You Can't Fire The Owner

For a sports fan, nothing is more agonizing than wanting to fire not the coach, not the GM, not the quarterback or cleanup hitter or point guard … but the owner.

Nothing makes you feel more powerless, more impotent, more feeble in your rage.

Consider Sunday’s Lions-Redskins game in Detroit. In the wake of the worst loss in most ‘Skins fans’ lifetime, there’s the usual venting about firing novice head coach Jim Zorn and former first-round quarterback Jason Campbell and the defensive coordinator and the overpaid defensive tackle and all the usual suspects. But the common theme aims blame straight at the top, at owner Dan Snyder, who has done a masterful job of alienating one of pro sports’ most rabid supporters within just a decade.

Detroit fans know their pain, times four, because under William Clay Ford their dreams have been crushed for more than 40 years. They’ve tried everything, from staying home to staging protest marches to registering every possible domain-name combination of “fire,’’ “Matt’’ and “Millen.’’ But the true target of their ire, Ford, remains solidly in place, and was spotted celebrating the end of a losing streak that had spanned three seasons as if the Lions had won its first-ever Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., ‘Skins fan took an immediate beating from gloating fans of the Ravens, going to 3-0 just up the road in Baltimore at the same time the ‘Skins were being humiliated. Lost in the mocking was the fact that Baltimore fans had to have known exactly what their suffering neighbors were feeling. Even if they were too young to remember Bob Irsay (as if anyone in town would ever let them forget), they were living amidst the nightmare of the Peter Angelos regime with the Orioles.

Not only are ‘Skins and Orioles fan bases practically separated at birth – the demolition of decades of success for a storied franchise – they are largely the exact same people. Thank another despised owner, Bob Short, for abandoned D.C. baseball fans adopting the Orioles for three decades.

The list is endless, even if circumstances are so dissimilar. The Yankees and Clippers are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of success, tradition and cache, but their owners (George Steinbrenner, Donald Sterling) tend to send their respective fans into vein-throbbing tirades. The Bidwill family has managed to become the bane of the existence of Cardinals football fans in three cities over the decades: Chicago, St. Louis and Phoenix.

Any fans who have been through this, even if it was long ago, likely still feel the sting. The A’s (Charlie Finley). The Reds (Marge Schott). The Bengals (Mike Brown). The Oakland-L.A.-Oakland Raiders (Al Davis). The corporations make the feeling even worse (the Cubs and Tribune, the Knicks and Cablevision), and the coincidental collaborations worse still (the group that ran the New Jersey Nets for a while, dubbed “The Secaucus Seven’’).

What they all had in common was the feeling of helplessness they inspired in their fan bases. The only thing more pointless to yell than “Fire the owner!’’ is “Sell the team!’’

They’re untouchable. They’re made men (and women). They answer to no one. On the rarest of occasions, they answer to their commissioners – who, of course, are employees of those same owners. If they ever sell the team, they sell it when they’re good and ready, and they’re never good and ready when their paying customers are clamoring for it.

Eventually, the cry goes up, “Stop giving him your money! Hit him where it hurts!’’ Detroit fans, however, stopped giving Ford their money years ago; Sunday’s game was the lowest-attended Lions game in 20 years, and it was blacked out locally. Yet Ford still runs things, because owning an NFL team works well for him. The same goes for Angelos with the gem that is Camden Yards, to no effect on his ultimate power. Raiders games are televised slightly less than Carrot Top film festivals. As for Sterling, life is never sweeter than when he hosts the Lakers in the building they share, because it’s a guaranteed purple-and-gold sellout.

Don’t expect Snyder to be eating government cheese any time soon, either, because the groundswell of anger doesn’t guarantee that Redskins games will stop selling out before the end of the next decade, much less this season.

With Snyder and his (mostly) brethren, his team can lose. His fans can lose. His image can lose. But he’ll still win.

(FOX Network screen shot from washingtonpost.com)

A Collect Call from 'Skins Fans to Roger Goodell

We’ll be hearing from Roger Goodell again very soon, I’m sure.

If he’s serious about the league’s public image being at stake, if the concept of a code of conduct he has enforced the last few years has any meaning, if “protecting the shield’’ is more than the cliché it has become lately, then the commissioner of the NFL will be calling Redskins owner Dan Snyder into his office and demanding that he explain himself – and then slapping him with a fine, or suspension, or both, that will be heard and felt from his FedEx Field luxury box to wherever in the world any casual fan has tugged on a cap with an NFL team logo.

Because if Goodell thinks his sheriffing job stops at the wallets and livelihoods of the players, he’d better think again. For every way in which the actions of the Michael Vicks, Plaxico Burresses and Pacman Joneses reflect poorly on the NFL, multiply it by a thousand – and that’s what Snyder and his partners in crime in the Redskins’ front office are doing to their own fans, right down to their own decades-long season-ticket holders.

The stories that ran over two days in the Washington Post this week, about the depths to which the Redskins will stoop to extract and extort money from anyone with pockets, had better be flat-out wrong. Better yet, Snyder’s group of gangsters had better step up soon and respond, some way, any way. If neither happens, then the Redskins stand accused, and pretty much convicted, of being the biggest bunch of lowlifes ever to disgrace professional sports, and would be marching steadily into territory now occupied by the subprime mortgage lenders, health-care looters and Ponzi-scheme perpetrators. All eager to use anybody and everybody as their personal ATM, beholden only to themselves and accountable to nobody.

Seriously, Vick has to grovel and beg for his career in front of Goodell, but Snyder gets another slap on the back at the next owners’ meeting?

Go ahead, say it. Killing dogs is worse than scamming your own customers, even worse than suing them for pleading for relief from your obscenely-exorbitant ticket packages when the worldwide economy hits home for them. It’s a strong argument, and you don’t have to belong to PETA to buy it.

You can make that case – as long as you’re not one of the Redskins ticket-holders driven into bankruptcy and near destitution by one of the team’s breach-of-contract suits, while the team repossessed their tickets and re-sells them, often with the same brokers used by the team to re-sell other tickets at scalpers’ prices to opposing team’s fans while their own fans wonder why they can never get their hands on the seats they want.

If you were the fan (there was more than one) in the Post story who the team counsel called a liar … or the fan who was ridiculed because he was a mortgage broker who dared ask for a break on his tickets … or the fan who holds evidence that the team altered his ticket application to tie him into a long-term deal … or any of the fans who sat home on the Monday before Election Day last year and watched Steelers fans take over FedEx Field … even if all you did was read that the team’s various spokesmen (because Snyder couldn’t be bothered to comment on any of it) shrugged off all the accusations and complaints and sorrowful tales because they represented such a small fraction of the ticket-buying public … are you really more angry at Plaxico Burress?

Do Chris Henry’s bouts with the law enrage you more than the debt collectors who ring your phone off the hook because you lost a $66,000 judgment over tickets for the team you rooted for since before the previous stadium was named after RFK?

There’s criminal conduct, and Vick and Co. are surely guilty and are certainly serving their punishment, whether they’ve actually finished their jail terms or not. Then there are criminal-level breaches of trust against the people on whom your business relies, who literally make you rich and pay your bills and swallow your pitches about how they’re not just buying a superior product, but the integrity and credibility that hold it together.

Unless and until the Redskins offer proof to the contrary, they’re worse than the lenders who suckered eager homebuyers into houses they couldn’t afford. Even at their lowest, they never followed up on evicting the owners by suing them for their mortgage balances. When you fall behind payments for your car, or furniture, or wedding ring or plasma TV, do you get hauled into court after you get your stuff repossessed?

Hardly, if ever. Many teams the Post reached, in the NFL and other sports, claimed they don’t pull that on their struggling ticketholders, either. This is neither the NFL’s rule, nor policy, nor general practice. If you’re broke and can't pay any more, these team’s reasoning goes, it takes your tickets away. It doesn’t try to then drain you dry until you can’t buy so much as a movie ticket afterward.

The Redskins are different.

But even the Redskins wouldn’t try that if the commissioner of the sport truly was interested in safeguarding the good of the game for all the participants, not just the 32 billionaire entities who pay his salary.

So if Goodell doesn’t temporarily put aside his crusade against players who accidentally shoot themselves and step in on this, on behalf of Washington’s fans, and the fans of the entire NFL, then he isn’t worth the paper his contract is printed on.

He might as well join his partner atop the hierarchy of his league, the nouveau-riche owner of one of the most storied, legendary and profitable franchises in the sport’s history – and spit on the customers below.

(Photos: Goodell, Boston Herald; Snyder, slate.com)