NFL

After decades of losing, mismanagement, and toxicity under former owner Dan Snyder, the Washington franchise has undergone a sports exorcism. And its great hope at quarterback couldn’t have come along at a more perfect time.

NFLAfter decades of losing, mismanagement, and toxicity under former owner Dan Snyder, the Washington franchise has undergone a sports exorcism. And its great hope at quarterback couldn’t have come along at a more perfect time.

By Danny HeifetzJan. 9, 11:55 am UTC • 15 min

When I met Dimitri Karmiris at a bar in mid-November, he was wearing a football helmet. He was at Walter’s Sports Bar in Washington, D.C., to watch the Washington Commanders–Philadelphia Eagles Thursday Night Football game, and I was there to talk to Commanders fans—about this season, and about how the team had undergone a sports exorcism. The combination of former Commanders owner Dan Snyder’s departure from the franchise and rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels’s arrival had seemingly revived a depleted fan base and restored hope in a team that many had given up on. And as soon as I walked into Walter’s that Thursday, I saw a guy wearing an old-school yellow Washington dome standing alongside a woman who was rocking an Eagles helmet. I couldn’t help my curiosity. I went up to the man and asked, as politely as possible: “So, uh, what’s your deal?”

He introduced himself as Dimitri and said his parents had immigrated from Greece to a D.C. suburb in 1970. Growing up, Dimitri was fascinated by football, but his parents wouldn’t let him play, so in ninth grade, his older brother forged his permission slip and he joined the Potomac School team in McLean, Virginia. He scored eight touchdowns in his first two games, and he played in secret for two years before his parents found out—after he broke three ribs in a game. (Dimitri thinks the language barrier and his parents confusing “football” with soccer likely helped prolong the ruse.) His playing career was over after that. But the game is intertwined with his identity. “The Redskins made me feel like I belonged,” Dimitri said. “Like I was American.” 

Dimitri and his wife, Julia, an Eagles fan from Philly, are foreign service officers. Wherever they’ve lived across the globe—from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Liberia—Dimitri has made it a point to follow the Commanders, often watching games at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. He estimates he listens to local Washington sports radio “100 percent of the time.” (Yes, even while he sleeps.) And while Julia was in labor with their firstborn son in Athens in November 2023, Dimitri insisted they stick a laptop in the corner of the delivery room so they could watch the Commanders play the Cowboys on Thursday Night Football (Washington lost by 35 points). I asked Julia if she’d been mad at Dimitri for wanting the game on while she was giving birth. “No,” Julia said. “Because I know that is who I married.” 

Dimitri got hooked on Washington football during the team’s glory days. From 1982 through 1992, Washington made five NFC championship games and won three Super Bowls under head coach Joe Gibbs. Those Lombardi trophies are the first things you see when you walk into Commanders headquarters. As recently as 2000, the Washington football franchise was named by Forbes as not just the most valuable team in the NFL, but the most valuable sports franchise in the entire country. It was a football powerhouse. 

“I just knew about winning only,” Dimitri said. “And nothing else.”

Then, in 1999, Snyder bought the team, and he spent the next quarter century destroying it. Kevin Sheehan, a local radio host on The Team 980 and host of The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast said Snyder was “the stench of the last quarter century.” He drove away one of the most rabid fan bases in all of sports by micromanaging the team, grifting from fans and fellow NFL owners alike, and allowing a toxic culture to fester within the organization. In 2007, Washington ranked second in the NFL in percentage of seats sold in its stadium. By 2018, Washington was dead last. Local television ratings declined sharply, too. From the high of Robert Griffin III’s rookie year in 2012 to 2018, they fell by 46 percent. “Snyder,” Sheehan said, “just sucked the life out of it for everybody.”

Now, though, that life has begun to come back. First when Snyder was strong-armed into selling the franchise in 2023, and now because of the team’s magical run with Daniels. Football is a team sport with 53-man rosters, plus the coaches and trainers and support staff. But Daniels has been the glue that’s held it all together for the Commanders. I asked wide receiver Terry McLaurin in December how much of Washington’s turnaround has been purely about Daniels. “I definitely would say 40 to 50 percent,” McLaurin said. “You can have a great culture. You can have great players. But if you don’t get that quarterback position right, or if he isn’t the type of competitor that [Daniels] is, if he doesn’t work hard, then you’re gonna plateau at some point.”

Daniels is proving that he’s the right guy. And he’s arriving at just the right time. Under Snyder, football in D.C. was so over. With Daniels, it is so back.

It is hard to keep track of how many illogical, immoral, and potentially illegal things Dan Snyder did or oversaw while he owned the Washington franchise. Dave McKenna wrote an A to Z syllabus of all of Snyder’s blunders for the Washington City Paper back in 2010. (One anecdote that sticks out is that Snyder acquired a bunch of expired peanuts from an airline that went out of business and sold them to fans at what was then called FedExField.) 

Despite Snyder chasing flashy head coaches (Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier, Gibbs, Mike Shanahan) and spending on big-name free agents (Deion Sanders, Bruce Smith, and Albert Haynesworth), Washington was 30 games under .500 from 2000 to 2011, good for the 25th-best record in the NFL. The team won a playoff game in Snyder’s first season at the helm (2000) and won another after the 2005 season, but never got a third across his final 17 seasons. The on-field product was so thoroughly mismanaged that the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent Washington think tank, cited the franchise in a 2006 report as “the most frightening example of a team that hadn’t thought through the simple economics of pro football.” 

Even the people you’d expect to be treated well within the organization were not treated well. Former Washington left tackle Trent Williams, perhaps the best offensive lineman of his generation and a future Hall of Famer, demanded a trade and sat out the entire 2019 season in large part because the team medical staff misdiagnosed a cancerous tumor on his skull. Six years after Williams first raised the issue with the team, he had it examined by an outside doctor. The situation was so dire that Williams was told he should “get his affairs in order.” Williams eventually got the tumor removed, and he never played for Washington again. 

While Snyder was initially reviled by fans for his handling of the football team itself, it soon became clear that things were even worse behind the scenes. Toward the end of Snyder’s stewardship, Washington was being investigated by the NFL, the IRS, the FBI, the DEA, and Congress. Washington had so many legal issues that the DEA raided the team’s headquarters during the 2021 season—and that may not have been one of the five largest problems the team faced that year. 

The FBI and the IRS investigated the franchise after minority owners examined the team’s finances and alleged that Snyder had committed bank fraud, according to an ESPN report in February 2023. ESPN also reported in 2022 that Snyder hired private investigators to get dirt on Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell amid an email scandal, and that Snyder’s lawyers went to NFL headquarters in New York and showed league officials what would later be referred to as a “blackmail powerpoint.” 

But even more serious was the toxic culture within the organization. In April 2009, a team employee said that Snyder had sexually harassed and assaulted her on a team plane, and three months later she was paid $1.6 million as part of a confidential settlement, according to The Washington Post. In July 2020, 15 women told the Post they were sexually harassed while working for the team. One month after that, another 25 women shared similar stories with the Post, including former cheerleaders who said producers for the team’s broadcast department took secret, lewd footage of them and burned it to a DVD, which was titled, “For Executive Meeting.” 

The team tried (and failed) to cover most of this up. Congress got involved. Snyder himself retreated to his superyacht, which was conveniently located in international waters, outside the jurisdiction of a congressional subpoena. In December 2022, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform released a 79-page report titled, “How the NFL and the Washington Commanders Covered Up Decades of Sexual Misconduct.” 

Eventually, the other NFL owners reached their limit with the issues in Washington and forced Snyder to sell the franchise, which was purchased for $6 billion in July 2023 by a group led by Sixers owner Josh Harris. 

Sheehan said that once Snyder was gone, the way fans talked about the team changed. “For so many years, it was like we suspended reality to have discussions about the football team,” Sheehan said, “because there was no way they were ever gonna be good as long as Snyder owned the team.” 

The sale of the team went through just days before training camp started in 2023, so Year 1 for the Harris ownership group was more like Year 0. But 2024 has been a fresh start. After receiving consulting help from former Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers, the team hired Adam Peters out of the 49ers front office to serve as Washington’s GM. The team also brought in former Falcons head coach Dan Quinn to serve in the same role for the Commanders.

But the most consequential part of Washington’s offseason—and perhaps decade, outside of Snyder leaving—was selecting Daniels with the no. 2 pick in April’s draft. History seemed to repeat itself when the team took Daniels, as he, like former Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III, was a Heisman winner and was taken no. 2 overall. Griffin had a league-altering rookie year in 2012, but his career was derailed by injuries as well as organizational mismanagement at the hands of Snyder. Not only did Griffin tear his ACL while playing on the team’s notoriously terrible turf, but former Washington coach Mike Shanahan believes Snyder encouraged Griffin to undermine the coaching staff—which included Shanahan, Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur, and Mike McDaniel. Griffin would go on to start just 14 NFL games after he turned 24. 

“Deep in the pits of our stomachs,” my Ringer colleague and born-and-raised D.C. sports fan Joe House told me, “everyone was worried that Daniels was RGIV.” 

So far, Daniels has been RGIV, but only in the best ways. Like RGIII, Daniels has taken Washington to the playoffs in his first season and looks to be in line to win Offensive Rookie of the Year. He’s thrown for 3,568 yards and 25 touchdowns, and he’s completing 69 percent of his passes. He also added nearly 900 yards rushing, breaking Griffin’s rookie record for a quarterback, and six rushing touchdowns. Daniels ran for more yards and touchdowns than Jets running back Breece Hall this season, gained more rushing first downs than Joe Mixon, threw more touchdown passes than Justin Herbert, and threw fewer interceptions (nine) than Patrick Mahomes. Washington finished the regular season 12-5, its first regular season with more than 10 wins since 1991, and earned the no. 6 seed in the NFC. The Commanders will face off against the Buccaneers on Sunday night in the wild-card round of the playoffs.

“A film studio would not accept a script that said ‘brand-new ownership group gets an unbelievably high draft pick because the team sucks so bad and immediately drafts a top 5 quarterback in the league,’” House said. “It really stretches the boundaries of believability.”

Daniels not only garnered stats for himself this season, but he also raised the level of the entire offense—and quickly. Here are the highest offensive points per drive marks through the first seven weeks of a season going back to the year 2000:

1. The 2000 St. Louis Rams (fresh off winning the Super Bowl and Kurt Warner winning MVP)
2. The 2007 New England Patriots (Tom Brady won MVP that year, and the Patriots went 16-0 before losing to the Giants in the Super Bowl)
3. The 2024 Washington Commanders
4. The 2018 Kansas City Chiefs (Patrick Mahomes won MVP with 50 touchdown passes)

Those are three of the best offenses in NFL history, and Daniels’s first seven weeks in the NFL. Washington’s offense slumped in November after Daniels suffered a rib injury. But take out the month when he wasn’t healthy—Weeks 7 to 12—and Week 18 when Marcus Mariota played the majority of the team’s snaps, and Washington averaged 3.14 points per drive, which would have been the highest mark across a full season since the 2007 Patriots (!). Washington also went a preposterous 20-of-23 on fourth down, which means the team was more likely to convert on fourth down this season (87 percent) than Michael Jordan was to hit a free throw in his career (84 percent). 

“We didn’t really know” this season would be special, right guard Sam Cosmi told me. “You never really know, especially with the new coaching staff. The turnover rate was insane with this team.” Indeed, Washington added a slew of veteran free agents this offseason, including tight end Zach Ertz, running back Austin Ekeler, and linebacker Bobby Wagner. Success “is not, like, a thing we knew about,” Cosmi said. “It’s kind of like being optimistic.” 

McLaurin estimated that half the team’s success this year is because of Daniels alone. And he would know. Throughout his six-year career, McLaurin has played with enough bad quarterbacks for the list to become a meme: Colt McCoy, late-career Alex Smith, late-career Case Keenum, Kyle Allen, Taylor Heinicke, Garrett Gilbert, Carson Wentz, Sam Howell, and Jacoby Brissett. This year, though, with Daniels, McLaurin broke the team’s single-season record for receiving touchdowns with 13.

But while giving Daniels his due, McLaurin also said that roughly half of Daniels’s success is because of the revitalized organization. “You can have that player,” McLaurin said. “You can have that kind of guy that has that type of ability, but you don’t have a support system around him. You don’t have the O-line, you don’t have vets in here that can show him what it’s like to be a pro. You don’t have receivers that have played across this league and have success. The support is as important as the player as well. So they go hand in hand. That’s why I say 45 [percent] Jayden, 55 everything else.”

Stats aside, what has separated Daniels this season is that he has the it factor. He plays his best when it matters most. He led a walk-off victory in overtime against the Falcons to win the Commanders’ 11th game of the season, more than any season in which Snyder owned the team. The week before that, Washington overcame a five-turnover game by scoring a touchdown with six seconds left to beat the Eagles 36-33 (Washington scored 22 points in the fourth quarter). And of course, there was the Hail Mary against the Bears. You know the story: With two seconds left in the game in Week 8 against Chicago, Daniels eluded pressure and tossed a ball into a crowd and watched it bounce into the arms of Washington receiver Noah Brown. 

It was back in Week 3, though, that Commanders players say they knew Daniels was different. The 1-1 Commanders were facing the 0-2 Bengals on Monday Night Football. And with Washington up five points and facing a third-and-7 with just over 2 minutes left in the fourth quarter, Daniels needed to get a first down or risk giving the ball back to Joe Burrow in a one-possession game. 

Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo sent an all-out blitz at the rookie—six blitzers, plus two linebackers who faked a blitz before dropping back to spy Daniels. The thinking seemed clear: that Daniels would see the blitz, panic, and either take a sack or run into a trap. In what has since become something of a theme, though, Daniels immediately recognized the blitz and coverage and, milliseconds before an unblocked rusher rocked him, he tossed up a moonball into the corner of the end zone that floated into McLaurin’s hands. Touchdown. The score gave Washington a 12-point lead and effectively iced the game. 

McLaurin said that road trip—from Cincinnati in Week 3 straight to Arizona in Week 4—showed him what this team could become. “We flew straight out to Arizona,” McLaurin said. “And so we didn’t really come back and get into a regular routine. We kind of had to depend on each other and the coaches, like, take care of us during that week because it was something that none of us really were used to.” 

Punter Tress Way, who is the longest-tenured player on the Commanders, said the vibe was totally different when the team returned—both inside and outside the locker room. “We go on this road trip,” Way said, “like we really start kicking things into gear, and then we come back [to] this kind of welcoming … from what everybody’s been watching on TV.” 

Way said that he could tell just from the team bus driving through the parking lot ahead of their Week 5 game against the Browns that something had changed in the atmosphere; that walking into the stadium was a true “home-field advantage.” Way, who lives in the D.C. suburbs, said his entire block is alive now (with the exception of the Patriots fans who live two doors down).

“I think a few times the fans had been here in the past towards the end of the season, it’s almost like sympathy a little bit,” McLaurin told me. “We weren’t playing for nothing. But you could feel the excitement over those two weeks when we came back to Ashburn. A buzz in the city. Everybody was excited and proud to represent being a Commander.”

Ted Abela has also noticed a buzz in the city—one that’s extended into the parking lots outside the stadium before games. Abela, a 45-year-old IT consultant by day and Washington superfan “Tailgate Ted” by night, can see Northwest Stadium from his window. But as a kid, he grew up near Fairfax, Virginia, and rooted for Washington with his father. In 2001, the same year his father died, Abela got a call that he was eligible for Washington season tickets. His father had placed him on the waitlist decades earlier without him knowing. “Cosmic timing,” Abela said. Over the next two decades, Abela established a fan tailgate, Hail BBQ, where, with the help of six to 12 people, he feeds as many as hundreds of people before Washington games. He does not charge, but encourages people to donate money to cover costs, and he relays any extra funds to charitable causes: He’s raised money for cancer patients, for the bone marrow registry Be the Match, for drycleaning suits for unhoused people with job interviews, and for helping settle Afghan refugees into the area, among many other causes. 

Abela said that back in 2015, he could host nearly 700 people at a single tailgate, but by the end of the 2022 season, he was cooking for less than 70. In September 2023, Ted hosted a video tailgating with the celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, but rewatching it, Abela is mostly embarrassed at how few fans were in the parking lot for the game. Even just two seasons ago, he didn’t have to worry about how many parking spaces he took up for the tailgate. It didn’t matter. 

Now, Abela said, cars are streaming in from all over. He is turning people away from the barbecue because he cannot bring enough food to feed everyone who shows up. They’ve had to turn their music up louder, as there are actually competing DJs now.

Abela understands why people stopped coming, but he said he was never going to stop. “I’m not there to support ownership,” Abela said. “I don’t have a Dan Snyder jersey. I’m still going to go, and the big reason was because I got these tickets as a gift from my father and I’m not going to give them away.”

Snyder “violated the social contract by destroying the cherished public trust that is part of the [city’s] social fabric,” House said. “Everybody understood that there was an institutional rot—the feeling of helplessness that emanates from the fact that there is no way to get a bad owner out of a situation. … And so this restoration of hope just can’t be overstated. [There’s] this untapped exuberance that’s been below the surface for most of the 25 years, and everybody’s ready to celebrate again.”

Back at Walter’s, after celebrating a Washington touchdown in that Week 11 game, Dimitri showed me his phone. His background was a photo of the Hail Mary from Week 8—and there, sitting in the front row just behind the play, was Dimitri, wearing a helmet and screaming. His father had passed away a few weeks earlier, and Dimitri almost didn’t go to the game. But the day before, he scooped up a single ticket—his first time in the front row.

Dimitri said that whenever he is in D.C. now (which is a lot), he sees Washington gear all over. Some of it is Commanders merch, but there’s also plenty of old gear that’s resurfacing. He’s happy to see all the fans returning, and said that everyone dealt with the Snyder era in their own way.

“I dealt with it by just shouting louder,” Dimitri said. “The other ones, they hid in their corners. But now, they can come out.”

Danny Heifetz

Danny is the host of ‘The Ringer Fantasy Football Show.’ He’s been covering the NFL since 2016.