Well, I can forgive Jack Kent Cooke in his 80's making some mistakes after decades as a great team owner of the Redskins.
But what's Snyder's excuse?
What it comes down to is not ego or an obsession with micro-managing everything (at least not since Zorn departed), but rather Dan Snyder's stark inability to EVALUATE PEOPLE that work for him and make the right selections in key positions to help the team move forward.
Bruce Allen ended up here because he was originally a friend of Mike Shanahan's and because his father used to be the coach with the team and the name 'Allen' still carried some cache with folks in Washington.
But in reality Bruce Allen had been a failure as a GM in Tampa. He presided over an exodus of talent and the team went from being a contender to being an also-ran. Before Tampa he was negotiating contracts in Oakland - Mike Lombardi was the personnel chief under Al Davis.
In his discussions with Allen, and analyzing his actual RECORD over the years, Snyder should have known that Allen was not really equipped with the organizational skills in re personnel to build a successful team.
He was being asked to move away from what he actually had done well in the past, namely manage the cap.
But he never played in the NFL, never put in time as a scout or true personnel chief and never had any coaching experience either.
His attempt to remedy the prediction he found himself in by hiring a potentially unstable guy in Scott McCloughan who had a lot of baggage as the team's personnel executive was a move that blew up in his face. Once again, though his rationalization for speed dialing Scott was that he was a friend of another friend, Jon Gruden - not coincidentally the Redskins' HC's brother.
For a team that had as many issues post-RGIII as Washington did after burning three
#1 picks this team needed to go out and hire a guy that didn't have any red flags. They needed to hire the personnel side equivalent of Sean McVay.
Dan Snyder should have known that and made Allen reach out to someone who wasn't compromised by having lost his last two jobs due to his personal demons.
In fact Snyder should have sensed that the very act of reaching out to McCloughan by Allen was a sign Bruce really was out of touch with today's league and was reaching back 7 or 8 years once again to guys that used to be part of the Tampa or Oakland connections or who had worked with one of the Grudens before.