For my entire conscious life, being a fan of the team known sequentially as the Redskins, the Washington Football Team, or the Commanders was cosmic punishment.
Being a supporter of this team meant meditating on what communal sin or inner flaw one’s investment of time and emotion was paying for. Each failed season raised the inevitable questions of what have we done to deserve this and why are we doing this to ourselves, for which there was never a shortage of possible answers. A year of John Beck as starting quarterback, a half-decade with a lesser Gruden brother as head coach, a high-stakes gamble on the incompetent Dwayne Haskins, who is literally dead now — none of this could be without meaning.
Perhaps the football gods were taxing us for the sheer immorality and waste of the federal government and the miasma of open graft and status-seeking wafting from our team’s fetid home swamp. Idiots blamed the alleged racism of “Redskins,” as if the team hadn’t won three Super Bowls and become the second-most valuable franchise in the league under that wrongly discarded name. Still, it is certainly interesting that the last good Skins season was in 1991, meaning America and the football team of its capital have declined in tandem — maybe they suck because we all suck. Sometimes I think the punishment is self-reflexive and self-imposed, and that the original error was supporting this team in the first place. Anyone stupid enough to root for them surely deserved to suffer. Or maybe we’d grown perversely fond of the misery they caused us.
This latest season of hallucinatory success, which somehow ended with us in the conference championship game, marked the first 12-win campaign for the team since former President George H.W. Bush’s administration. The Philadelphia Eagles savaged us with a spot in the Super Bowl on the line, but not before these ‘Ders exhibited many of the fine attributes that vaulted them into the NFL’s final four after last year’s dismal 4-13 effort. “Scary” Terry McLaurin outsprinted the entire Eagles secondary on a dazzling second-quarter touchdown that brought us within two points of our divisional rivals. In the second half, with victory already out of reach, linebacker Frankie Luvu attempted to vault over the Philly offense and strangle quarterback Jalen Hurts on three straight plays, an aerial ballet of such violence, persistence, creativity, and illegality that a referee announced he’d have to award a touchdown to the Eagles if Luvu launched himself a fourth time. No one among the football obsessives I know had ever seen a player earn such an official warning. Even in defeat, these Commanders were made of special stuff.
They did things this season that none of us had ever seen our team do before, including a Hail Mary victory in a must-win game against the Bears, a series of increasingly gutsy comebacks against teams both better and worse, and the maintenance of a once-fictitious 75% fourth-down conversion rate. After three decades of mediocrity and disgrace, years in which the fandom largely died or defected and ownership ripped over 20,000 seats out of our decrepit concrete pile of a stadium in Landover, Maryland, we were treated to events far beyond our frame of reference as followers of a loser.
Although some credit must go to gutsy first-year coach Dan Quinn, the true author of these triumphs is 24-year-old Jayden Daniels, a Heisman Trophy winner from LSU, a film-room workaholic, and a dead-eyed winner. At no point in this season did the rookie and second-overall draft pick seem overmatched or nervous. It was defenses who feared him: Week after week, he escaped the narrow chutes of the collapsing pocket and vanished into the defensive backfield or found cutting receivers while running sideways and backward. His targets were no longer no-names by season’s end — thanks to Daniels, NFL beat writers were forced to learn how to spell “Olamide Zacchaeus.” A sense of otherworldly calm radiated from the young quarterback. Over time, Daniels’s steely certainty in victory spread to the whole team and to a fanbase conditioned to distrust their own happiness, along with anything or anyone that had caused it.
‘Ders fans have had many candidates for football messiah over the years, beginning with Dan Snyder, the ambitious young new owner, a lifelong Redskins fan, who tried to buy his way to a Super Bowl during a 1999 free agent binge. He failed at that and everything else he did as owner. Then there was Joe Gibbs’s bizarre yet somewhat successful return to coaching, an era defined more by the murder of star safety Sean Taylor than by anything that happened on the field. Our last great would-be rescuer was Robert Griffin III, whose magical feet outpaced his slow football brain and whose knee exploded at the climax of his one and only playoff start.
In the decade after Griffin, Snyder dragged fans through a one-way march to oblivion. The micromanaging owner could never relinquish on-field control over the club he had ruined, and by the late 2010s, he’d set his blackening heart on the complete destruction of the object of his love. Synder executed the “retirement” of the Redskins name amid the 2020 kulturkampf in the most rushed and cynical way imaginable, with the owner believing he could use his supposedly newfound racial enlightenment as proof he deserved billions of public dollars for a new stadium. His performance of obeisance was too transparent and pathetic to fool anyone. After having been accused of sexual harassment and a range of fraud-adjacent corporate behaviors, the league cornered Snyder into a $6 billion sale of the team before the 2023 season. Thanks to a quarter-century of losing seasons, emptying grandstands, and Snyderian psycho-drama, the Skins trio of Super Bowl victories from the 80s and 90s were accomplishments so ancient that it became embarrassing to take any comfort in them.
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The new owner, private equity honcho Josh Harris, had the great virtue of not being Snyder. Yet by the time he took over, many fans, especially ones who had long ago left the Washington metro area, had gotten used to asking themselves why they still cared — why we trudged out to bars on autumn Sundays to root for a lousy team representing a city we’d never live in again and why we’d staked anything of ourselves on something that could never bring us joy. In my case, the answers were sentimental. The team might have changed its name twice and revealed how little it cared about much of anything, but there was no erasing the facts of my life and the place that the former Redskins would always have within my own particular, unchanging substance. There must be some solidity to existence, and while God is numinous and often unseeable, the football team of your youth will play a minimum of 17 games a season, right here in physical reality. My friends and family and I kept watching the ‘Ders in a weekly reenactment of a child-like hope, the shielding of a pure feeling that shouldn’t be easily surrendered even when you’re sure it’s a lie.
Then came Daniels. Hope isn’t a lie anymore. For the first time in decades, Skins fandom is something more than a trial of character or an oblique way of making peace with the immovable realities of life. For the first time in forever, we’re actually having fun.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.