Guide to the Washington Redskins Football Team as of Whenever I Posted This

My thoughts on the state of the Washington Redskins professional American football team have been sliding into a miasmatic meditation on the value of democracy in management. It is a somewhat boring line of thought, but somehow I feel it’s an incredibly important one.

Former New Orleans Saints head coach Jim Haslett has just been hired as the new defensive coordinator for the Washington Redskins professional American football team. I can’t say I have an opinion one way or another about his skills with defensive game planning and strategy, other than the fact that he’s announced that the team will switch to a 3-4 formation for their base defensive front, which I consider to be a good idea considering the relative strengths of their current defensive personnel. I do have a very high regard for his legendary work ethic, which I only know about because of his quote-trading dust-up with former Redskins coach Steve Spurrier. Apparently Haslett used to come to work at 4:30 every morning. And Steve Spurrier didn’t.

Newly hired Redskins coach Mike Shanahan also has a similar track record of a workaholic/perfectionist’s attention to detail.

All of which leads me to feel somewhat confident about the future of the Washington Redskins professional American football team in the same way that I feel confident about Barack Obama’s stewardship of the country. Which is to say: I view it as an instantaneous improvement over the previous regime, based on nothing more than a public acknowledgment that attention to detail is important. I don’t want to go political here, so let me say that this opinion of Obama as improvement over Bush is based largely on a 10/19/05 speech given by former Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson in reference to the foreign policy decision-making process in the Bush White House. Which I realize is a political thing.

But: the gist I got out of that speech, in which Wilkerson labels a policy-stting alliance between Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld as a “cabal,” is remnants of a non-politicized criticism of the Bush White House as an administrative entity. My father works at a fairly high-ranking government position. He’s about as far as one can get in the government without being either a member of the military or a political appointment. He’s not “connected” to anything more scintillating than, say (not really, but I don't want a blog post to bite him in the ass), the policy structure of our nation’s Institute of Standards and Technology, but he does feel the ebb and flow of organizational acumen within our nation’s bureaucracy. The government is a huge operation, and regardless of political viewpoints, some bosses are more effective than others at running it. A shitty Democrat-run administration is just as shitty as a shitty Republican-run administration in the minute ways that make the difference between and efficient work environment and an inefficient one. Government workers often (always) have their hands tied by policy, but their input into the creation of that policy, and the day-to-day administration of their efforts to enact it are open to huge swings in value according to leadership in a way that has very little to do with where that leadership lands ideologically on the political spectrum. The bigger concern is whether current leadership got their job from political backstabbing and behind-the-scenes glad-handing or because they have arrived at their current post through something resembling a meritocracy.

This is the aspect of Wilkerson’s speech that sticks with me the most. It’s not that Cheney and Rumsfeld were evil war-bent hellhounds (moot), it’s that they were bad bosses who used fear, backchannels, and intimidation to support their own assumptions and decisions rather than listening to people who disagreed with them and incorporating those opinions into contingencies. And this guy Larry Wilkerson disagreed with them on several points, and even though they were not his direct chain-of-command bosses, they superceded him and his work within the organizational structure of the White House and as a result he felt like all of his hard work was useless. Regardless of whether his opinions of Iraq War/Dimplomacy strategy were ultimately correct, this much is a fact: he was superceded, and he felt frustrated and angry about it. The Bush administration was, in effect, a shitty boss.

I think the administrative track record of the Bush administration (9/11, Iraq, response to Hurricane Katrina, complete meltdown of the economy) backs this claim up. The difference, between 2000 and 2008, in the American government’s standing, both in the world and with its people, is remarkable. There are a lot of reasons why, but I keep being caught up in this one: they were shitty bosses to work for. Bad things happen when you’re working for a shitty boss who doesn’t listen. You stop paying attention to detail. You care less. You start looking for other jobs. It’s not your fault, really. If you already tried your best and it didn’t make any difference, and worse, your best effort was repeatedly mocked and publicly dismissed to the point where future honest efforts could only be expected to be met with ridicule and humiliation, why would you bother trying your best? You either quit or you sit there, not doing your best, until everything eventually falls apart and you at least have a shot at a tell-all book deal. If you stay, the worst that could happen is you’ll be released from your commitment, and the best that could happen is the shitty boss would fail and be fired. Or, alternatively in the worst-worst case scenario, not only will the shitty boss be fired, he’ll take the entire world with him, a la Joseph Cassano, former head of A.I.G.’s Financial Products unit.

But we’re talking about football here, and thankfully, the stakes are lower.

In the years since Dan Snyder has taken ownership of the Washington Redskins, the team has all the hallmarks of an organization with a shitty boss. His employees get paid more money and try less hard with less success than they would in other places. The wrong people are being listened to, and both hard work and talent, both on the field and off, often goes unrecognized and unrewarded. There has been constant public turmoil, a track record of negative outbursts in the media, a high turnover rate among employees, a reliance on distracting sensationalism in public relations output, public adherence to censorship-based policy for dealing with customers, lawsuits, scandal, tragedy, betrayal, you name it, and all have resulted in disappointing returns. In other words, from an organizational standpoint, the Washington Redskins show no outward sign of being any different from the Bush White House or the AIG Financial Products unit.

And now here come these two men, Mike Shanahan and Jim Haslett, who, say what you will, at least have a track record of hard work and attention to detail. It’s been sorely lacking from the organization recently.

But this raises two questions:

1. What happens to that hard work and attention to detail if it runs up against an owner in Dan Synder who is the ultimate shitty boss?

There’s a possibility that Snyder’s right hand man of the last decade, former “Executive President of Football Operations” Vinny Cerrato, was the primary shitty boss, sort of a Joseph Cassano (President of AIG’s Financial Products unit) to Dan Snyder’s Hank Greenberg (former CEO of AIG, accused of meddlesome behavior within the company and censured by the company’s board of directors in the wake of ethics accusations), but if so, there are legitimate questions of judgment involved in Cerrato’s longevity. What kind of leadership would allow such a shitty boss to remain in power for an entire decade?

If Snyder is the ultimate shitty boss within the Redskins organization, and the organization displays more than enough shitty behavior which has nothing to do with duties one would typically associate with an “Executive President of Football Operations” for this to be the case, then the Shanahan and Haslett hires will ultimately fail under the weight of an impossibly top-heavy management structure. But he will be paid very well first, at least.

2. Are Shanahan and/or Haslett shitty bosses themselves?

The above-linked profile of Shanahan, and this 2001 profile of Haslett suggest that neither man is overly concerned with democracy or incorporating dissent within their own ranks. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Football is a violent and complicated game in which 11 players must work in unison over both the short (plays) and long term (game) to accomplish a shared objective. There is little room for dissent come game day. And certain kinds of dissent, for instance public dissent among players or public dissent between a player and his coach, are absolutely detrimental to a team’s ability to unify on the field of play.

But there is room for healthy dissent among a coaching staff and between the coaching staff and front office or scouting department. Now stretching the definition of the word "dissent" a little, I'm reminded of the case of the 2008 Miami Dolphins, who after floundering came up with a somewhat radical solution in the Wildcat formation. This was not "dissent" in the classical sense so much as a coach asking one of his lieutenants to help come up with a radical solution to a problem, but it's the kind of administerial flourish that you'd not often see in either the Dan Snyder Redskins organization nor the Bush White House, i.e. "assuming we are underdogs without much chance of winning a game, what game-planning wrinkles can we come up with that will maximize the strengths of our current personnel?"

The phrase "assuming we are underdogs" is an interesting one. Professional sports management has become somewhat of a spectator sport in the post-Moneyball era, with fans more exposed to the inner workings and thought processes of management than at any point in the history of professional sports. And too often the Redskins are behaving like the deep-pocketed Yankees circa 2003 rather than the lean, smart Billy Beane-managed Oakland A's. In a sport such as football, which has a salary cap (for now) and widespread revenue sharing, an eye towards organizational efficiencies inspired by a "we're an underdog" assumption is a philosophy which blurs the line between prudence and necessity.

But regardless of the apparent lack of implementation of that philosophy (and this is arguable, I'm sure good ideas got passed back and forth all the time among even Jim Zorn's coaching staff, just not any as radical as the Wildcat) among the Redskins organization, there has been no indication that the managerial structure could tolerate such an approach. The franchise seems more prone to fire a coach who fields a 3-5 team than allow that coach to experiment with strange "new" formations. Case in point: the Redskins recently announced a shift to a 3-4 defensive formation, which has been around since the 1940's, and are the second to last professional team to have tried it. Clearly, they are deficient in "outside the box" thinking on a macro, structural level.

But what structure will work? The relative lack of success in recent years of Head Coach/General Manager uberleaders in professional sports is fairly well documented, but the question of where real authority lies in a functional GM-Coach relationship is generally case-specific and also not usually publicized. There may be a short list of certain operational agreements which are common for all successful teams, but the actual implementation of those ideals does not follow a set pattern. It’s all case-by-case and personality based. Otherwise it would be easy to maintain a record of success over the long-term: just follow the blueprint. As far as front offices go, it seems to me that there’s a kind of reverse Anna Karenina Principle in effect, where successful teams are successful in different ways, but unsuccessful teams share the same issue in their front office structure: people don’t listen to each other (for various reasons).

Well as a Redskins fan, I feel I have reason for concern about the incoming coaching staff along these lines. They might be shitty bosses. They have a history of being somewhat shitty bosses, at least insofar as administering while engaging dissenters and securing proper channels for dissent. Shanahan is known for being a my-way-or-the-highway guy, which in the current Redskins leadership vacuum is sorely needed in the short term. But as far as restoring the franchise to its once-glorious perennial-contender status, I feel like something has to give, likely in both ownership and management’s style of operation, for anybody with a vested rooting interest in the burgundy and gold to be excited about a long-term franchise turnaround.

All of which is an extremely longwinded way of saying “it’s too early to tell,” which is the prevailing sentiment anyway, but I’m not optimistic.

I guess it all comes down to the difference between a bird in the hand and several in the bush. I’m glad Shanahan is running things. I’m glad Obama is running things. Will I have issues along the way with what either of those gentlemen either do or don’t do? Certainly. But in both cases I feel confident that difficult decisions are now being made only after lengthy deliberation, rather than a hasty decision and a lengthy period of justification and spin. And regardless of whether I agree with the decisions being made, I think it should be fairly unanimous among people who are fans of both the Redskins and/or America that this is a step in the right direction. And remember: disagreeing with this sentiment is the same thing as saying “I wish we could have a 3^rd Bush term. He was doing just fine.”