Benching the Skins for the season

It's been better this season. My Sunday afternoons are emptier. No hurrying home from church. No begging off lunch. No sneaking glances at my phone.

After 48 years, life without the Redskins has been surprisingly liberating. Surprisingly sad, too.

But it's still better than what the team has been putting fans through. In the dead of every summer, we are given hope. New coach, new faces, new promises. Then, as leaves begin to fall, it all goes wrong.

That the team is terrible again this year is no surprise. The Redskins have been rotten for ages now. It's the way the Skins stink that is so shocking: They're inept. They bicker. They're undisciplined. They make inexplicable mistakes.

After a long Sunday afternoon of running around Suffolk, I found myself in front of a TV in the last minutes of the Tampa game. With a few seconds left, the boys in burgundy marched down the field and scored. The extra point would've tied it. Except the Redskins never got that far. They muffed the snap, the kicker got tackled and the game was over. The Keystone Kops would've been embarrassed.

Of course, the team promptly fired the holder, who was also their punter. I just wish they hadn't stopped with emptying two positions. There's plenty of ineptitude to go around. In 25 of my 48 seasons on Earth, the Skins have been unable to post a winning record. They've made the playoffs just 16 times, though the three Super Bowl wins were nice.

But I don't recall them ever being as hapless as they are now. So willfully bad. Most galling, they've never been so unconcerned by their own incompetence.

I once thought that owner Dan Snyder was a boyish George Steinbrenner, the famously capricious Yankees owner. I was wrong. Steinbrenner, for all his faults, was consumed with winning and getting credit for it. It animated every move he made from the moment he bought the team until the moment he realized he was its biggest problem.

I loved the Yankees despite Steinbrenner.

For years, I assumed Snyder wanted to win but couldn't figure out how. After all, every team owner wants a Super Bowl ring. But given his previous professional success, and his unlimited resources, there are really only two possibilities: Snyder himself is the reason the Redskins are so awful, or he long ago decided he cared more about the dollars and cents than the wins and losses.

Either way, it's hard not to dislike the Redskins because of Snyder.

Under his tenure and meddling, a parade of coaches and players - most of them with some history of success - have come to Washington and thoroughly embarrassed themselves.

Snyder even turned Joe Gibbs, a coach in the same breath as George Allen and Vince Lombardi, into someone I barely recognized. The conventional wisdom was that Gibbs was out of his depth in the modern game, but a guy that smart, that successful (he mastered NASCAR), could've figured it out.

You can now fill all-star teams and front offices with guys who have happily - with bulging pockets - left Snyder's employ and discovered they could still play the game after all.

Since he bought the Redskins in 1999, Snyder has turned the franchise into one of the most valuable enterprises in sports, even while overseeing some of its worst years on the field.

It took Steinbrenner a full two decades and a suspension to learn that he was the problem with the Yankees. He turned the team over to competent professionals, and the Yankees again are the most consistently great team in professional sports.

Snyder may do the same one day, but for some reason I doubt it.

Until he does, though, I'm doing the once unthinkable. This Sunday the 'Skins play the Cowboys, the most important day on any year's schedule. I'm going Christmas shopping.

Donald Luzzatto is The Virginian-Pilot's editorial page editor. E-mail: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.