OPINION:
What may have gotten lost in all the attention to a Christmas Day 30-23 loss to the Dallas Cowboys at Northwest Stadium was that it was the Washington Commanders Fan Appreciation Day.
There were holiday decorations, entertainment and a meet and greet with the big man himself, Santa Claus.
We’re a long way from when former Redskins owner George Preston Marshall used to have Santa arrive in a helicopter at midfield at Griffith Stadium during halftime.
I’m assuming Cowboys fans could take advantage of the day’s festivities, since they filled up nearly half the stadium.
Owner Josh Harris and fellow owners also recognized a local national championship youth football team and gave them game tickets, plus three local high schools were given $650,000 in grants from the Washington Commanders Foundation and NFL Foundation for field projects.
All in all, generous gifts in the spirit of the day — at least before Washington fans who turned out for their last home game suffered through their team’s sixth straight loss at Northwest Stadium this season.
On Fan Appreciation Day, though, Washington football fans might have appreciated another gift under the tree — a rebate on the price increases they were hit with for the 2025 season.
That’s right — in case you forgot, many Commanders fans paid an average of 11% more for this 4-12 debacle of the season. And they’re going to pay more next season – nearly 10% more.
You really didn’t think Harris and his band of fellow saviors were going to pay for that $75 million lipstick on the pig of stadiums out of their own pocket, did you?
Six months from now, stadiums around North America will play host to the most celebrated sporting event on the planet, the World Cup. There will be games in Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles, among other locations.
But in Washington — in the year the nation will be celebrating its 250th anniversary — there will be no game. Northwest Stadium was too repulsive for FIFA.
It will still be home, though, for Commanders fans for more than 30 regular-season games until the new $3.8 billion District stadium on the RFK campus is scheduled to be finished.
Harris and his fellow owners inherited the worst stadium in the NFL. There’s little they can do about that.
The product it hosts, though, is in their control, though it may not have seemed that way in 2025 as the season spiraled out of control — coming to a close Sunday in Philadelphia against the Eagles — with a stunning number of injuries.
The worst of those, of course, were the multiple injuries that sidelined star quarterback Jayden Daniels for nine games and ended his year prematurely. The 12-5 record last season was built on Daniels’ passing arm and legs, and that turned out to be a flimsy foundation.
It collapsed before the new owners could build a more solid structure to overcome the decades of decay under the toxic tenure of owner Dan Snyder.
Now it’s like 12-5 and an NFC title game appearance never happened. It’s a good thing Harris got approval for the new stadium this summer. This Commanders product would not likely win many votes.
Here’s what else Harris and company inherited — the name controversy, but not the one that owners faced before him.
From Marshall to Edward Bennett Williams to Jack Kent Cooke to Snyder, Washington football owners have dealt with protests against the Redskins name.
Sometimes it was bothersome, other times it was challenging.
But it was a burr in the ownership saddle for 60 years or so until finally, faced with corporate sponsorship pressure, the NFL forced the team to drop the Redskins name in 2020.
They were called the Washington Football Club until 2022, when, in an amateurish promotion, they changed the name to the current Commanders moniker, which Harris’ group inherited and have since endorsed.
That name went over like a lead balloon, and the controversy now is that there are some fans who wanted the Redskins name back.
But the excitement of last season — the franchise’s best since the 1991 Super Bowl team — had quieted much of that unrest.
Any criticism of the name seemed like complaining that the noise was too loud at a party you wish you had been invited to.
The party’s over. The anger over the lost name remains raw. A fractured fan base hates your stadium, your name, and now, with an unfortunately familiar lost season, your product. Happy holidays.
• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.
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