Redskins security seized anti-Snyder paraphernalia at the FedExField gates before the Tampa Bay game a few weeks ago, without any honorable explanation for the seizures. The guards' heavy-handed tactics kept shots of bags on people's heads and "Snyder Sucks!" posters off the Fox airwaves for a few hours on that Sunday afternoon, but Snyder's strategy has otherwise totally backfired. Those whose agit-prop props were taken by Snyder's jack-booted thugs or otherwise censored got really motivated, and are now among the leaders of some very organized campaigns to demonstrate against the Dan Snyder Administration on a much bigger stage: "Monday Night Football."

***

The Third Coming? Mike Florio, the one-man TMZ of the NFL, rumors that Joe Gibbs will return to the Redskins to save Dan Snyder again.

The Gibbs rumors might take some steam off Snyder for yesterday's Steve Largent blasts. Largent, a former U.S. Congressman (awesome trivia about Largent: he lost his last election because Oklahoma voters were outraged by his stance against... cockfighting!), told a Seattle radio audience that Snyder is humiliating his buddy and onetime Seahawks teammate simply to avoid paying him the $6 million remaining on the head coach's contract. Largent says Zorn told him that Skins officials, presumably meaning either Vinny Cerrato or/and Dan Snyder, tried bullying Zorn into quitting by waving a copy of his contract in his face, and repeating the clauses that state that wholesale subservience is required or the team can fire him for cause. That sounds unbelievable, unless you've heard several dozen similar accounts of bizarre and mean behavior from Snyder from former employees.

Snyder was seen yesterday at practice talking to Zorn. Standing side by side, Snyder came up to Zorn's sternum. You know Zorn would like to go to the top of the boss' head with an elbow drop. But in his press conference after practice, Zorn simply said, "I have to hold back on any feelings."

God god. Forget a new set of eyes. Jim Zorn needs to grow a new set of balls.

(AFTER THE JUMP: Doc Walker puts a happy face on Skins' budding playcalling disaster? Sherm Lewis looks like Chief Zee without the headgear? Sam Elliott shills for horse racing? Horse racing leads to domestic bliss? Where's Karl Swanson when you need him?)

Zorn should tell the world what it already knows: He's being treated like dirt by a bunch of loser fools just so they can save a few million bucks. Snyder's putting a hurt on Zorn's image that he ain't going to recover from.

On Snyder's sportstalk station yesterday afternoon, Rick Walker tried to put a positive spin on the Skins' switch to a new play caller during a spot on John Thompson's show. Walker, calling in from Redskins Park, said the mood at practice was upbeat, that everybody in the organization was down with the plan to let Sherman Lewis take over Jim Zorn's game-day responsibilities, and basically insinuated that everything about the Redskins was suddenly just peachy.

Then John Thompson stopped the peachiness with a simple question: What's Jim Zorn's role going to be come kickoff against the Eagles on Monday?

Walker hemmed and came up with "clock management," then he hawed some more. And then Walker hemmed some more. Then, he told it like it was: "I don't know!"

Nobody knows what Zorn will be doing. At Fox-5 last night, sportscaster Lindsey Murphy reported that Jim Zorn "will be involved in the pass protection.". WUSA's Brett Haber said Lewis will only be able to call "a type of play," and not make actual play calls, because he's not familiar enough with the Skins playbook. Wowee. Now the Skins are saying that Sherm Lewis's playcalls will be filtered through Sherm Smith, not even Zorn. And he's the head coach?

Why not just make Zorn sell beer in the FedEx bathrooms? Get your bingo jokes ready, people. This is gonna be a disaster.

***

Walking around practice in a burgundy Redskins sweatsuit, Sherman Lewis sure looked like Chief Zee minus the headdress.

Speaking of: In chronicling how the Washington Post grounded and pounded on Dan Snyder in every section of the paper yesterday, I neglected to mention that Courtland Milloy held court for Metro with an assault on Chief Zee. The timing does seem odd.

But damn if Chief Zee isn't the most racist mascot in pro sports. There's nothing else even close.

***

Speaking of geldings... Shocker of shockers: Somebody's marketing horse racing to the masses! Laurel Park has been running commercials on Dan Snyder's sports station for this weekend's DeFrancis Dash.

The spots feature a voiceover that sure sounds like the great Sam Elliott, telling a tale about a father/son relationship enhanced by days at the racetrack.

Sure, the track has torn apart a whole lot more families than it's helped, but, it's still fabulous to hear any mention of racing in the mainstream media.

***

I was wondering whatever happened to Karl Swanson. I'd reached out to the Redskins top PR man a lot lately. But, no return calls. No return emails. Not even a "no comment"! But I wasn't taking it personally: These are tough PR times for the Redskins, what with the organization all messy and beer being sold in the bathrooms, but "Karl Swanson" wasn't even getting any hits in Google news. So I called and emailed Swanson yet again just to find out if he was still with the team.

And at long last, Swanson responded yesterday! He's still on the job. Swanson gave no explanation for the radio silence.

Maybe it's me.

***

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***

You don't need to read the Washington Post;s redesigned weather page to forecast the perfect shitstorm that is heading for Raljon on Monday evening.

The rest of the paper has all the evidence. There's no section of the Post that doesn't hold horrible news for Dan Snyder.

Mike Wise fills up the front page of Style with a profile of The Man Who Would Be Snyder, John Kent Cooke.

Some of the bitterness from Cooke, whose birthright to become owner of the Redskins was never exercised:

"Dan Snyder destroyed the reputation of this franchise," Cooke said. "I sure as hell don't like the way he gutted the organization after we left. And he commercialized the Redskins like my father would have never commercialized the Redskins. People brought cushions and pennants to the games. You know how they got those? My father gave them out at fan appreciation days."

Cooke also took issue with recent controversy over tickets. "Suing season ticket holders?" he said, incredulously. "My God, it's embarrassing. We would have never done such a thing."

(AFTER THE JUMP: Mike Wise dusts off Bobby Beathard to throw some jabs at Snyder? The Post's Business section tells readers that Snyder's a lousy businessman, just for the hell of it? The bingo caller line, again? The bingo caller last called plays for the Detroit Lions? How much would you have to get paid to go to a Redskins game? Eastern gets its first and last win? )

Better still, Wise dusts off long-ago general manager Bobby Beathard to unload on Snyder. While pretending to be saying how the younger Cooke would have been good for the Redskins, Beathard's really getting back at Snyder for giving him a low-ball offer to return to the team as GM in 2002, as Marty Schottenheimer was getting shown the door:

"I think he learned so much from his father [that] John would have been a great owner," Beathard said. "His dad wasn't a hands-off guy, but he wasn't a meddler. He didn't want to come over and want to watch films or tell us who to take."

Instead of paying Beathard a decent wage, Snyder rehired Vinny Cerrato.

Then, if you jump over to the Business section, Steven Pearlstein writes a few fab and devastating paragraphs about Snyder. And everything Pearlstein says is as easy to understand as, say, "The Emperor's New Clothes."

"What do you call a business that consistently overcharges its customers for an inferior product, hires the wrong people and pays them above-market wages, and yet still manages to be one of the most profitable and valuable franchises in its industry?

Here in nation's capital, we call it the Washington Redskins.

Economists, however, have a more generic name for such an enterprise. They call it a monopoly.

It should be apparent at this point that, whatever his other virtues, Dan Snyder isn't the business whiz he's cracked up to be. From the traffic jams and drunken crowds to the soggy hot dog rolls and the endless TV time-outs, a Redskins game at FedEx Field may be one of the worst entertainment experiences you can buy at any price. And that's not even taking into account the opera buffa now playing out on the field and in the locker room.

But for the fact that Washington football fans have no other choice, the Redskins by now would be in bankruptcy court, right alongside Snyder's other big fiasco, Six Flags."

The brutalest part comes later, when you realize Pearlstein's story is about an upcoming Supreme Court case, and all the Snyder hammering, beautifully written and dead-on as it is, is totally gratuitous!

Then there's the Post's sports section, which is full of the theme that all national reporters will use when the Philadelphia Eagles visit for "Monday Night Football":  The latter-day Redskins are the most messed up franchise in the NFL, and maybe in all of professional sports.

This has been said a lot lately, and will be said a lot more over the next week, but can't be said enough: Dan Snyder just promoted a bingo caller to be an NFL play caller, a job he last held in 2004 with a horrible Detroit Lions team.

Despite all Snyder's wacko meanness, it looks like Jim Zorn ain't gonna follow the owner's plan and quit. So unlike the last two Redskins coaches, Joe Gibbs and Steve Spurrier—both of whom walked away from contracts worth millions—Zorn's going to get paid.

Take THAT, Mr. Snyder!

***

Last week, the The Great Dan Steinberg reprinted a Craigslist ad he'd found before the Kansas City Chiefs game, in which a Redskins fan said he wouldn't go to FedExField—unless somebody paid him:

Don't want to go to the game? ME NEITHER. I will, however, watch my beloved Skins for a fair price...I'll only attend if the compensation is adequate.

Earlier this week, I tracked down the fan who placed that ad. The good news for Dan Snyder: That fan, Mike Stuart, says nobody offered to pay him to go watch the Redskins/Chiefs game.

"I did not get any offers, at least for what I was asking for," Stuart tells me via e-mail. "Instead, I was offered plenty of tickets FOR cash, the most laughable being 'I have 2 tickets in 417 row 15 for the Eagles on Monday Night for $150 for the pair and 2 in 133 row 21 for $260 for the pair.' I think he may have gotten this game confused with a Caps playoff game from last season."

Stuart says he's mad at his friends who used their tickets, and that he doesn't intend to go to any more games this season, and is looking forward to watching the franchise bottom out and start over.

"I don't see single winnable game the rest of the way," he says. "Funny, even though I've bled burgundy and gold my entire life, I actually see that as a good thing."

***

Have-Nots Update: In last week's Bowl for the Bottom, host Eastern defeated Spingarn, 38-12. That means Spingarn, now 0-6 and having been outscored 285-18, will be the city's only winless football team this season, barring something crazy. As for Eastern, the Spingarn game might be the last win in the school's history. Next school year, because of a DCPS reorganization plan, Eastern Senior High School will have only 12th graders, and therefore likely won't have enough players to field a team. And after that, DCPS plans to close the school at least temporarily, and some folks think permanently.

But, if Eastern is indeed going out, they didn't go out on bottom...

***

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As if vending beside urinals at Redskins games wasn't viral enough: Jennifer Donelan of WJLA put BeerInTheBathroomsGate™ on her station's evening news, and even took a few seconds to give Washington City Paper kudos for blowing the lid off Snyder's newest revenue stream.

Here's Donelan's WJLA piece. Wait til the 50-second mark. Don't take a pee break or beer break or both, or you'll miss my work. And remember: TV puts on 10 pounds, and I've been watching a lot of TV lately.

Otherwise, I think I nailed my line. Thinking ahead: "I'd like to thank-thank...both my readers-readers...and the Academy-Academy..."

Reading between the lines of Donelan's copy, it looks like the Redskins fired the beer man caught on tape dispensing beer in an environment teeming with second-hand poop. A commenter on City Desk yesterday wrote that he was a vendor at FedExField, and he found the bathroom vending "disgusting." But he warned Redskins patrons who are "worried about sanitation" that they should really "stay far away from the lemonade."

Yucky!

***

Sticking with local media, via DCRTV: Two more guys fired by Dan Snyder will have a radio show to bash their former boss. WTOP will give John Riggins and Frank Herzog at least a tryout for a weekly show called "Ask Riggo." (The first installment of Riggins/Herzog is going off the air as we type. "We should do this again," Riggins said to Herzog at sign-off.)

(AFTER THE JUMP: Does everybody who despises Dan Snyder get a radio show? Will Laveranues Coles get a program? Timmy Smith's out of jail? Dan Snyder benched Jason Campbell? Jeff George who? Dan Snyder will put Jason Campbell back on the field Monday night?  Night of Quarterbacks what?)

Herzog lost his 25-year gig as Redskins announcer a few years ago to make room in the booth for Dan Snyder's sidekick, Larry Michael. Riggins had a radio show on Snyder's embarrassing Triple-X sportstalk network, but got canned by Snyder last year when he bought WTEM-AM, a station that could actually be heard in DC.

Riggins, meanwhile, has been brutal on Snyder and Vinny Cerrato in recent Youtube monologues.

Riggins and Herzog join an army of folks who've been grinding their axes with Snyder over the public airwaves. Brian Mitchell, who crushes Skins management on Comcast and during Sunday night spots on WUSA-9 TV, has been fired not once but twice by Snyder: The first firing came in 2000, when Mitchell, the NFL's all-time leader in kickoff and punt return yards, got booted off the Redskins to make space for one of the owner's early jock sniffees, Deion Sanders.

Then Mitchell got canned by Snyder yet again last year when his former boss bought the sportstalk station WTEM, where Mitchell had been a co-host of the "John Thompson Show."

And there's LaVar Arrington, the afternoon drive-time star at WJFK, a rival to Snyder's sportstalker, WTEM. Arrington was once an owner's pet, but has been blasting Snyder since the end of the 2003 season, when he went through a contract negotiation with the Redskins owner. Arrington claims that Snyder pulled a bait-and-switch during negotiations, in the process eliminating a huge bonus that Arrington says he was promised.

The turning point in the player/owner talks, Arrington said a year later, came when Snyder asked him to sign a contract that had "666" written somewhere on it.

“[M]e and my agent, we are Christian people and we were alluding to the fact that there were three sixes in the total of the contract,” Arrington told FoxSports interviewer James Brown. “Three sixes, I think if you are a Christian you know what three sixes means. It is the mark of the devil.”

Arrington then asked Snyder to crunch the numbers in his contract a little bit to “get those three sixes off.”  The team did so, and Arrington say he signed the contract without re-reading the re-worked contract. He later discovered that the way Snyder got rid of the "666" was by removing the $6.5 million signing bonus Arrington says he was promised.

Arrington has had a lot to say about Snyder, all of it brutal, ever since.

The FCC would have to open up some more frequencies if everybody screwed by Snyder were to get a radio show, of course. But if I could pick, I'd like to see Laveranues Coles get a forum where he can tell that story about Snyder threatening to ruin his career and turn him "into Terry Glenn" during a nasty contract negotiation. Recap: After Snyder threatened to send a "flat-screen" television to Coles' house so he could watch football at home, since he'd make sure that Coles wouldn't be playing the game anywhere if he didn't play along with Redskins management, Coles got his wish and was traded to the New York Jets.

***

Timmy Smith talks about the Super Bowl, not about prison. Yes, Skins fans, the team used to be in the Super Bowl pretty regular.

***

A moderator at Extremeskins.com reports that Dan Snyder and Vinny Cerrato left the owner's booth at halftime and didn't come back. Jason Campbell got benched at that time.

Did Jurgensen's cigar smoking buddy, Snyder, personally put JC on the bench? Snyder wouldn't personally get involved in lineup changes, and force a coach to to accommodate Jurgensen's whimsy, would he?
Oh, right! Jeff George who?

But now reports are that Jason Campbell will be back in the starting lineup for Monday's game with the Philadelphia Eagles. Zorn, however, wouldn't confirm that, as if he's not making that decision, either. So maybe Snyder is calling this shot, too? He wouldn't want Campbell back in the lineup, would he?

Oh, right! Snyder's still trying to sell his Night of Quarterbacks!

***

All day yesterday, Dan Snyder's radio station, WTEM-AM, was pushing an event called "ESPN-980 Night of Quarterbacks: Three Quarterbacks. Three Generations." That's a dinner produced by Snyder's sportstalker that is, at least for now, scheduled for Nov. 3 at Union Jack's in Ballston. The featured guests, according to the radio and web advertisements, are Sonny Jurgensen, Joe Theismann, and Jason Campbell.

Quite a haters triangle there, eh?

(AFTER THE JUMP: How many people showed up at FedEx yesterday? The waiting list guy's now estimating Redskins crowds? Vinny Cerrato looks like Balloon Boy's dad? Even Barno bails on the Redskins? Jim Zorn mines for a silver lining?A lot more about Led Zeppelin at the Capital Centre?)

Let's review: When Theismann came to the Redskins in 1974, he cockily announced he would win the starting quarterback job here and “put the old men on the bench.” The "old men" Theismann referenced were Jurgensen and Head Coach George Allen's pet, Billy Kilmer. Theismann's attitude turned rivals—Jurgensen and Kilmer—into best buddies, united in hating the kid.

Jurgensen, for his part, has apparently not gotten over his disdain: Last season, during Redskins radio broadcasts, Jurgensen repeatedly referred to ol' No. 7 as "Theese-man." Lore has it that when he was in college at Notre Dame, Theismann changed the pronunciation of his name from “theese-man” to “thyze-man” for one big reason: It rhymed with "Heisman," as in Heisman Trophy. (Almost worked: Theismann finished behind Stanford’s Jim Plunkett in the 1970 Heisman voting. Lore also has it that Theismann blamed his loss of the big prize on voters’ sympathy for Plunkett, whose parents were blind.)

Then we have Campbell. Jurgensen has made it clear during game broadcasts this season that he wants Campbell on the bench. And out of the booth, Jurgensen declared last week that the Redskins would be 4-0 if Campbell were sitting and backup Todd Collins was allowed to play. Well, Jurgensen got his wish yesterday, with Campbell benched for Collins as the second half of the Kansas City Chiefs debacle started. Campbell's reaction? He stopped talking to the press, and left the locker room without making any statements about what transpired.

So, heading into can now be billed as the Night of the Former Quarterbacks, the questions are: Will Jurgensen call him "Theese-man"? Will Theismann call No. 9 a geezer? Will Campbell pull the no-talkee act when he hits the podium?

Tickets are $106.50. "Space is limited!" Sure it is.

(I once paid $9.50 to hear Led Zeppelin*. I won't be paying $106.50 to hear this.)

***

Skins fans who've only known the disasters at FedExField always say they wonder what it was like going to a game at RFK Stadium. Yesterday's game had one thing in common with the good ol' days: The crowd looked to be about 55,000.

The announced attendance was 79,572. Please.

This from the folks with the 200,000 people on the waiting list.

***

Watch this video, as Balloon Boy spills the beans on his family, and tell me Balloon Daddy doesn't look like Vinny Cerrato. I dare you!

***

Highlight of yesterday's locker-room interview between Snyder's main broadcaster, Larry Michael, and head coach Jim Zorn:

Michael: How down is this football team?

Zorn: The silver lining is we're playing pretty good defense...

Geez. Just walk away, JZ.

***

The end of the Washington Redskins season came at 4:05 p.m. EST. That's when BARNO1, the last man standing in the Skins corner on local blogs, posted the following message on the Great Dan Steinberg's D.C. Sports Bog:

I want to apologize to everyone on the WaPo blogs for my insanely optimistic predictions for the 2009 Redskins. I could not have been any more wrong. I will be taking some time off from the blogs except to continue to apologize and occasionally respond to comments that are addressed to me.I still love the Redskins with all my heart, but needless to say I'm not okay right now.Take care.

For weeks, Barno1 has been the lone holdout against the Skins and/or Snyder bashing that has taken over the Sports Bog. Him giving up on the team is like Pete Rose giving up on parimutuel wagering.

***

* I just found out a bootleg exists of the Led Zeppelin show I attended, on May 28, 1977. I was a little dirtball heavily under the influence of gin and orange Kool Aid—the Falls Church Margarita—so I don't remember much other than the dance Robert Plant and Jimmy Page did across the stage during the opening number, "The Song Remains the Same," the lasers and Jimmy Page's bow, which make me chuckle now but left me all goosebumpy back then, during the intro to "Whole Lotta Love," and Robert Plant announcing that John Bonham's drum solo during "Moby Dick" was 35 minutes long. That last one can't be true. Must have been the Falls Church Margarita talkin'. But I want to test my memory, so I'm gonna buy the bootleg, using some of the money I'll save from not paying $106.50 to hear Jason Campbell at SportsTalk 980 Night of Quarterbacks.

***

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