Patience is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Daniel Snyder’s tenure as the owner of the Redskins.
They’ve gone through seven head coaches since Snyder bought the team in 1999, undergone numerous roster makeovers thanks to those coaching changes or ill-advised attempts to load up on expensive veterans and generally felt like a team that would have trouble waiting long enough for a light to change at an intersection. As we enter Mike Shanahan’s third season as head coach in Washington, though, Snyder is trying to sell the idea of patience to his team’s fan base.
“It takes a long time when you bring in a new staff, also, that really wants to change our defense from a 4-3 to a 3-4. That takes a few years to really get clicking. You’ve just got to be patient,” Snyder said during an interview with Sirius XM NFL Radio, via the Washington Post‘s D.C. Sports Bog. “I was very very patient with Joe Gibbs for quite some time, and we got close a few times. And I would have loved him to stay til he turned 80, but he had to retire. You’re searching for the right combination. I think we’ve got that now.”
The cynical response to that is that many of the Redskins’ failures over the last decade-plus could have been avoided with a more patient approach to team building and that Snyder’s past actions make it hard to fully buy what he says about staying the course. A more optimistic view would be that it’s better to do the right thing late than it is to never do it at all.
Option two is the better one for the Redskins. The Jason Campbell experience should be fresh enough in Redskins memory to know that don’t take a quarterback in the first round and then run him through two different coaching staffs and schemes in his first two seasons if you want to build toward something.
