Several weeks ago, as I was watching the John Beck-led Washington Redskins get shut out by the Buffalo Bills (the franchise against which the Redskins captured their last Super Bowl title), a friend of mine put his head in his hands and muttered, “Why are the Redskins such an embarrassment?”

Before the weekly finger-pointing and scapegoating that Redskins fans have come to know as supporting their team began, I interjected the following theory, which to my knowledge has not yet been mentioned but seems rather obvious: the Redskins’ struggles are due to the fact that the franchise is cursed.

Much like the Boston Red Sox were cursed for 86 years for trading a player that would go down as one of the greatest to ever swing a bat, the Redskins are cursed for a mishandled personnel situation that gripped the city in the mid-1990s.

The player they mishandled, as irony would have it, is far from one of the greatest to ever put his hands under center, but nevertheless his brief tenure in Washington set the tone for franchise’s struggles in the years since.

It is the reason why over the past 17 seasons the Redskins have gone from one of the most respected franchises in the NFL to a dependable punchline for uncreative sports writers.

In short, the Redskins are an annual embarrassment because of the Curse of Heath Shuler.

Now, before I continue, I should disclose that I am not a superstitious individual, nor am I predisposed to foment belief in the supernatural, but there comes a time when fans of a perennially maligned sports franchise can no longer look to logic and reason to explain sustained and sometimes incomprehensible athletic ineptitude.

I’m not suggesting Heath Shuler placed a hex on the franchise that requires some sort of voodoo remedy, but the Shuler debacle was the beginning of the dark period in which Redskins football is mired.

On the field, the team’s primary problem from the Norv Turner era to the return of Joe Gibbs years to the current administration headed by the Shanahans is a simple personnel one: the team has lacked a reliable quarterback.

Ever since Mark Rypien walked out RFK Stadium for the last time while sporting the burgundy and gold, the franchise has failed to put a player under center capable of meeting the high standard set by Redskins quarterbacks of yore. Since 1993, the Redskins have started 18 different quarterbacks, only two of whom—Gus Frerotte and Brad Johnson—made the Pro Bowl while wearing a Redskins uniform.

This is a significant problem, because as any casual fan can tell you, the NFL is a quarterback-centric league. The one characteristic every NFL dynasty and consistently winning team over the last 15 years has possessed is a quarterback in whom fans and coaches can place their trust.

More importantly—and the factor that separates the Redskins' struggles from the other NFL franchises that have been without a great quarterback during this same time period—there always seems to be a quarterback controversy brewing in the nation’s capitol, leaving fans and coaches unsure of whom to support and whom to belittle. 

All of this can be traced back to Shuler, who was tabbed as the player that would sustain the Redskins' success in the wake of Joe Gibbs’ first retirement from professional football.

Shuler was the Redskins No. 1 draft pick in 1994. He was chosen third overall with the Redskins' highest draft pick in 30 years, and he was the first Redskins quarterback to be taken in the first round of the NFL draft since Norm Snead in 1961.

He was, at the time, viewed as close to a can’t-miss prospect as is possible. In two years as a starter at the University of Tennessee, Shuler broke every meaningful passing record at the school and finished second in voting for the 1993 Heisman Trophy.

Scouts drooled over potential and foresaw great things for the young man from Appalachia, who, as irony would have it, grew up watching Redskins games—according to an interview Shuler gave to the St. Petersburg Times in 1994, the Redskins were the only team that received television coverage in his hometown of Bryson City, N.C.

The fact that a western North Carolinian boy growing up in the 1970s got exposed to the Washington Redskins illustrates how far the franchise’s influence stretched at the time of Shuler’s entrance to the league, a level of influence that has been diminished over the past two decades by NFL expansion into more southern cities and the franchise's chronic under-performance.

But back in 1994, the Redskins were more than just the favorite team in the Washington. Former owner George Preston Marshall, who brought the team to this region in 1937 and came up with the politically incorrect name Redskins, christened his franchise the team of the South, and that designation became more than just a moniker.

Prior to the urban renovation and influx of wealth Washington has experienced over the past two decades, the district was viewed as just another Southern town. Until the Atlanta Falcons joined the NFL in 1965, Washington was the most Southern town in the Eastern Time zone with a legitimate professional football team.

As a result, the Redskins became a regional team almost by default, the one professional franchise that southern football fans, who devoted the majority of their energy toward college football, could get behind.

Shuler’s personal familiarity with the Redskins and the fact that he was a good old southern boy made it seem more appropriate that he don a Redskins uniform and become the face of a franchise that at the time was saying goodbye to Art Monk, Earnest Byner and Charles Mann—stalwarts from the previous dynasty and favorites among fans.

It seemed like destiny, a match made in football heaven, and the excitement upon his arrival was palpable.

Shuler drew the ire of the fans who were initially excited at his arrival when a contract dispute caused him to miss the first 13 days of training camp. It was initially reported that Shuler was holding out for more money, but Shuler later denied that report, saying the delay was caused by NFL Players Association and league officials who were trying to work out the details of the contract.

Regardless of the cause, Shuler ended up receiving an eight-year, $19.25 million contract, the most lucrative contract ever received by an NFL rookie and one that made Shuler the highest-paid Redskin in franchise history.

This is where Redskins management made their first misstep. Whether management should have offered Shuler such a gaudy contract is up for debate, but they certainly never should have allowed him to hold out for a significant period of time.

Great sports franchises are not beholden to unproven players. The New York Yankees, the New England Patriots and the Boston Celtics, to name a few, do not let rookies dictate the terms of negotiations. And by doing just that, the Redskins came across as weak and desperate.

They in no way resembled a team that was just two years removed from a Super Bowl title. General manager Charley Casserly would have been better off trading Shuler or the draft pick they used to take him for a group of less-touted but still highly skilled players than to get caught up in a holdout that always hung like a shadow over Shuler’s time in Washington.

His contract only raised the bar on expectations for his performance and got some fans ready to boo him the second he started to under-perform.

Nevertheless, that is how the situation unfolded, and the time Shuler missed in training camp obviously worked as a setback.

As a result, first-year head coach Norv Turner was reluctant to name Shuler as the team’s starting quarterback going into Week 1, so he instead employed a strategy that can at best be described as questionable, and at worst can be labeled inspired lunacy.

Turner decided journeymen John Friesz would start the 1994 season opener against the Seattle Seahawks, but Shuler would share snaps with him. Essentially, the plan was to split quarterbacking duties between the two players.

Fans of professional football can tell you that franchises typically deal with rookie quarterbacks in one of two ways: They throw the player into the deep end (a la Peyton Manning, letting him start every game and learn from his inevitable mistakes), or they sit him until he’s more developed (a la Tom Brady).

The Heath Shuler situation is the only one that I can recall in which the coach essentially consciously planned to play a game with two quarterbacks.

I’ll spare you from going to deep into X and O analysis of why this is a poor game plan, but suffice it to say consistency and routine is a key factor for success in football, and deciding to play two different quarterbacks with two different throwing motions, different sets of strengths of weaknesses, etc. is not a wise move. It also strikes me as classic Norv Turner—a man whose genial, non-confrontational demeanor has always made him better suited for a coordinator role.

To be continued...