Despite spending millions, Snyder, Redskins have little to show for it

It's all about him now. Whether Dan Snyder secretly wanted this when he bought the Washington Redskins a decade ago is less intriguing a question than why it took so long to become clear, but then, there were so many distractions along the way. There was so much free-agent cash thrown about, year after year, and the rise and fall of Steve Spurrier, and the return of Joe Gibbs, and the slew of forgettable quarterbacks, and the strange hiring of Jim Zorn -- so many high-drama ideas gone wrong -- that it was hard to cut through and see that maybe this was the real plan all along.

How else to explain it? Billionaires do what they want. Big money allows the owner of a professional sports team to fade into the background, or be a gushing fanboy or a meddlesome presence, but none of those roles occur by accident. In essence, this is the realization that dawned upon the team faithful -- the whole Washington region, really -- over the last few weeks.

The Redskins are 2-5 coming out of their bye week and, yes, there's still chatter about Zorn's ability and the offensive line's failures and quarterback Jason Campbell's leadership. But this season's debacle has taken on a decidedly different feel, as if everyone simultaneously, sadly, realized that all that football stuff was secondary. Every game is shaping up as a referendum on Snyder. The team's most important player is a guy in a business suit.

"Most people think the owner's an idiot," said Phil Fenty, 69, whose sportswear store has been a Washington fixture for 25 years, and whose son, Adrian, happens to be the mayor of Washington D.C. "And that's putting it mildly."

Indeed, instead of tamping down the vitriol, the Redskins bye week only seemed to fuel further disgusted chatter about fan boycotts, about lifetime supporters turning in season tickets, about Internet-fueled plans for some kind of anti-Snyder demonstration for the Nov. 15 home game against Denver. The heat has grown so constant and so intense that Snyder, veering from his no-interview policy during the season, orchestrated an impromptu mea culpa on Tuesday, apologizing to the fans with a royal we. "We just feel terrible," he said of the team's poor play. "We're disappointed and we're embarrassed."

And he misread his audience completely. The outrage toward Snyder goes well beyond losing; it has been fired and fed by management moves that any sentient being would recognize as public-relations minefields. First, there was the Washington Post's September revelation that the team had been taking an usually hard line against defaulting season-ticket holders, suing 125 of them, many recession-strapped, despite the team's legendarily long waiting list. A month later, the team hired retired offensive coordinator Sherman Lewis -- fresh from calling bingo numbers in Michigan -- to send Zorn a devastating vote of no-confidence, and soon relieved the head coach of his play-calling duties.

"The things he's done in the past, people sort of tolerated, but what he did with Zorn, hanging him out to dry like that? That was just plain cruel," Fenty said Thursday. "Either fire the guy ... but you don't let him hang out there like that."

Then, during the team's hapless Monday night loss to Philadelphia on Oct. 26, FedEx field personnel confiscated any signs from people entering the stadium -- many of them ripping Snyder, but one held by a woman sending a supportive message to her husband fighting in Afghanistan. The takeaway was irresistible: A near-caricature of an owner so tin-eared, hard-hearted and, well, dumb, that he all but begged to be ripped. On Wednesday, former Redskins running back and lifelong loose cannon John Riggins went on Showtime's Inside the NFL, verbally soaked Snyder with gasoline and lit a match.

"This is a bad guy that owns this team. I'll just tell you that up front: Bad guy," Riggins said. And, he added for good measure, "Let me put it to you this way ... this person's heart is dark."

Never mind that, when pressed, Riggins had nothing to back up such a statement. Never mind, too, that the next day Redskins defensive coordinator Greg Blache broke his media boycott to defend his boss, calling Riggins' words "vicious," and Snyder "generous" and "kind."