Bruce Allen wants clarity, so here’s a quick dose. The Redskins hired a lauded personnel man, despite his personal demons, at a time when they desperately needed a public-relations boost. They promised to stand by him as he worked through his issues. They said he was “going to be in charge of all the personnel department and the personnel on this team.” They enjoyed their best back-to-back seasons in nearly 20 years. And then — after barely two years — they fired that man in an embarrassing public spectacle, as everything solid melted into air. In the best possible reading of this, the team made a bad hire that ended badly. That clear enough?
Allen finally broke his silence this week. This was 23 days after the team president said General Manager Scot McCloughan was “a great guy” who was “dealing with some family matters” but that “as soon as the family matters are cleared up, we’ll be okay.” This was 16 days after Allen fired McCloughan, as an anonymous colleague trashed the GM as a drunk. And the reason Allen finally offered for making such a nearly unthinkable front-office move on the first day of free agency?
“We wanted to give clarity to our free agents and to our staff of where we were going,” Allen told The Post’s Liz Clarke.
“At the beginning of the league year, we needed some clarity,” Allen told ESPN.com.
“I thought on the first day of the league year, the free agents we were bringing in, we needed clarity,” Allen told CSN. “And for our scouts to continue the good work we were doing, we needed clarity for the season.”
“I made the decision on the first day of the league year in order to give clarity to the players that we were signing to bring into the team, and also for the scouting staff, going forward,” Allen told the Washington Times.
So this was about clarity. Clearly. And now the landscape is finally clear. Clear as industrial sludge.
There are some — maybe many — die-hards who have sided with Allen and the team during this episode. They think McCloughan had alcohol problems of his own making, and that he fumbled away his third chance at a plum NFL gig. They think the team tried to protect him, but couldn’t continue the facade when McCloughan’s side started leaking damaging, one-sided details. They think firing McCloughan was the Redskins making the best of an impossible hand. And they ask why people like me have been so cynical and mistrustful of the front office for this latest shake-up.
And this is what I’ve told them: remember Jim Zorn. The Redskins hired the affable assistant as their offensive coordinator. After two weeks of limbo, they promoted him to head coach, a decision which made no obvious sense to anyone. And as his second year devolved into chaos, the team publicly undermined Zorn, virtually begging him to quit, before finally firing him after a carnival-like final few weeks. The official narrative? “That incompetent buffoon was in over his head!”
Nah. Not anymore. If you hire someone who isn’t qualified for the job, and he then fails, you don’t get to blame the unqualified guy you hired. If you hire someone with a history of alcohol abuse — someone who has openly talked about his struggles, and who has said that he still drinks — and he then fails, you don’t get to blame the struggling guy you hired.
Not when there’s a pattern stretching over nearly 20 years. Marty Schottenheimer came here with a .630 winning percentage; turns out he was a control freak. Mike Shanahan came here with two Super Bowl rings; turns out he was a manipulative leaker. Donovan McNabb came here as a six-time Pro Bowler; turns out he lacked both cardio and brainpower. Robert Griffin III came here as an unblemished and charismatic leader; turns out he was just a grinning, egomaniacal hashtag.
In the most charitable interpretation, all these people — like McCloughan — were just bad hires, and the team had no choice but to cut ties. Squint a bit at each individual case, and that makes sense. But as a group? After this many crack-ups, maybe it’s time to look at the people making the hires. If my boss kept making high-profile hires who bombed out in chaos, I’d start hoping for a different boss.
What has the Redskins boss done? Well, remember Schottenheimer? That whole thing was his fault.
“He’d still be here if he didn’t want to do it all,” Dan Snyder once told author Gary Myers. “He was insistent on doing it all.”
Or Zorn? That was Vinny Cerrato’s fault.
“The general manager needs to prevent the owner from hiring someone who’s not qualified,” Snyder told Myers. “And that’s why Vinny is no longer here, to be truthful with you. He’s not here because his job was to prevent the owner from hiring a not-qualified coach.”
Those two moves, of course, predated Allen, and Snyder also acknowledged “I made a big mistake” in hiring Zorn, for which he apologized. Still, this all feels like an organizational pattern. Now it’s McCloughan’s turn, flicked aside in pursuit of clarity. Allen told ESPN that he and McCloughan actually were “on the same page,” that he still likes McCloughan but that “it feels like our friendship obviously will be strained.” You can imagine Stalin saying the same thing about Trotsky, after that unfortunate misunderstanding with the ice pick. How do you say “I do wish him the best” in Russian?
If you want clarity, you can’t divorce this ending from the two years that preceded it. The whole thing began with fan rage after Allen’s “Winning off the field” news conference, which was soon mollified by McCloughan’s hire. Then came the promise that McCloughan was in control, the months of “In Scot We Trust,” the two winning seasons. If you’re trying to now say McCloughan was incidental to the success, then the last two seasons are suddenly unrecognizable. We were all clinging to a wispy myth.
The reason those two years felt like progress was because the wins seemed paired with front-office normalcy. If you strip that away in pursuit of clarity, you’re going to be left with something else: a murky uncertainty, with fans no longer knowing whom or what to believe.
So what could Allen have said this week? He could have said it was disgusting for a team representative to have trashed McCloughan. He could have expressed regret that the team did not provide an atmosphere or support system in which McCloughan could flourish. He could have acknowledged that this episode was a horrible shock for the team’s fans. He could have admitted the team burned up acres of good will over the last four weeks, and would have to patiently work to grow it back. He could have said that this franchise-altering hire did not work out, and that the final responsibility for that rests with the person who made the hire.
“I screwed up,” he could have said, “and I’m sorry, and I’ll do my best to fix it.” How’s that for clarity?
