very special assistant…
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. People of D.C., your defensive line is in good hands now that Jim Tomsula has arrived. Jay Gruden may sound like a handyman but Tomsula IS one. All the man needs is a piece of cardboard and some gum from the underside of a park bench, and he’s ready to WORK.
Your quarterback: Kurt Cousins!
Apart from full-on contraction, I can think of no better fate for this team than for them to be held hostage by a thoroughly average, hotheaded quarterback who times his interceptions for maximum devastation. Kirk Cousins’s franchise tag in 2018 could be as high as $35 million and the Skins will probably have to pay up if they don’t want him to walk to L.A. or San Fran. How marvelous.
Since Dan Snyder and his toadies have all the interpersonal skills of a Trump press secretary, they fucked up every possible aspect of handling the Cousins situation. They could have locked him down at $20 million a year but didn’t. Then they low-balled Cousins when he outplayed that figure. Then Cousins personally appealed to Snyder for a trade and was denied. Then they tarred Cousins as greedy. Then team President Bruce Allen—aka Fancy Vinny Cerrato—kept calling him “Kurt” and the PR staff attributed it to his accent.
At this point, the Skins have essentially painted themselves into a corner where they’d actually benefit from having Cousins snap his leg while playing out there. I was around this spring as this fanbase tried to talk itself into every possible Kirk Cousin endgame scenario. “Well, it would be nice to keep him, but if we DON’T… we could get 12 first round picks for him!” I can’t wait for this to happen all over again next spring, and the spring after that, and the spring after that. Kirk Cousins is gonna throw 100 picks and make a billion dollars off Snyder. I love him now.
What’s new that sucks: Oh, the just the standard Skins thing where they froze their own general manager out of the pre-draft process, let him twist, canned him right before the draft, and then deliberately leaked stories about him being a drunk to the Washington Post.
An official with direct knowledge of the situation attributed the decision to McCloughan’s ongoing problems with alcohol… “He’s had multiple relapses due to alcohol,” said the official, who spoke on a condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on personnel matters. “He showed up in the locker room drunk on multiple occasions. . . . This has been a disaster for 18 months.”
Yep, just another pathetic offseason in Dan Snyder’s crypt. Not only did they smear Scot McCloughan on their way out of town, but of course they kept his draft board and scouting reports and used all of them.
I cannot emphasize enough how gross these people are. Allen is a boozer who doesn’t like anyone stealing credit from him, and who openly told McCloughan, “Nobody likes you in this building. Nobody wants you here.” Join us next offseason when he leaks to Liz Clarke that Jay Gruden is a crack addict. He and Snyder and Larry Michael and PR goon Tony Wyllie all deserve to rot in hell. After a cursory GM search that included mildly amusing rumored candidates like Mike Mayock, the team decided to hire from within (what a surprise!) and promote Doug Williams. And with that, Snyder’s supply of Glory Days Skins to trot out when everything is a raging tire fire has been just about depleted.
On the field, the team lost DeSean Jackson and Pierre Garçon, then signed Terrelle Pryor away from Cleveland to make up for the losses. Pryor was the Browns’ best wideout last year by far and they let him walk for nothing. Did that ring ANY alarm bells in Ashburn? Did it cause them to wonder at all about Pryor’s penchant for turdery? Nope. No, they already knew he’d fit right in.
And really, what does it matter? This team doesn’t really give a fuck about winning football games. Snyder has an enormous hard-on for a new stadium and is already muscling press outlets and bribing state governors to get it. Everything else is window dressing. All he cares about is getting a new joint where he can charge $10 million for parking and slap a Pepsi logo on everything. Look at this fat ruddy shitheap:
That Tostitos bag…that’s Dan Snyder’s Super Bowl ring. Given this man’s business acumen, I expect PepsiCo to go bankrupt sometime within the next five days thanks to this partnership.
What has always sucked: Vile. Disgusting, vile, despicable, miserable scum. Pigs. Like the President, the Skins have fashioned bullying and incompetence and proud ignorance into their brand essence, alienating most of society while cultivating their own grotesque orc base that cheers on their every fuckup and excuses their monstrous treatment of fans, employees, and entire municipalities. They have found their niche as the Official NFL Team Of Terrible People and have no compunction about exploiting their standing to the fullest. Indeed, I think Snyder ENJOYS having this team shoot itself in the face every offseason. Shamelessness is the only business he seems to thrive in. They deserve to have nothing but bad things happen to them from here into infinity.
And to Terry McAuliffe and any other dickless pol who is actually entertaining the idea of gifting Snyder his own billion-dollar Snyderworld stadium? FUCK. YOU. Fuck you a million times. Shame on you. Shame on you and everything you’ve ever stood for. Pairing up with this team is the surest sign that you give ZERO fucks about the people you purport to represent. You should be jailed for war crimes. No themed Tostitos for you. Terry McAuliffe was willing to publicly trash D.C. and Maryland just so he could crawl an extra inch inside Snyder’s ass. He’s a rat-faced fuck.
On the field, the team is still counting on Junior Galette for the pass rush even though he was hurt all last year and has a penchant for whipping people with belts and beating up the help. Jordan Reed is their best skill player and will get hurt 17 different times during the course of the season. Josh Norman came here and instantly became a dickhead.
What might not suck: Congrats! You won your trademark suit in federal court! Now the only thing stopping you from changing the Skins nickname is basic human decency. Looks like you’ll be the Washington Redskins for a very, very long time.
They had a nice draft.
Did you know? Buy two Skins season tickets and get a free bundle of tiki torches!
HEAR IT FROM REDSKINS FANS!
Matt:
We are the only team in the NFL without an 11-win season in the last 25 years.
Alex:
Bruce Allen is Langley High School scum.
Chris:
I hope Kirk Cousins fucks Bruce Allen’s wife and make her say his name.
Matthew:
Our team is an annual nightmare of mediocrity wrapped in a blatant racist coating. It’s a vegan Hitler sausage.
Steve:
Their only core competencies are racism and over-investing in receivers.
Lloyd:
I am a lifelong Redskins fan. The best year of my life was 1992 because the Skins won the Super Bowl and it was the last year I got to spend with my dad before he died. I was 11.
Jeff:
I inherited two things from my father: a predisposition for heart disease and Washington Redskins fandom. If given the choice, I’d return the fandom.
Rich:
Back in ’93 I took my wife to her first (and turns out, last) Redskins game. It was her first-ever professional sporting event of any kind, so she was excited. I got us seats right in the corner of the end zone, and I told her ‘Cool! We can see them celebrate right in front of us!’
The ‘Skins lost 3-0 to the Jets. NBC’s Play of the Game was a botched FG attempt where the ball bounced of Boomer Esiason’s helmet. Somehow we’re still married.
Chris:
The Redskins have beaten the fan out of me. Dan Snyder has been the team’s owner for 2/3 of my life. Dear God, that’s depressing. Kirk is a pure DC sports athlete because he looks good when the games don’t matter. When it’s time to be clutch, Kirk folds like a 19th century handmaiden.
Kurt:
The low-hanging fruit is plentiful: the Napoleonic owner supported by lackeys; the horrible and expensive gameday experience at FedEx Field; misguided free agent signings; suing old ladies over season tickets; selling expired airline peanuts; the Jim Zorn experiment; the mishandling of RGIII; a team president who can’t pronounce the starting QB’s name correctly; and many more that Dave McKenna could expound upon. Even now when they finally seem to have their shit together with a competent coaching staff (Tomsula!) that can put a respectable team on the field, the Kirk Cousins contract situation is a fiasco that I’m sure they will ultimately fuck up and result in him playing in San Francisco for Kyle Shanahan.
This brings to me to team name. From the standpoint of basic humanity, the name is racist and demeaning. But I’ve been able to overlook it until recently because, right or not, I could always separate it from the group of players on the field. It was just a name. You don’t think of airplanes and sheep while struggling to watch the Jets and Rams on a Thursday night. I didn’t think about the name when I cheered as RGIII ran for a 76-yard TD against the Vikings (sorry, Drew). I didn’t think about the name on a Sunday morning as I jumped off my couch and shouted when Hopkins missed a chip shot field goal in OT in London. I only cared about what happened on the field and the name was irrelevant. Even though I have multiracial children who may one day feel the pain and confusion of a racial slur because of their skin color, I didn’t think twice about wearing an officially licensed NFL shirt with a slur printed right across my chest.
So what happened that finally made me change my opinion? The most inconceivable thing in my lifetime happened when an unqualified man-baby was chosen to be the most powerful person in the free world and people like Steve Bannon were given prominent positions in the White House. It’s all too common now to see cellphone videos of people being openly racist in public and property being defaced with swastikas and racist slogans. Some people are now emboldened to do this because in their minds they’re doing their part to “Make America Great Again.” Meanwhile, the name of the NFL team that represents the nation’s capital is an insidious racial epithet.
Just like in years past I will still watch the games and get emotionally invested only to have my hopes crushed – I follow all the DC teams so this is nothing new - but I removed the team logo sticker from my car and I got rid of all of the shirts I used to wear. I’m not trying to make some grand gesture, but I feel that it’s important now more than ever.
Jessa:
One time I was in Boston watching a game and openly cheering for the Redskins. Not one, but two different groups of Pats fans came up and expressed shock and surprise that people actually were fans of the Redskins claiming that they’d “never seen that before.” They then looked on with sympathy and sort of-half consoled me every bad play the Redskins made (and there were PLENTY). The worst part was that they weren’t even trying to make fun of me, you could tell they felt genuinely sorry for me. Even the most insecure, petty sports fans around think being a Redskins fan is too sad to even take pleasure in insulting.
Bill:
They fired their GM who promised to turn around decades of incompetence. On his way out, they smeared him as relapsing in his fight against alcoholism.
They further alienated their star QB by tagging him for the 2nd year in a row. Their opening offer was so ridiculous that Cousins’s agent never responded.
The current GM, after having failed to sign Cousins to a long-term deal, and tagging him for the second year in a row, held a press conference where he called him the wrong name six times, and then refused to take questions.
SomethingBrewing:
Fuck Dan Snyder. Seriously, I wish a burning penis upon our little Joffrey.
Canaan:
Washington is just a city with several sports teams that may not be winning championships but are at least trying and seem to actually regret how things turn out when they under-perform. Meanwhile 95%* of all sports coverage in town is focused on Dan Snyder’s latest attempt to either monetize the air you breathe** at the stadium or him playing off each various municipal government into a bidding war over the next football stadium.
*The other 5% is handwringing over Bryce Harper playing baseball the right way.
**Prince George’s County may build a bike trail near the stadium. I guarantee Snyder will try to come up with a way to charge people for biking within site of the stadium on game days.
Jeb:
After a trip a few years ago to Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia in which a few buddies and I had an absolute blast one of my friends and I made a life bet. The bet was whoever’s team wins the Super Bowl first the loser has to pay for a round trip ticket to Slovenia for the winner when we go back. My team in the bet is obviously the Redskins. His team is the Buffalo Bills. That bet will never pay out for either of us, ever.
Matt:
Fuck Dan Snyder with RG3's mangled ACL.
Ken:
In the fifties my dad was a DC cop, and at first he had stadium duty on Sunday home games (this was before security contractors). He was a rabid Skins fan and thus my role model for becoming likewise. I went through the dog years of the sixties, that one good year with Lombardi in ‘69, then the exciting over-the-hill gang George Allen years (BTW—Bruce Allen came to my high school as a sophomore and got on varsity for the sole purpose of holding kicks for his older brother George Jr. He got a letter jacket for doing that and rode around in a free Pontiac he got from his dad’s endorsements, so yeah—he was always a douche knob).
Then came Gibbs and the happiest fan years of my life. Since those salad days and Danny boy’s buy-in, my level of fandom has gone from happy to hopeful to curious to bewildered to angry to embarrassed (I live in SF now and I’ve removed any memorabilia from sight so people don’t laugh at me). Now I’m in a state of mind that I would never have thought would be possible: disinterested. Fuck Dan Snyder in the ass with a dead squirrel.
Andrew:
Kirk is the only thing about this organization that isn’t prominent dogshit and he’s gonna run through the door to get to San Francisco come next March. Ole Danny Boy is going to blame it on Kirk being greedy. It’s going to work, too, because the fans of this team are mostly stupid.
I decided to stop giving the team my money in 2013. Then they hired a GM and I reversed. Now I’m done with this fucking team. Snyder can kiss every part of my ass.
I need Tylenol. I wish I was a Browns fan.
Matt:
I moved to Philly from DC just over two years ago. Needless to say, I don’t broadcast my DC upbringing because I hate getting drawn into conversations about how my team sucks and how the Iggles rule. I also don’t like getting jumped any more than the average person.
Sometimes, I have no choice but to engage in these Washington/Eagles debates. But in the end, no matter how many points I land against the Eagles (and that’s the whole point really) I always lose because I agree wholeheartedly with every single statement as to why we suck. Do we have competent management? No. A non-cringe inducing name? No. Stadium in the city? No. Better than even shot at running in the playoffs? Not for the past twenty-five ears. Danny Snyder? Yes.
Matt:
No one, in any city, has problems as systemic as we do. Our stadium is a living monument to never passing an infrastructure bill ever. Our owner, my god, there’s no way to complete this sentence and to encompass what a farcical dwarfish cunt he is. He’s such a failure on every level except at delivering unto you the junk mail that made him his fortune. Everything he does is bad. Literally everything. All these other owners are evil and successful. Dan Snyder is evil and a failure.
Even my dad, a Conservative mind you, told me years before wokedom the name is wrong because “what if they were the Blackskins, or the Whiteskins? Wouldn’t that be bad?” But now, because the name change is associated with Trump-era America, it’s a banner and a middle finger against “the elites” who think oh, I don’t know, unchecked white aggression might be a problem. Supporters of the name think they’re not racist because they saw Dances with Wolves in the theater.
In the end, they are the only team who have a rooted embarrassment that far outweighs the problems of the NFL itself. Everyone else gets to complain about public funds or CTE or bad beer choices. We have all of that, plus a racist name with a weasel baby owner in a city that vacuums up all the most political rich assholes. Fuck football.
Bob:
Our GM was fired for being a drunk. But he did better work “drunk” than any sober GM of ours in the past 15 years.
I hope that Snyder goes to Six Flags, gets on one of his shitty rides and it malfunctions, throwing him from a very high height right onto the pavement below, hopefully landing on Bruce Allen.
Christopher:
I made a grand sweeping declaration that when they fired Scot I was done. That was the last straw. I was no longer emotionally invested in this abusive relationship. My friends have set the over/under on 0.5 games into the season before I’m hooked again. As a lifelong Skins fan, God I hate my life…… And hate Dan Snyder so much more than that.
Jared:
Fuck Brook Allen.
Kyle:
As everyone knows, Dan Snyder can ruin even the best of things (Six Flags, local papers, hope) but now he has taken it upon himself to drive out of town the only decent QB we’ve had since I’ve been alive. I lived through the Mark Brunell/Jason Campbell/Rex Grossman/John Fucking Beck days and I’m not going back. What’s the point of the public squabble? Everyone fucking hates the Skins ownership and front office anyway, they’re not going to save face by saying Kirk is spoiled and wants too much. Dan Snyder probably loves that people hate him at this point and just wants to remind us that we’re poor and we’ll never have nice things.
I can’t wait until 2018 when he’s in San Fran tossing TDs to whoever hasn’t retired on that team and we’re stuck with Colt McCoy. DC talk shows are actually trying to hype him up already because he beat Dallas a few years back. DC hasn’t won a championship in my adult life, and I don’t see it ending anytime soon. DC is the new Cleveland only with worse traffic.
Side Note- didn’t know any of this before, but it makes a lot of sense.
Dan:
I’m a NOVA native and I rooted for this team for so many years. Just this week I threw out all of my remaining Redskins shit. I don’t care about this stupid fucking dumpster fire any more. Whenever the guys over at WJFK bring them up (which is all the time because DC is a FOOTBALL TOWN *jerking off motion*) my eyes just about roll out of my damn head. I can’t even coherently express my loathing in sentences so here’s an off-the-top of my head list of reasons why they suck:
1. The name is racist, and if you don’t agree you’re probably some white asshole from McLean. Fuck you.
2. They fired a guy for being a drunk who, by all reports, wasn’t even drinking. And when they tried to throw him under the bus he took the fuckin’ high road and made them look like shit.
3. SNYDER. These billionaire plutocrats fucking live forever, and that’s bad for everyone else. Let’s circle back to when he sued the Washington City Paper (the best paper in town by far) because they published this. He claimed that the drawings on his picture were anti-Semitic because I guess he doesn’t realize that his religion has no bearing on why everybody hates him. He also loves Trump.
4. They botched the Kirk Cousins thing so fucking badly. Here’s a middling QB who they could have locked down forever three years ago, but they didn’t because Bruce Allen is a horse’s ass and likes fucking with people. I hope Kirk fucking takes them for all they’ve got.
5. The stadium is so fucking bad and far away that locals pine for the return of RFK which is ACTIVELY FALLING APART. I went there last year for a DC United game and I was honestly concerned for my safety while walking around the concourse. Thing is, people are right: it’s way better than FedEx Field.
7. This team will never win anything. They won’t. The management is stupid. No one has any idea what the fuck they’re doing. Washington is a byword in the NFL for “paycheck” and that is what they deserve. I would have originally said that the fans deserve better, but if you’re still a Skins fan in 2017 then you deserve nothing but the misery and pain you’ll get from this horrendous shitshow of a team. Fuck you.
Rob:
I grew up in Toronto, so had no inherent NFL loyalties growing up. When I was 8 years old in 1982, my brother pointed to a TV and said that the Washington Redskins “were a good team”. I was reaching sports maturity, was impressionable, and lo and behold, started watching the NFL – and the Redskins go on a tear, crushing the Lions, Vikings, and Dallas – culminating in becoming Super Bowl Champions. For the next 10 years I watched the Redskins compete against a 49ers dynasty, the greatest team ever (’85 Bears), and a Parcells/Belichick-led Giants squad for NFC (and eventual League) supremacy. They won three Super Bowls, lost one, and played in numerous other NFC Championship games without a steady QB. It was a fucking awesome time to be alive.
I now feel like the 1982-1991 years were just a massive Venus Fly Trap. I’m now an insect trapped in the pit hairs of Dan Snyder, slowly being covered in Dan Snyder’s digestive enzymes, hermetically sealed to an existence of total ineptitude intertwined with racism, narcissism, and camera shots of Tom Cruise and Rush Limbaugh in private boxes, before I finally lose organ function and disintegrate. In my household I have a McNabb kids jersey, and toddler / adult RGIII jerseys. How the fuck did I become such a goddamn loser?
Fuck Dan Snyder. Fuck his pit hairs.
Drew:
Set aside every awful thing they have done, every contract they have botched, and the awful suburban DC fanbase. The thing that depresses me the most: if they ever reach the top of the sport and win the Super Bowl, I will have to watch Dan Snyder hold that trophy. As insane as it is, I literally don’t know if that is worth it.
George:
The Redskins are bad at football and socially problematic and I have to root for them forever.
Garry:
My life has included several eras of Redskins football. In elementary school and junior high, the team was mediocre at best but we had Hall of Fame offensive players such as Sonny Jurgensen, Charley Taylor and Bobby Mitchell and the losses were at least entertaining, such as 38-28.
George Allen took over, shored up the defense and the running game and wanted to win every game 17-10. Boring, but at least the ‘Skins were winning.
Then Joe Gibbs showed up and it was the best of both worlds: Three Super Bowl titles and exciting offenses.
But I’m afraid I will never see any of those phases in any combination in the 30 years I estimate I will have left on this earth, if I’m lucky, as long as that little rat turd owns this team. And since owning an NFL team apparently means you have access to a secret formula that enables you to live well into your 90s, Redskins fans are screwed until somewhere around 2060.
JS:
I used to drive by Snyder’s house on my way home from work when I lived in the area and dreamt of detouring and egging it. Because of where I live now, I have to watch Redskins games in a bar, and in the past six years I’ve taught the bar patrons to boo every time Snyder comes on screen. They’re all fans of other teams, but they at least know if the Redskins are on to join me in yelling horrible things at the only owner in the league that makes Trump’s White House look competent. May Snyder’s yacht sink in the Potomac.
Dave:
I just heard yesterday that Snyder was “embarrassed” again due to the McCloughan butchering. Just like he was embarrassed in 2009 during the Zorn debacle. Just like he was embarrassed after the leak-filled insanity that was the end of the Shanahan era. Just like he’ll be embarrassed when the next round of shit cannons that he aims directly at his own face explode. The guy just can’t help himself. He’s like one of those kids that craves attention and will do anything to get it, but instead of drawing on the walls with crayons, he lights his sister’s crib on fire while she’s in it.
Dan:
This is the team with the stadium that has removed thousands of seats because they couldn’t sell them (went to the Packers game for 15 bucks last year), has a racist nickname, traded three first round picks for a total bust, sold expired airline peanuts, hired a coach who did not even know the team’s colors, and overpaid for this guy, this guy, and this guy, would DEFINITELY screw up the opportunity to sign a franchise quarterback. They have pissed away money for years both on and off the field, and the one opportunity they have to sign a quarterback in house, they go cheap. They’ll go 8-8 with Kirk, and then revert to 4-12 next year when he reunites with either one of his old coordinators in California.
Also, the Scot McCloughan fiasco was a power grab by the team president who only got his job because of who his father was.
Ned:
We are well on our way to fucking up another quarterback situation for what feels like the millionth time. I always tell myself that I’m better than this racist, mouth-breathing fanbase who hates the best quarterback we’ve had since the mid 90s for wanting to get paid; but the truth is I’m just as much of a fucking idiot deep down.
We fired the best GM we’ve had in decades and smeared him on the way out because Bruce Allen is a jealous shithead and this franchise is run by the most loathsome person in Washington DC.
We are so fucked. Fuck Dan Snyder forever and ever, world without end, amen.
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