“Welcome in to the Hoffman Show on a day - April 13th, 2023 - that you will likely remember for the rest of your life.”
The opening words of Craig Hoffman just after 4 p.m. on The Team 980, hours after news broke that Daniel Snyder is selling the Washington Commanders for just over $6 billion to a group led by Sixers and Devils co-owner Josh Harris.
It has been a day of celebration for many of the hosts on 106.7 The Fan and The Team 980, and here’s a snippet of Hoffman’s opening monologue on the day the Daniel Snyder era began to end:
“After 24 years, nearly a quarter century, and more than a quarter of this franchise’s rich history, Dan Snyder is on the verge of being gone. As first reported by Sportico, Snyder has agreed in principle to sell the Washington Commanders for $6 billion to a group headed by Josh Harris that also includes Mitchell Rales and Magic Johnson.
He is undoubtedly the worst sports owner in the history of this town. He is probably the worst owner in the history of the NFL. He’s one of the 10 worst sports owners in sports history and a quick search of the internet has him in the consensus Top 5.
“Worst” here is multi-faceted. It is on-the-field, off-the-field, and very off-the-field. On the field is obvious. Washington has mostly stunk during Snyder’s tenure and much of that lack of success is directly attributable to Daniel M. Snyder. Almost immediately it started with Charley Casserley’s departure; to the big name signings that failed miserably, to coaching carousel of failure…that cycle merely repeated endlessly outside the Joe Gibbs 2.0 era. Norv, Marty, Spurrier, Zorn…you know the drill.
By the 2010’s, he found a different way to interfere, which shaped his second decade of ownership on the field: personally screwing up the quarterback position. First it was Donovan McNabb. Then, it was giving up an unheard of return for the No. 2 pick to take Robert Griffin III – and then empowering him to be the most powerful person in the franchise instead of the two-time Super Bowl winning coach he had hired to run the football operation.
In doing so, he alienated a future Top 5 coach in the league in his son – Mike and Kyle Shanahan, if you haven’t put it together – and turned the most magical, successful year of his ownership into something we look back on as the start of a disaster.
Kirk Cousins was there to save it, and yet Dan messed that up. While Bruce Allen was the one playing hard ball, Dan was the owner. He could’ve stepped in and gotten a deal done. He didn’t. Kirk walked as soon as he could. The Alex Smith trade was made from the top, whether it be Bruce or Dan, without real consult of the football folks. And while Alex’s injury turned the tide of the franchise that no one saw coming, no one thought it was a smart move at the time of the deal, and there was a clear ceiling that was below the stated goal of returning to glory even if he had never been hurt.
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It was Dan who drafted Dwayne Haskins. I know this for a fact. He repeated the same mistakes he did with Griffin, and if that wasn’t enough, a lot of folks will tell you he’s repeated the same mistakes with Chase Young: a non-quarterback and much less controversial pick at the time, but someone who perhaps was given too much leeway and in turn might feel exempt from the larger culture many good football people have tried to build.
That enough would make today something worth celebrating. That track record alone, of mediocrity at best and debacle at worst, and the uncanny ability to cycle through it in a variety of different ways, is reason to be happy that Dan is no longer running the franchise. But to be honest, that’s just the surface. That’s the frustrating, but non-embarrassing stuff…nevertheless, the truly dark lies off the field.”
Hoffman then went into a laundry list of off-the-field transgressions, malfeasance, and shenanigans that would make a hardened criminal blush, before finishing off with this:
“Daniel Snyder ruined something he loved. To truly love something is to do what’s best for it, not what’s best for you, yet at every turn Dan Snyder did what Dan Snyder wanted, and Dan Snyder is very, very bad at business. I don’t think it takes psychiatrist to know there’s some inner child stuff going on with Dan when it comes to this team. A kid who felt ostracized and had a hard time connecting with people could now have any of his heroes pick up the phone because he owned the team. Better yet, he got to be in charge, and have power.
Dan loved that he could have players, coaches, and other owners on his yacht. He loved being the man. That has to be part of why he kept his circle so small. Anyone who could pop the bubble that he wasn’t actually the man, but instead an extremely problematic failure wasn’t allowed in the bubble.
Someone told me recently that Dan was shown financial figures in the last few years of just how bad things were for the franchise and he threw a fit…couldn’t believe them. People had been scared to tell him because he’s so combative and lived in such an alternate reality, that these figures, of the team he owned, were new to him, and yet despite all the obvious evidence, hard for him to believe.
It just didn’t have to be this way. If Dan Snyder had an ounce of humility to him and tried to hire people who were good at the jobs he hired them for, if he had treated people with respect, if he had the dignity to look at himself, see the early failures that so many owners have, and make the corrections instead of repeating the same mistakes…we may not be here today.
But we are, and we’re here with a litany of tragedies, big and small, in our wake. Twenty-four years of Washington football all but wasted, careers of players, coaches, and staff forever altered for the worse, relationships with all-time great soured to the point of no return – all of it because no one had the foresight to think that a 34-year-old businessman with little track record of success and nowhere close to the funds to buy the team might not have been such a good idea.
It didn’t have to be this way. But it was. And now, it’s over. It’s over DC. Dan Snyder has agreed to sell the Washington Commanders. The nightmare is finally over.”
Take a listen above to hear it all from Hoffman himself, or see the live video here from Craig's YouTube channel:
Follow The Hoffman Show on Twitter: @CraigHoffman & @HoffmanShow
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