The firing of Ron Rivera as the head coach of the Washington Commanders may have been expected, but team owner Josh Harris has a long way to go to restore a tradition of winning football to the nation’s capital.
I was 8 years old when I moved to the D.C. area and adopted the Washington Redskins as my hometown team. Since then, I have watched a franchise repeatedly embarrass itself off the field with workplace culture issues and deranged ownership and embarrass itself on the field with abysmal and inconsistent play.
To make matters worse, amid its culture of losing, the team abandoned its iconic and historic moniker amid the 2020 race riots, severing its legacy ties to the great teams of the 1980s that brought Super Bowl championships to the nation’s capital.
I never saw those teams play. Great players of the era such as Joe Theismann, John Riggins, Doug Williams, and Art Monk had long retired and were enjoying their championship rings by the time I was old enough to be a fan.
Instead, I was stuck with owner Dan Snyder and his incompetent meddling with on-the-field affairs and shameful conduct off it. I saw Kirk Cousins get out of town as quickly as he could and find long-term success in Minnesota, and coach Mike Shanahan’s firing after the 2013 season is never long forgotten, given that nearly half of the NFL’s current head coaches were on his staff. Two of them have made it to the Super Bowl, and one, Sean McVay, won it.
Instead of winning football games, I had to watch my chosen team cave to political correctness and give up its iconic name, adopt a placeholder name as the Washington Football Team, and, after a much-anticipated process, brand itself as the obnoxiously generic Washington Commanders.
It has been a 21st century of losing football in Washington. But with Snyder’s sale of the team and new owner Josh Harris’s track record of building winning teams in the NHL and NBA, there is a cautious optimism that things are going to be different now.
Washington football has a long and storied tradition of successful teams that brought pride to the DMV area. Harris has said that he wants to restore that legacy and pride, and hiring a new coach and a new general manager to make that a reality on the field is certainly a major and necessary step in the right direction.
But restoring that winning tradition requires more than just fielding a team. It requires inspiring players, coaches, and a fan base that has largely abandoned its team.
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Restoring the Washington Redskins moniker would go a long way to building goodwill with legacy fans and would pay homage to a legacy of championships and a tradition of excellent football in the nation’s capital.
You can bet that this fan base and this city have not forgotten the words to “Hail to the Redskins.”