Over this past week, the 0-4 Redskins moved to 0-5 with a crushing defeat to the undefeated Patriots. In their entire history, the Redskins have failed to make the playoffs all but two times. After being dominant in the 80’s and 90’s, they got a new owner, Dan Snyder.

Many things can be said about this new owner, almost all of them bad.

Snyder loves his control, but it hurts the team because he has no idea what he is doing. He is the leader of one of the largest sports franchises in the world,  but without running it correctly, they will always under-perform.

Other problems occur as well, some in the form of Bruce Allen. Allen is the President of operations and the right-hand man of Snyder. If they weren’t very good friends, Allen would’ve been fired 3 years ago when he lost 3 All-Pro players; or this past year when he traded away the most promising CB in the NFL for a mediocre QB who had to retire after eleven games. These two have consistently kept the Redskins in the back of the league; it’s hard to keep a good team, but it’s even harder to consistently be the worst.

The only thing that can save the team now is if Snyder sells them. Lifelong, die-hard ‘Skins fan  Tommy Neville has strong feelings about the Redskins leadership. “The leadership within the Redskins organization has toxic elements and is broken.  A key piece of leadership is empowering your subordinates.  During Dan Synder’s 20-year tenure as the owner he had continually inserted himself in areas where an empowered subordinate (head coach, general manager, businessoperations Director) should be allowed to make decisions that are in keeping with the owner’s objective – produce a winning football team. Time after time Mr. Synder has “back-doored” key executives by going directly to players (ex RG3) and then dictating actions to executives,” he said.

Synder has a knack for doing jobs that he has hired others for, and often doing them very poorly. After the awful start this season, Snyder and Allen elected to fire head coach Jay Gruden. It was reasonable to fire him, as he simply wasn’t getting the job done. Afterwards Gruden was asked by NBS sports for a comment, he said  “I wasn’t put in a position to succeed,” which is exactly what one might expect. With an overbearing owner and a terrible president, it makes it hard to coach a good team.

Redskins fans at Lafayette have their own opinions about Dan Synder and his leadership.  Junior Tommy Gardner said, “Dan Snyder should sell the team, he’s not playing on the field. He has no idea what he is doing.”

Another local Redskins fan, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke about how the Redskins can get out of this slump and return to their former glory. “Leadership requires courage, vision, integrity, toughness, humility, accountability, self-awareness and charisma.  The Redskins 2 senior leaders – Synder and Allen – don’t have those qualities.  When push comes to shove the people they hire do have those qualities, Synder and Allen become uncomfortable and sub-optimize the individuals who are actually making the organization better.

Hopefully the cycle ends soon as the Redskins are in that lull, most believe the only way to end the cycle is getting rid of Allen or hoping Snyder sells the team. As always Hail to the Redskins!