Another year, another wasted Washington season.

I don’t think anybody expected them to be this bad. Last season they literally were in first for half the year before Alex Smith went down. The team clearly had some talent. And yet…here we are, again. This situation feels familiar. Maybe because we’ve been watching it unfold for the past 20 years.

The Skins are 0-4. They covered up Alex Smith’s injury with a bandaid known as Case Keenum, who has proven to be what we originally thought he was before that one good season in Minnesota. He’s also hurt. The Skins started their first two games well, then collapsed. In the most recent two games they didn’t even muster a good start. The latest travesty of football against The Giants was so bad they almost made the Giants look like a good team. I can assure you, the Giants are mediocre at best. But they looked like a top 10 team that Sunday against this flaming pile of shit.

Jay Gruden is toast. I think he doesn’t even care anymore. He looks dead inside, kind of like how most Skins coaches look by the end of their tenure. Dealing with upper management must be awful and after a certain point the battle saps your soul. It is only a matter of time before he’s out, and if the Skins put in another couple of performances like they did against the Giants it will be very soon. They play the defensively dominant Pats this weekend, I assume with Haskins starting, and it is going to be a bloodbath.

Speaking as someone who wanted Haskins instead of Danny Dimes, I was kind of shocked at how bad he looked that game. Obviously that wasn’t an ideal situation to get put in and only happened since Keenum was hurt and playing like butt. Haskins didn’t have any real reps with the first team that week and probably didn’t expect to play. But he still looked completely lost. The Giants got multiple sacks because Haskins didn’t know what to do with the ball, even though plenty of players were open. He threw his first touchdown to Giants Safety Jabril Peppers. I honestly didn’t even get that much enjoyment out of watching it. There was a brash and loud Skins fan in the bar in front of me during the game, and as the disaster unfolded, you could see his spirit wane. It wasn’t the sad downtown of a fan who knew this was just a bad week. It was the sad, resigned silence of someone who just had whatever hope remained for the season snuffed out. He only returned to life after the game ended and we all got to watch the end of Lions/Chiefs instead.

It’s a sight I’ve seen many times over the past decades. I’m going to offer a bit of a hot take here and say that the Skins fanbase might be the saddest in the entire sport. Worse than Cleveland. Worse than Detroit. Worse than Buffalo. Worse than the Bengals, although similar. Unlike most of these fanbases, the Skins haven’t had quite the history of failure. They were very good as recently as the 90’s. Many fans remain who enjoyed the Skins heydays. Unlike most of those other fanbases, they haven’t turned their own failures into part of their own identity. Browns fans, Bills fans, Lions fans…they want success but part of what makes those fanbases so passionate is their shared bond over being cursed. The Skins don’t really have that. They’ve never really been bad enough for it. They go out and they overspend on big name free agents, and they win enough games to always draft in the 6-15 range, so they miss out on the biggest picks unless they give up a draft to move up (A’la RG3).

On top of that, Snyder is a dipshit, but he’s still young, and doesn’t appear to want to give up the team. It has left Skins fans mostly just angry and apathetic. They can’t bond over their failures. They just seem angry. They aren’t coming together on Sundays to enjoy the games despite the disasters, because they can’t support Snyder. Skins fans live in hell.