Sunday, October 18, 2009

The Chefs, the Skins and Amarillo Slim (the use of "Chefs" was intentional)

Amarillo Slim, who is considered the world's greatest proposition gambler, once said "You can shear a sheep 100 times, but you can only skin it once". For those of you who aren't knowledgable about the world of gambling and cons, that basically means you can play a sucker for some of his money often, but you can only bankrupt him once.

Here in the D.C. area, Dan Snyder has his hunting knife out and is starting to skin Redskin fans. After ten years of finding every possible way to reach into Redskins fans' pockets and pull out a dollar, Snyder is down to what may be his final con, putting the worst Redskins team in decades on the field and asking fans to continue to pay for admission to FedEx Field.

I won't list out all the scams Snyder has pulled over the years, Dave McKenna of the Washington City Paper is making a career of doing that. And, most everyone in the area read the series of articles a few weeks back in the Washington Post about ticket brokers getting first shot at tickets from the Redskins ticket office and the team filing suit against premium seat ticket holders who broke their multi-season contracts. But, none of Snyder's stunts compare to the fact Snyder continues to fancy himself a football operations expert after 10 years of Redskins mediocrity or worse and that he wants Redskins fans to believe it.

Finally, Redskins fans are seeing the light and realizing they are getting skinned. There are more and more empty seats at Fed Up...I mean...FedEx Field and fan reaction in the media outlets is one of disgust. Of course, we won't know for sure if the skinning is complete until those empty seats at FedEx Field are being driven by unsold tickets and not just no shows. Snyder's skinning of the Redskins fan base will be complete when the fans have turned the tide and put some pain in Snyder's pocket the way he has done the fans' pockets the last ten years.

Today's Redskins loss to the Chiefs continues the Redskins trend of helping teams in the midst of losing streaks break them. A couple of weeks back, I was in Missouri the day after the Chiefs got blasted by the Philadelphia Eagles 34-14. I gave the two sports radio stations in Kansas City a long listen that day while I was driving from Columbia to K.C. It was amazing how similar the calls into the station were to the calls received by the sports radio stations here in the D.C. area. There were the recurring themes in the calls of how the team had no direction, no talent and no hope. A common comment that day was "even Lions won yesterday" (the Lions had defeated the Redskins). For a while, I debated calling one of the stations to make a point I thought all those Chiefs fans were missing, at least they had a real football executive running the team since the Chiefs'owners had hired Scott Pioli away from the New England Patriots during the offseason. That alone puts the Chiefs one giant step ahead of the Redskins. Hell, today's game puts them two steps ahead of the Redskins.
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I'm thinking it's about time the Redskins were the subject of a commerical like this one that once used the Chiefs...I mean the Chefs...as the punchline.

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