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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

The thunderheads are piling up and it appears that a storm is about to explode with the Redskins franchise

As I put the daily Twitter article together over the last half a day, it was impossible to ignore the huge number of grim warnings from multiple DC sports media members who are trying to brace the fan base for something bad on the immediate horizon.

Most of these tweets are in the All a’Twitter article published a short time ago on Hogs Haven, but I know that a lot of readers don’t visit that post, so I thought it might be worthwhile to repeat this collection of tweets here. This is not a comprehensive collection, but it is very representative of what’s been showing up on Twitter since Sunday evening.

The feeling I get reading all of these tweets is sort of how I felt when I read the Revelation of St. John the Devine for the first time — like something’s coming that I don’t want to witness.

The universal themes in the messages I’ve been seeing is the use of adjectives: disappointing and sad, warped and toxic. Whatever these warnings portend, it sounds really bad.

Some of the messages have gone beyond simple implication and stated flatly that the coming bad news is connected directly to the firings of two senior executives, Alex Santos and Richard Mann. The words “sexism” and “racism” have been thrown out there, along with the description, “toxic culture”, so we have some strong hints about the nature of the coming revelations.

One question that might be popping up in your mind right now is why there seems to be so much mystery here. Why are reporters “teasing” this story instead of reporting it?

The answer seems to be that people in the media have heard rumors, or they have sources who are unwilling to go on record yet — that the bad news is out there in unreportable form until someone can meet the usual standards of journalism needed to publicly break the story. Why do I feel as if I may be reading the first official account of this on TMZ?

So, the prophets have spoken their warnings. Fans of the Redskins franchise that continually hope that a corner has been turned and that — finally — we can look forward to a new season without off-the-field drama and who saw the firing of Bruce Allen as the harbinger of better times ahead will, it seems, have to endure another uncomfortable episode while we wait for the full effect of the Ron Rivera culture change.

It does seem that the organization has already taken action, dismissing Santos and Mann in mid-July and replacing them with two seemingly competent personnel executives who come from the Panthers organization. While some have pointed to this as a sign of Coach Rivera extending his cronyism, I see it in a different light. The Redskins faced a bad (and as yet, publicly undefined) situation, and action was taken. Two high level executives were fired at a very unusual time. Rivera seems to have turned to two people that he knows and trusts. Almost unbelievably, one of those two people, Donnie Warren, is also a legendary name for the Redskins, and one with history and experience in the Redskins personnel department. Warren played tight end in Washington for 14 years, winning 3 super bowl rings with Joe Gibbs, and after retiring as a player, returned to spend 5 years as a scout with the Redskins before moving on to a further ten years with the Panthers.

The Redskins organization seems to have acted in an effort to “get in front” of the story. When the details come out, I’m sure we’ll hear that the people responsible have been fired and replaced. It’s better to be seen as proactive instead of reactive, but, in the end, getting in front of a story is merely an effort at damage mitigation. It can’t erase the fact that something ugly happened or erase the stain that goes with it.

While fans like me have hoped that Ron Rivera’s emphasis on new culture would put an end to off-the-field embarrassments along with more winning on the field, it appears that 2020 still has some body blows to deliver to Redskins fans.

I, for one, will be holding my breath every time I log onto the internet for the time being.



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