Today is Daniel Snyder’s 50th birthday. (h/t to Rick Snider for the reminder.)
To know the Redskins era of Mr. Snyder’s formative years is to explain a good deal about his idea of building a team.
The man is trying to recapture his childhood.
Snyder was in his early teens when he fell in love with George Allen’s Redskins. Allen made one Super Bowl run with the Over The Hill Gang because, you know, they were over the hill by 1976. But Snyder only knew the team as contenders. Allen distrusted rookies and dealt for veterans, “known commodities.”
Bruce Allen is the son of the legendary George Allen. Bruce will always have a place at Redskins Park.
Snyder reached manhood in Washington’s Golden Age, the Gibbs I era. Art Monk and Darrell Green were first-round Draft picks, but most of those players, even The Hogs, were low-round picks or cast-offs from other teams.
The Redskins found great success with them under an extraordinary coach and front office. As Snyder became a self-made billionaire by age 30, Gibbs and The Hogs carried us to great heights without using the Draft to build an All-Madden Team. If the Redskins of the ’80s could build winners with free agents, why not do it now.
Are you sensing the pattern here?
The wrong lessons from history
The Redskins morphed to perennial losers in the early ‘90s, but not for lack of trying.
GM Charley Casserly maneuvered to rebuild the team with clever Draft picks that should have worked. Heath Schuler was the Quarterback of the Ages when he left the Tennessee Volunteers. No one at the time thought his back-up, Peyton Manning, would be his equal.
Desmond Howard and Michael Westbrook should have been the one-two receiving punch to match Monk and Clark. Shuler had “weapons” around him.
Shuler was a major bust. Howard was miscast in Washington. Westbrook was decent, but he was no Art Monk.
The future owner of the Redskins saw busts from the NFL Draft, but big payoffs from deals. That is the wrong lesson from history, but completely understandable.
Mike Ditka made the Redskins an offer they could not refuse. The Saints gave up their entire 1999 Draft plus two 2000 pick to position itself to grab Ricky Williams. It was the second most stupid trade in NFL history, exceeded by the Vikings trade for Herschel Walker.
Snyder overruled whatever Casserly had in mind for those picks. Instead, he channeled Allen and emulated Jimmy Johnson who built Super Bowl teams from the picks received for Walker.
Snyder, the boy-owner of the Redskins, lacked Allen’s eye for talent and Johnson’s sense of team cohesion.
You know the rest.
Snyder keeps trying to rebuild those great teams from the past using methods that worked in the 1970s and ‘80s. He hopes to build a new stadium that, he says, will be reminiscent of old RFK.
I hope he does not. We learn from the past, but must not be captive to it. Old RFK was not great because of its structure. It was great because great things happened there.
When Snyder looks back, we do not move forward.
The ‘Skins visit the 49ers today. Hog Heaven clings to a diehard’s faith that the Snyderesque trade that landed Robert Griffin III will not become the third-most stupid trade in NFL history. The rest of the world is leaning that way. Winning cures everything.
Rick Snider’s comments in today’s Washington Paper inspired this post. Snider offers five birthday ideas to Snyder. All are familiar to you. You can read them here.
Hog Heaven makes an exception to our policy of avoiding links to the Washington Paper. We adopted that position when The Paper announced that it would no longer use the team name “Redskins” in its publication, except oddly in the Sports section. Snider uses the team name in his piece, so there you go.
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