Friend of the Junkies John Feinstein of the Washington Post was fighting a cold when he joined the guys on Friday morning, but even that couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm on a day that the Daniel Snyder era is beginning to end.
“I think we all agree on this: anybody would be an improvement on Dan Snyder. If my cat owned the team, it’d be an improvement – and good for me because he’d have a lot of money!” Feinstein joked. “But this is a day that people in DC have been waiting for for a long time, as you well know. I was very skeptical it would actually happen, and I’m still not completely sold it will happen.”
Feinstein harkened back to 2004 when MLB announced the Expos were moving to DC and the skepticism of some, noting he’ll believe this is happening once it actually comes to fruition in full.
“When the owners actually vote, and I expect they’ll vote 31-0, then I’ll believe it,” Feinstein said. “I think this is going to be the bid, but I think Snyder is keeping it open just in case.”
So assuming that, what is the first thing Josh Harris and the new ownership should do?
“The first thing I’d do from a fan perspective is change the name, to put everything related to Snyder behind me,” Feinstein said. “It wasn’t a good name to begin with, and you can do that very simply, just to send a message to the fans. Then I would look very carefully, have people go through the off-field personnel and see who they want to keep, and look at what kind of people they need to bring in to change the mentality of the franchise.”
Feinstein wouldn’t get rid of Ron Rivera right away, but “everything else can start from scratch” – including reaching out to local media, as he noted that Dan Snyder “has been the invisible man for years now.”
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And the problem, Feinstein says, is that even as almost everybody agrees this is a good day because Snyder’s ownership tenure was a disaster, the man himself will never take any fault, and has six billion reasons why.
“Not at all – this is everybody else’s fault. Even the one interview Tanya did with Adam Schefter, he asked about the difficulty of being co-CEO, and she blamed the media. The media didn’t do anything but report what they did,” Feinstein said. “I’ve known a lot of guys who have spent their lives surrounded by people who tell them they’re never wrong. Snyder is one of those guys; he surrounded himself with yes-men, and if they ever stopped saying yes, he’d fire them. And now, he’s going to say, ‘I walked away with $6 billion, did I do anything wrong?’”
Even as, Feinstein says, the new ownership quickly opens the door to the possibility of a new stadium, one that wasn’t feasible as recently as this week because of Snyder’s personality.
“These governments don’t want to do business with Dan Snyder because of his reputation and who he has been,” Feinstein said. “I think most of them think they’re going to get screwed if they go into business with Dan Snyder, because that’s been his M.O. in life. Now with a new owner, a lot of these governments would love to have the team – but I think they should do whatever they have to do with the DC government and get it done at RFK.”
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