I supposed the witch is dead, for what it’s worth. After twenty-five years, Dan Snyder – the boy wonder who took a heritage NFL franchise and reduced a 30-year waiting list for season tickets to dead last in attendance, who never managed to luckbox into 11 wins in a season once in a quarter century of modern NFL parity scheduling, who took the one thing that bound the DMV together and make it into a laughingstock leavened with criminality – that son of a bitch is gone, and $5 billion richer for the investment.
Thieves get rich and saints get shot and God don’t answer prayers a lot, as the saying goes.
I don’t think I’ve done a ridearound since the onset of the pandemic. Sonny Sam and Frank are long gone, and the broadcast team that succeeded Sonny Sam and Frank are all gone now, and the team doesn’t even have the same name – the problem wasn’t that they changed from an old name, it’s that they changed to a stupid XFL-assed name when they had the quiet badassery of just Washington Football Team and the slogan “NO NAME BUT TEAM”. Never mind that the NFL is slick garbage, one giant foaming slop bucket of Narrative and performative jingoism. The only professional football I’ve watched a full quarter of in the last five years is the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL.
For that matter, the last college football game I watched all the way through was probably Army-Navy the year Army broke the streak, and that was on DVR delay. Football is starting to seem like the problem – basketball is quicker, baseball is more relaxing, soccer is at least different. George Will’s slur about “violence interrupted by committee meetings” has never been more apt. But that’s not the thing that grates on me the worst.
It’s that it used to be a tie to the old days, a common thread to that old Saturn cruising down Old Georgetown Pike with two large Dr Peppers and a double bacon Whopper, windows down, cigar between my fingers and good ol’ Sonny Sam and Frank calling the action. The days when everything on autumn Mondays depended on the results of the day before, and the homeless guy was high-fiving the 2-star general who was high-fiving the GWU co-ed on the Orange line because we beat Philly or Dallas. It was enough to get me out the door at 9 AM on a Sunday on the bus to Dan Brown’s Lounge, where I’d repose under a painting of Sonny Jurgensen and drink with Bobby Mitchell’s son and despair of whether Jim Zorn was any kind of replacement for Gibbs 2.0. It was that happy moment of being parked on the street with the game on the radio, furiously Tweeting and texting everyone as RG3 completed the last truly exciting season and made us feel like there was a future.
It’s been a long, long time since it felt like there was a better future coming. I am finding more and more than after 50, it’s mostly about figuring out how to keep most of what you have, minimizing the steady loss and just learning to live without what you lost. Getting rid of that Shetland asshole is less about making “Commanders” football something I can live with again and more about settling accounts, about proving that there’s some kind of judgement for wrongdoing – even if it’s the kind of wrongdoing that lets you walk away to live in London with $5 billion in the bank. They punished the little bastard by giving him all I ever wanted. Which I guess is just how America is, now.