Washington’s professional football franchise is broken. That isn’t some grand revelation, but it still bears repeating.
The Redskins “beat” the tanking Dolphins 17-16 on Sunday, thanks to a ridiculously botched two-point conversion attempt by Miami at the end of regulation. Six days after defenestrating scapegoat head coach Jay Gruden, this team was 2 yards away from experiencing the most embarrassing loss in franchise history. Remember: This is an organization that once lost a championship game 73-0, in what’s still the most lopsided NFL game ever played. Losing a tank-off to a team that’s actively trying to fail would’ve been worse. If the Dolphins’ two-point play had succeeded, the game would have—and should have—been bemoaned as the rock bottom of Dan Snyder’s 20-year tenure as the Redskins owner. Yet even after the win, I’m going to go ahead and say that 2 yards from the bottom is low enough.
Washington has been finding ways to descend to new lows for years. In Snyder’s two decades at the controls, the Redskins have gone 140-185-1. They’ve posted eight seasons with double-digit losses—one more than the franchise had in its previous 67 years of existence—and won just two playoff games. Yet even amid all that dysfunction, this still seems like uncharted territory. In a season filled with horrendous teams, Washington has less hope than anyone. The Dolphins at least have a plan, no matter how painful it might be to execute. Sam Darnold looks like a budding star capable of one day lifting the Jets from obscurity. And at least the Bengals look poised for a full-scale rebuild. There is no solace to be found in Washington. With nothing but darkness on the horizon, it’s time to ask how a once-proud franchise fell so far.
When examining the Redskins’ failures, it’s best to start by establishing a specific time frame. Some of Snyder’s earliest missteps inform maladies that still afflict this team, but lumping the early years of his regime with the organization’s current problems isn’t totally fair. Snyder, for all his faults, has learned some lessons. So let’s look past the bloated contracts his front office handed to Deion Sanders, Bruce Smith, Jeff George, Albert Haynesworth, and others. Let’s move beyond how Snyder fired Marty Schottenheimer after a single season because the legendary coach wouldn’t bend to his wishes. Let’s gloss over the time Snyder sent a gallon of Baskin-Robbins ice cream to defensive coordinator Mike Nolan’s office as some bizarre message about the vanilla blandness of his play-calling. While all that matters—because the same man capable of those mistakes is still in charge—I don’t have 50,000 words, and you don’t have five hours.
For our purposes, let’s limit the scope of this inquiry to the most recent version of the franchise, which took hold after Robert Griffin III’s injury in the playoffs following the 2012 season and Mike Shanahan’s firing a year later. Despite some promising moments before and during the Shanahan era, things really started to come unhinged in its aftermath.
In fairness to Snyder and embattled team president Bruce Allen, Washington has had its fair share of bad luck. The bold decision to trade up in the 2012 draft to select Griffin initially looked like the right one. The Redskins went 10-6 during Griffin’s debut season, and he earned Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. He led an offense that was coordinated by Kyle Shanahan and included young position coaches like Matt LaFleur and Sean McVay to a no. 6 finish in DVOA and 27.3 points per game (fourth in the NFL). But Griffin’s devastating knee injury and eventual decline changed the organization’s trajectory. Who’s to blame for Griffin’s torn ACL—and the frayed relationship it caused between the quarterback and his head coach—has been revisited often over the past seven years. But in practical terms, the Redskins lost a player for whom they’d mortgaged their future, and they’ve struggled to pick up the pieces ever since.
Unforeseen events happen in the NFL all the time, though. Cam Newton has been sidelined for the past month with a Lisfranc injury, and Carolina has gone 4-0 during that time. Andrew Luck retired two weeks before the season began, and the Colts are in the thick of the playoff hunt. Griffin shredding his knee and Alex Smith breaking his leg late in 2018 have both contributed to the Redskins’ woes, but attributing the franchise’s ineptitude to a pair of quarterback injuries overlooks the root causes of the dysfunction.
One of those is Washington’s continued quarterback malpractice. After Griffin dislocated his ankle early in the 2014 season, effectively ending his tenure as the team’s starting quarterback, the Redskins turned to Kirk Cousins. And the Cousins saga in Washington illustrated how the franchise often seems like it’s making up its plan for the most crucial position in sports as it goes along. In 2015, Cousins’s first year as a full-time starter, he completed 69.8 percent of his passes and threw 29 touchdowns for an offense that finished sixth in passing DVOA. Rather than extend Cousins after the season, Washington elected to use the franchise tag, which paid him nearly $20 million. It also tagged him again the following year and wound up shelling out close to $24 million. There’s been plenty of back and forth reported about the financial demands that Cousins and his agent put to the Redskins before the 2016 season, but if the reported terms of about $20 million per season and $60 million or so guaranteed over three years are correct, Washington essentially paid Cousins his desired rate for two years instead of three.
There’s no sense in wading through a debate about what Cousins is worth and whether the Vikings have buyer’s remorse two years into the three-year, $84 million, fully guaranteed deal they gave him before the 2018 season. The telling part of the Cousins debacle is that the Redskins decided to have a staring contest with the most important player on their roster and effectively kept themselves in limbo for two years. Rather than appeasing Cousins with the (reasonable) deal he wanted and creating some harmony within the organization, the Washington brass decided to sow discord and allow the story to drag on, only to pay Cousins close to what he was asking for in the first place. Given the recent explosion of the QB market, extensions at the position tend to look like bargains almost immediately after they’re signed. If Cousins had gotten the three-year, $59 million deal he originally coveted, his $20 million cap hit in 2018—the final season of that hypothetical deal—would have been the 15th-highest among quarterbacks. That’s palatable for any QB on a second deal, let alone one capable of guiding a top-five offense.
The argument against extending Cousins was that he was buoyed by Gruden’s well-designed scheme and an excellent group of pass catchers that included DeSean Jackson, Jordan Reed, Pierre Garcon, and Jamison Crowder. Cousins’s detractors contended that any success he had was merely a product of the situation around him. The truth is, though, that’s the case for all but about five quarterbacks in the league. Finding a QB who can thrive in the right circumstances is half the battle. Washington succeeded in unearthing one, only to pay him $44 million and watch him walk in free agency for the measly return of a third-round compensatory pick. The Redskins ended up trading that selection for a pair of fourth-round picks. So in the end, the Cousins drama cost the Redskins $44 million in cash and netted them running back Bryce Love (who’s currently on injured reserve) and backup guard Wes Martin.
Washington’s solution in the wake of the Cousins debacle shed a light on a very different and even more concerning tendency. With Cousins clearly on his way out, Washington traded a third-round pick and slot cornerback Kendall Fuller to the Chiefs for quarterback Alex Smith. Regardless of the context, trading a reasonable draft asset and one of the team’s most promising young starters for a QB in his mid-30s would be considered a huge risk for a franchise that wasn’t close to contention. Yet it’s especially stunning that Washington handed Smith a four-year, $94 million contract (with a whopping $71 million guaranteed) as part of the deal. The Smith trade and extension point to the franchise’s lack of a cogent team-building strategy. The Redskins never seem to know what they are, where they want to go, or how they’re going to get there.
When Washington hired renowned talent evaluator Scot McCloughan as the franchise’s general manager in January 2015, it felt like things were finally turning a corner. After five years with Allen ineptly running the personnel department, it was time for a change, and McCloughan—who’d helped build contenders as a member of the 49ers’ and Seahawks’ front offices—seemed like an ideal candidate. His tenure started out well. Outside of a splashy deal for cornerback Josh Norman in the summer of 2016, the Redskins were uncharacteristically restrained in free agency over the first two years of McLoughan’s reign. His first draft class in 2015 netted Pro Bowl guard Brandon Scherff in the first round, excellent pass rusher Preston Smith in the second, and Crowder in the fourth. McCloughan badly missed on wide receiver Josh Doctson with the 22nd overall pick a year later, but he still nabbed Fuller in the third round and quality defensive tackle Matt Ioannidis in the fifth. For the first time in a long time, the franchise looked to be building something. And then, in typical Redskins fashion, it all started to fall apart.
The team’s brass began disseminating stories that McCloughan, who has a history of alcoholism but said that his drinking was no longer a problem, had relapsed. He was prevented from speaking to the media at the Senior Bowl in early 2017 and was absent from the team’s draft meetings and the NFL combine. A month and a half before the draft, McCloughan was fired. (He later filed and lost a grievance for wrongful termination.) With its first two picks that year, Washington took a pair of players from Alabama, which just happens to be the most visible program in the country. Not a whole lot of scouting necessary there.
With McCloughan gone and the front office once again adrift, Allen—now back in charge of the team’s personnel department—and the Redskins have settled back into their old, bad habits. Alex Smith’s broken leg is an undeniably sad outcome for a player who’s beloved around the league, but the trade to get him and the subsequent extension were both obvious mistakes. Those were the sorts of decisions made by a franchise desperate for relevance and destined to never find it. And there have been several more like them over the past few years.
Before last season’s trade deadline, Washington dealt a fourth-round pick to the Packers to acquire safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, who played nine games for the Redskins before leaving for Chicago in free agency on a modest one-year, $3.6 million deal. Washington would have earned a measly seventh-round compensatory pick for Clinton-Dix in 2020, but the franchise negated it by signing Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie this offseason. The Redskins also would have netted a third-round comp pick for Preston Smith after the pass rusher signed a four-year, $52 million deal with Green Bay in March, but Washington negated that by inking safety Landon Collins to a market-setting, six-year, $84 million contract. Rather than showing restraint and acknowledging that a full-scale rebuild was the best path forward, Allen and vice president of player personnel Doug Williams opted to make the sort of headline-grabbing move that has haunted the organization for 20 years. Collins will carry a $14.2 million cap hit next season for a team that will likely be picking in the top three this spring.
Unfortunately, that prime draft status won’t extend to the second round. Washington traded away its 2020 second-rounder, along with its 2019 second-round pick, to move back into the first round of April’s draft and grab pass rusher Montez Sweat at no. 26. Sweat has nine pressures through six games; he currently ranks 98th out of 112 edge defenders in pass-rushing efficiency, according to Pro Football Focus. Trading up in the draft is hard to justify for any organization, but when a team like the Saints—which has a contending roster and a Hall of Fame quarterback entering his 40s—ships away a future first-round pick to move up and draft Marcus Davenport, at least the rationale is clear. For a team completely bereft of talent like Washington, it seems more akin to a 4-year-old in a toy store yelling, “But I want it!”
Washington has a chance to recoup some of that draft capital by trading All-Pro left tackle Trent Williams, who said he refuses to play for the organization after the mishandling of a medical issue last season. But Allen has been steadfast in his refusal to deal Williams. Rather than stockpile draft assets as part of a smartly executed rebuild, Allen has decided to be vindictive even as it harms the franchise’s interests.
The Redskins spent their 2019 first-round pick on Ohio State quarterback Dwayne Haskins. That move, at least, was widely praised at the time: Smith’s injury had put the Redskins in a precarious spot, and while Allen and Co. had shrewdly traded a seventh-round pick to Denver for stopgap option Case Keenum, the team still needed to find a long-term answer at quarterback. After a spectacular 50-touchdown season with the Buckeyes, Haskins looked like a potential solution, and Washington landed him without having to trade into the top 10. With Haskins in the fold, it seemed like Gruden would get a chance to groom the team’s next franchise quarterback and start a new, more promising era.
That’s a fun thought, huh? Almost immediately, Gruden and the front office were at odds about whether Haskins was ready to start. As a coach trying to preserve his job, Gruden decided to go with Keenum (and longtime backup Colt McCoy when he recovered from a broken leg) rather than taking a risk on the rookie. After five games and five losses mainly with Keenum and McCoy at the helm, Gruden was fired anyway. Yet even with interim coach Bill Callahan in place, Washington’s staff has determined that Keenum is still the best option at the moment.
It makes sense that Allen wouldn’t seek out the opinion of a head coach who was on the verge of being fired when choosing the team’s next quarterback. But a disconnect between the Washington coaching staff and front office isn’t new. In advance of his team’s matchup with the Redskins this weekend, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said that his favorite part of coaching in Washington was working with his dad. The worst part? “Everything else.” Since Snyder took over, the nation’s capital has been where coaching careers go to die. In the aftermath of Gruden’s dismissal, a report emerged that Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley—the biggest name on the NFL head coach radar this year— wasn’t interested in the gig. You don’t say.
If the dynamics within the Redskins organization don’t improve—and fast—it won’t matter who the team hires as its next head coach. Snyder’s penchant for cronyism has doomed this franchise for as long as he’s been in charge. Allen—who’s the son of legendary Redskins coach George Allen—is far from the first executive who’s stuck around in Washington for all the wrong reasons. Snyder confidant Vinny Cerrato served as the team president and de facto GM during Snyder’s first decade in charge. He oversaw the financial follies of the team’s early days under its new owner, and tensions between him and Schottenheimer led to the latter’s firing after the 2001 season. Nothing about Cerrato’s résumé suggested that he deserved 10 years of chances. In fact, the most notable part is his starring role as a cop in the straight-to-video 1994 film Kindergarten Ninja. (Yes, there is video available online. Yes, it is amazing. And yes, I have so many questions.)
On a football level, though, Cerrato’s chief qualification seemed to be that he was buddies with the boss; a decade into Allen’s tenure, it seems as though he’s hanging around for the same reason. Being able to tip back Coors Lights and lend a sympathetic ear isn’t a reason to employ someone as a high-level executive of a cratering franchise that’s worth more than $3 billion. Whether it’s delusion, incompetence, or contempt for his own fan base, Snyder has been unwilling to alter course in the two years since firing McCloughan, and that’s led to pitiful scenes like the one that followed Gruden’s dismissal earlier this month. Seated in front of the Washington media, with Snyder nowhere to be found, Allen, with a straight face, said that there was enough talent on the Redskins’ roster to win now, and that the culture in place was “pretty damn good.”
Watch that farce of a press conference, and it’s no wonder why this team has been mired in irrelevance for the better part of two decades. When Cerrato gave one of the worst acting performances in recent memory, at least he probably got a free lunch out of it. Allen has no such excuses for trotting out his same-old shtick, and, given the way things have gone in Snyder’s two decades in charge, no one should buy it anyway.
