Part of being a true fan of a team involves a stubborn refusal to understand that the other team has fans of its own who care about their team as much as you care about yours. Impossible! The other team is nothing more than Opponent. When you are watching on Sunday afternoon, all you want to know is: How do we kill these guys? Whom do we boo? Die, humans wearing different colors than the colors to which I have grown accustomed to cheering!
We are here to help. With a slight nod to Drew Magary’s Why Your Team Sucks series, we want to give you three people to scream at on the television every Sunday, peppering Cheetos flecks in every direction. The Giants play the Washington Redskins at Giants Stadium at 4:15 p.m. on Sunday. Here’s whom to boo on the Redskins.
Daniel Snyder: If you go by on-the-field success, Snyder is a very bad owner. He’s spent boatloads of money on guys who don’t deserve boatloads of money (Deion Sanders, Jesse Armstead) and generally kept the Redskins from being any good under his watch. In one sense, this is great; there are too many good teams in the NFC East already, so it’s nice that one of them is doing its part to balance things out a bit. The problem is that despite not winning on the field, Snyder’s Redskins are incredibly profitable. The Redskins are the second-most-valuable franchise in the NFL, giving hope to any other billionaire looking to buy a team as a fun little side project. Also: He used to be an associate of Tom Cruise.
Albert Haynesworth: Speaking of Snyder spending lots of money on guys who don’t deserve it! Haynesworth got a seven-year, $100 million contract this winter, $41 million of which is guaranteed. For that, the Redskins get a guy who’s played in more than fourteen games exactly once in his seven-year career and who earned an unprecedented five-game suspension in 2006 for stomping on the head of Cowboys center Andre Gurode. Let’s go to the videotape!
Jason Campbell: Campbell’s an okay-enough quarterback, and some of his numbers aren’t really drastically different than Eli Manning’s. (Campbell has a higher rating and threw for a big seven more yards than Eli did last year.) But he’s never thrown more than thirteen touchdown passes in a season, and he’s never played in a playoff game. We learned this in an AP article about, basically, how this is Campbell’s last chance to prove he’s worth keeping. If we were Redskins fans, that article would scare us very much. There are now five quarterbacks in the four-team NFC East, and the Giants must see to it that Campbell doesn’t get it in his head that he’s anything but the worst of the bunch.