The Draw Play

The Redskins are such a baffling pile of turds.

It consistently amazes me how they are able to consistently amaze me in how badly they can screw something so straightforward up. I feel like I should be used to it by now, but every time he still manages to surprise me somehow. For my entire football aware life it feels like the Skins have followed the same pattern of “Be terrible -> Find something that works, begin an upswing into actual relevance ->Dan Snyder’s ego and the front office screw it up somehow-> Repeat”. It’s not like the Browns, who are perpetually a dump with no expectations. The Skins win the division every once in a while and look primed for long term relevance, then a bunch of bad decisions like this contract situation happen, and it all falls apart again.

They looked primed to break out with RG3. Then everything exploded. RG3 was mishandled, bad blood between ownership and coaches tanked the team, back to square one. Now they got incredibly lucky and found a quality QB right behind RG3, and they are doing almost everything possible to sour him on the team, which is a shame because Kirk genuinely seems like a good guy who wants to stick around.

Tagging him last off-season made sense. He was the flawed leader of a weak team that won a pathetic division. But last season he was even better, and then the Redskins go and tag him again, basically to make sure no other team can touch him. Of course the tag is meant to give you time to offer a contract, and the Skins totally offered him a shit contract. Cousins says no, and the team pulls the classic PR move of “Portray the player as greedy and disloyal” to the general fanbase which an irritatingly large number of people still don’t see through and eat up in droves. Anyone paying slight attention could see the Skins offer was bad and that they were doing Kirk dirty, but still people call Kirk the greedy one because the Skins suggested he was. I will never understand the people who side with Billionares calling people greedy.

I don’t know if Bruce Allen saying “Kurt Cousins” was intentional spite, hilarious ignorance, or an “accent”, but that’s kind of the problem. Dan Snyder’s entire tenure has been riddled with examples of both childish spite and ignorance. It should have been a hilarious joke that Bruce Allen said Kurt, everybody laughs, move on. Instead people spent the next few days legitimately trying to figure out if it was an innocent mistake or not. When the probably honest accent mistake is getting legitimately discussed as not, you have serious concerns as a franchise.

I hope Kirk gets his dough and flips the Redskins the bird next season and plays in SF or something. Start the sucky cycle anew. I want to add Kirk to the money fight someday, he’s a delightful dork.