Washington Redskins Football: Patron Saint to the Winless

Maybe Washington is destined to bring other teams joy.

It didn’t happen against Tampa Bay and St. Louis, both of which are in full sprint to 0-16, but the Detroit Lions and now the Carolina Panthers can celebrate the kindness of Daniel Snyder and the Family Dysfunctional.

Let’s start with the positives. It appears that the addition of Sherman Lewis, even though he probably just stood around this week and said what he liked and didn’t like out of the Washington offense, has had an impact. The team scored 17 points, which is just three points more than the 14.0 points they were averaging coming into the game.

Now for the bad news. Chris Samuels is hurt, and offensive line injuries are the last thing this team needs while trying to establish an offensive identity. They held a respectable eight-point lead in the fourth quarter and surrendered it just when Burgundy and Gold Nation thought there would be a bad punch line to this joke of a season thus far.

Doc Walker’s upset, which means he’ll likely melt down tomorrow on The John Thompson Show. Brian Mitchell is still hating and has lobbed the most condemning indictment of Zorn’s leadership yet—calling him "a little less" than former head coach Norv Turner.

Truth is, Zorn is the right man for this job. None of the players hate him, and he’s growing into the role of a first-time head coach. The team has super amounts of talent, capable of not only contending in the NFC East, but possibly winning it.

The problem is the pressure, public and private, that the team faces from its ownership. The fans know that Snyder is to blame for trying to mesh a West Coast passing coach with a team built to run Joe Gibbs’ “run it all day and throw just to confuse 'em” philosophy.

No one on the field is at fault. It is entirely the blundering, egotistical efforts of the ownership, which fans are all too ignorantly happy to finance.

But hey, at least you are making sorry teams around the league happy when your team comes to town. There’s no telling the kind of hope that this team has infused in Detroit and Carolina, because now, despite the win-loss record, they know that there is a team legitimately worse than they are.

At least give Snyder credit for making some fans feel good—even if they aren’t affiliated with his toy NFL franchise.