aswas71788 wrote:I have been a Redskins fan since 1945. I still have the autographed football that Turk Edwards gave me. In all of those years, I have seen the great, good, bad and rotten. I can attest that the Redskins have never been as bad as they have been since Snyder bought the franchise, in my opinion. There is no stretch of time in there when they were anything but somewhat good. Don't mistake a couple of play-off appearance where they got wiped up by the other team and being good. I had hopes that Snyder would bring back the great years since he was a fan. He didn't. The franchise has been mired in turmoil and self destruction.
I was a kid in the late-50's, when we -- my Dad, my friends, and Shirley Povich -- thought that George Preston Marshall was hopeless bad. "He's a showman. Doesn't know football", my Dad said. I have followed the team since about 1953.
Thinking back, Marshall's bottom-feeding time was only about 15 years long.
Snyder is worse.
Thus Post article is comprehensive. Worth a complete read. Well done, Liz Clarke, Les Carpenter, and Mark Maske
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/r ... 84c5483b71
Some selections:
The decisions Snyder makes in three key areas will determine the future stability and relevance of the Redskins — a $3.1 billion business that is showing troubling foundational cracks. In the past year alone, regular season attendance is down nearly 24 percent at FedEx Field and game-day revenue, by conservative calculations, has plunged $18 million.
One: Should Snyder bring back Jay Gruden, his amiable yet consistently mediocre head coach, and Bruce Allen, his increasingly reviled team president, for a sixth and 10th full season, respectively? Gruden’s record is 35-43-1; Allen’s is worse: 59-83-1.
Two: Can Snyder reverse a plunge in game-day attendance and declining local TV ratings in a market that for decades revolved around Redskins Sundays?
Three: Can Snyder find a home, and a funding plan, for the 60,000-seat, roughly $1 billion new stadium he hopes to open in 2027? He is off to a poor start, having waited in vain for a bidding war to erupt among officials in Maryland, Virginia and the District while underestimating the political challenges of acquiring development rights to the former RFK Stadium site, his top choice.
Some close to Snyder say privately that he doesn’t fully grasp the extent of fans’ enmity. Like a quarterback who can’t read the whole field or spot open receivers, he fails to connect his squad’s poor performance, both on the field and at the turnstile, to the frequently tone-deaf moves of his unpopular front office.
Nor does he necessarily see his own hand in the mess, opting to find and fire scapegoats, as he did again this past week, ousting his handpicked chief operating officer, Brian Lafemina, less than eight months into the job. Snyder was said to be stunned by backlash among fans who railed on social media and besieged Redskins Park with angry phone calls. The team’s young marketing staff was bewildered, according to two people with knowledge of the in-house briefing on the purge of Lafemina and his top lieutenants.
In his penchant for blaming the Redskins’ woes on others, Snyder risks missing an essential point that was glaring this season: The team’s fan base is eroding, and he has few allies at a time when he sorely needs both.
High-lighting a few staggering sentences, including "[s]ome close to Snyder"...
Unlike Allen, Gruden readily acknowledges that his results haven’t been good enough.
“Nobody likes to lose around here. Everybody demands greatness around here, and that’s the way it should be. This is the Washington Redskins,” Gruden said in an interview. “I have not done a good enough job to get us over the hump. I have not won a playoff game since I’ve been here, and if you had told me five years ago I would have laughed at you.”
Later:
Allen could be kept, fired or reassigned. Some in the NFL with insight into the Redskins’ workings anticipate the latter, predicting Snyder will move Allen to the business side of the team and name someone else to oversee football operations. One agent who deals with the Redskins believes that Eric Schaffer, the team’s longtime salary cap expert and chief contract negotiator, could be put in charge of football operations.
If Snyder pursued an outside candidate, he would likely have a tough time wooing a top personnel executive. The Redskins’ reputation in NFL circles has deteriorated during Snyder’s tenure and is at a particularly low ebb now, following his ouster of Lafemina this month and former general manager Scot McCloughan, who has strong allies in front offices around the league, in March 2017 less than two years into his tenure.
Money matters:
“Snyder has positioned himself as the junior [Dallas Cowboys owner] Jerry Jones,” said a former high-ranking NFL executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “While a lot of owners don’t like Jerry and resent Jerry because he operates by his own rules, they respect him. They know he runs a franchise that makes a bazillion dollars and makes everybody money. I don’t think anybody thinks Daniel Snyder puts money in their pocket. He’s met with a smirk.”
When Snyder bought the Redskins for $800 million in 1999, he not only took possession of Redskins Park in Ashburn, FedEx Field in Landover and the team’s three Super Bowl championship trophies; he also inherited a corporate titan’s dream — more demand for his product than supply.
Now, however:
Attendance has plummeted since. This season saw a seismic drop. In 2017, the Redskins ranked sixth in NFL home-game attendance, drawing 75,175 fans per game. Heading into Sunday’s season finale, their average game-day crowd of 60,719 ranks 29th in the 32-team league.
Moreover, the Redskins rank dead last in percentage of stadium capacity filled (74 percent). Visually, the team tried to minimize the fact that more than 25 percent of tickets were unsold by covering large sections of the upper deck with advertising banners. But the empty seats, prevalence of fans wearing opponents’ jerseys and sporadic boos were jarring to Snyder.
It's as if Snyder lives in a bubble with the world kept far away.
While neither Snyder nor Allen was made available to comment, the team authorized its public relations consultant, Maury Lane, to speak on its behalf. Asked about this season’s precipitous drop in revenue, Lane said: “The organization had a very aggressive marketing plan, and unfortunately it didn’t work out as well as we would have liked. We’re looking forward to restructuring that plan and believe it will have much different results in the coming season.”
Since LaFemina reduced some ticket prices to draw fans back, does that mean an increase in ticket prices? Good luck, Little Dan.
Lane noted that the Redskins, according to Forbes’ 2018 valuation of NFL teams, had $491 million in revenue last season, which places it among the league’s top five revenue-generators. That figure has increased each of the past five years, he said. But the bulk of that revenue is the Redskins’ 1 in 32 share of the NFL’s national TV revenue, which is hefty enough to mask a steep drop in local, stadium-related revenue.
Fans’ dissatisfaction with FedEx Field isn’t Snyder’s only problem. Six successive years of a drop in local TV ratings for the Redskins’ broadcasts on Fox — the predominant network for teams playing in the NFC — indicates that more fans are tuning out the team from their own homes. This year’s rating (17.7) was down 10 percent from 2017 (19.7) and off more than 46 percent from the rookie season of quarterback Robert Griffin III in 2012 (25.9).