The focus for the new-look Washington Commanders will be on the field on Sunday, a welcome respite for a franchise that has been one controversy after another for the past several months.
At least The Team Formerly Known as the Washington Redskins finally has a name again, after spending the past two years as the Football Team.
The name change is the kind of thing that will take time to resonate with fans, if there are many fans still left at this point in the Daniel Snyder era.
Snyder has owned the team since 1999, and in that time, a span of 23 seasons, Washington has had six playoff berths, and just two playoff wins, the last way back in 2005.
Snyder is on his 11th head coach, Ron Rivera, who won the NFC East with a 7-9 record in 2020, before last season’s 7-10 finish.
The Commanders – can we call them the Commies for short? – have a new QB1, Carson Wentz, who has been cast off by two teams (Philadelphia and Indianapolis) the past two offseasons, and is pretty much on his last chance to be an NFL starter in Washington.
And the franchise is in the middle of a protracted negotiation with Maryland, Virginia and D.C. over which is going to end up getting stuck having to spend a few hundred million dollars to build Snyder a new stadium.
Snyder, facing congressional investigations into sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, may have to end up building a football field on an oversized yacht and float it around in the Potomac on Sundays given the lack of interest.
The 2022 season opens with a matchup against the similarly dysfunctional Jacksonville Jaguars, who won the Trevor Lawrence sweepstakes last year, and proceeded to waste his rookie season by having him work under Urban Meyer, who spent more time getting lapdances from coeds than he did game-planning, before being let go late in the season.
Now Lawrence has Doug Pederson, who won a Super Bowl in Philadelphia with Wentz as the starting QB, sorta, kinda.
Pederson led the Eagles to the win in Super Bowl LII, and Wentz was 11-2 as the starter that season, but he missed the final three regular season games and the playoffs with a torn ACL, and it was Nick Foles who quarterbacked the team to the Super Bowl.
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Chris Graham
