Robert Griffin III Will Make You Forget That Dan Snyder Is An Awful Person
I've lived in the DC area for nine years and as long as I've lived here, the Washington Redskins have existed primarily as Dan Snyder's abused chew toy. They've carted in ****ty coach after ****ty coach and signed ****ty free agent after ****ty free agent. And all the while, the brand identity—the culture—of the Redskins remained virtually the same. This was always an organization that made every possible desperate move and traded every possible draft pick in order to help Snyder buy into the team's Super Bowl legacy.
Before this season, there wasn't a moment when you forgot that Dan Snyder owned this team. His bloated, arrogant shadow permeated virtually everything: Joe Gibbs being hauled back in strapped to an oxygen tank, Vinny Cerrato being a ****ing idiot, Clinton Portis fancying himself the team's unofficial GM. This was a team that many of its fans loved more out of obligation than anything else, because everything about the Redskins otherwise sucked: the players, the coaching, the stadium experience, all of it. This was a soulless, cynical enterprise. This was a team and its fans going through the motions in a loveless marriage. Drew Magary writes for Deadspin and Gawker. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at
drew@deadspin.com.
Everything about the Redskins is different now, of course. The presence of Robert Griffin III has grown so massive that, at times, you can forget that Dan Snyder owns this team and is a horrible person. That's NEVER happened before. The Redskins right now are a prime example of how a franchise's public identity can shift, thanks to just one player, into a whole new era.
I'm not trying to say that RG3 is magical or that "this is what sports is all about." I'm looking at this strictly as a kind of football branding exercise. NFL teams have always existed in phases. You can take a team like the Eagles and break it down into distinct eras: The Buddy Ryan Era, the McNabb Years, the Vick Experiment, etc. All of these incarnations of a football team have their own distinct personality, and those personalities have a different effect on the average football fan.
Apart from my own team, I find myself having minor flings with other teams on occasion strictly by era. I really liked the Phil Simms Giants, which embarrasses me now because Phil Simms the announcer is so awful. I ****ing hated the Jim Kelly Bills. I loved the Bernie Kosar Browns. I ****ing hated the Manning-era Colts. I like the Rex Ryan Jets against my better judgment. I'll always hate the Packers, but I hate the Aaron Rodgers Packers a whole lot less than the Brett Favre Packers. Once a major change happens to a franchise—a change in location, ownership, QB, or head coach—that personality gets reset, and your relationship to it as a fan changes.
For me, I lump the past 15 years or so of Redskins football into the Dan Snyder Years. The coaches and players changed (and often), but Snyder was the domineering factor across all of it. I ****ing hated the Dan Snyder Redskins.
But now that Griffin has given the franchise a new identity, I feel different. They aren't the Snyder Skins to me anymore. Even though Snyder is still the owner and Mike Shanahan is still standing there on the sidelines like some kind of emotionless leather android, they're the RG3 Skins, completely and fully. I very much wanted the Skins to beat Baltimore last weekend. As long as it isn't at the expense of my own team, I definitely want to see them in the playoffs, even the Super Bowl. **** yeah I wanna see RG3 play Andrew Luck in the Super Bowl (I like the Luck Colts). That's how wildly your affections for a football can fluctuate depending upon who or what constitutes their dominant trait.
The old joke is that you're cheering for laundry out there when you watch sports, but that isn't true at all. You root for your home team now and forever, but the rest of the sports landscape is a dynamic, constantly shifting human carnival. People matter, even though you're rooting only based upon your distant perceptions of those people. It's not a rote exercise. It's a deeply personal thing, in which you bestow your fandom upon players and coaches and teams who you think have qualities you find fascinating or admirable. You can go from hating a team to liking it and then right back to hating it all over again in the span of a decade, perhaps even faster.
That's what keeps sports compelling. If every team stayed exactly the same and coaches were never fired and players never aged, this would all get really boring really fast. You need teams to reshuffle. You need them to assume new identities. You need them to change, because otherwise you never would.
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