Redskins owner Daniel Snyder screws up again. Are you surprised?

Jay Gruden, welcome to the club. 

Gruden is the latest in a long line of Redskins coaches to be hired and fired by owner Daniel Snyder. They all have something in common. Starting with Terry Robiskie, who replaced the departed Norv Turner on an interim basis in 2000, no coach brought on by Snyder has had a winning record at the end of his tenure. Only Marty Schottenheimer, who coached the team to an 8-8 record in his only season, escaped Washington without a losing mark.

Steve Spurrier, Jim Zorn, Mike Shanahan, Gruden and even the legendary Joe Gibbs could not successfully alter the direction of the franchise. That makes sense, because the biggest impediment to success in D.C. remains Snyder himself.

Washington’s descent into dysfunction can be traced back to the owner, who desperately wants to build a winner but doesn’t know how to go about it. He can’t help himself when it comes to meddling with football decisions. That’s how the winless Redskins (0-5), who play at the winless Dolphins (0-5) in Week 6, ended up with this season with Dwayne Haskins, their 2019 first-round pick. Snyder reportedly wanted the Ohio State quarterback, but the coaching did not.

None of this is meddling is anything new, of course. When Snyder bought the team in 1999, he immediately set about collecting big-name, past-their-prime veterans like he was amassing a trading card collection. Bruce Smith and Deion Sanders were the first wave, and though they flopped, especially Sanders, Snyder didn’t learn his lesson. He continued doling out big money to the likes of Albert Haynesworth, Jeff George, Adam Archuleta and Jeremiah Trotter, to name a few. None of them worked out, and Haynesworth in particular was an unmitigated disaster.

Decades of mismanagement has left a once-loyal fan base apathetic. Patriots fans took over FedEx Field to such an extent in Week 5 that even normally stoic Bill Belichick was amused about New England's de facto home game.

Can you blame Redskins fans for staying away? The stadium is regarded as one of the NFL’s worst, in a terrible location, and the product is wretched. What’s more, Snyder and team president Bruce Allen seem either unaware that this is the case or unwilling to acknowledge that it is.

Allen went so far as to say that the organization’s culture was “actually damn good” after Gruden was let go. For what it’s worth, Gruden was summoned to the team facility at 5 a.m. to be given his walking papers. He could have been fired immediately after the game Sunday, but instead Snyder and Allen let him twist in the wind for several hours, with at least one player, running back Chris Thompson, getting emotional talking about his doomed coach after the game.

Sure seems like a “damn good” culture at work.

Grant Paulsen, who covers the Redskins in radio, on television and in print in D.C., has a grim evaluation of the team's owner and coaching search. “If you’re going to coach for Washington," he told me, "you’re working for an owner with a low popularity rating who has proven he cannot win. You’re working for a team president at this point who has not only had a lot of failure on the field, but debacles and embarrassment off it, and controversies and turmoil as well.”

Paulsen made it clear that while the buck stops with Snyder, Allen is also a major issue, saying, “He’s going on a 10-year run here where he’s been one of the most ineffective front office executives in all of sports, and it doesn’t seem like the run’s coming to an end.”  The man least deserving of his current job also seems the least likely to lose it.

Steelers coach Mike Tomlin is rumored to be on Washington’s radar, but even if he somehow ended up with the Redskins via trade, why would anyone expect the owner to step aside and let one of the league’s most successful coaches do his thing? It's simply not in the football DNA of Allen and Snyder to step aside.

Expect the Redskins to make an expensive, splashy hire. Then the Snyder-Allen cycle will probably repeat itself: losing followed by turmoil. "...whoever comes here at this juncture is going to leave here worse off than they got here,” Paulsen believes.

As long as Daniel Snyder owns the team, the more things change, the more they stay the same.