Oct
9
The Washington Redskins have taken a lot of hits in the past few weeks. Two weeks ago, they lost to the Detroit Lions, a team that had been on an 18-game losing streak. The other three games haven’t been much better. And fans and many in the media have laid the blame at the feet of owner Dan Snyder.
This week, a 16-13 win against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers brought the team to 2-2 and should have helped Snyder’s cause. Instead, the team hired Sherman Lewis as an offensive consultant, spurring still more criticism. Snyder’s right-hand man and executive vice president of football operations, Vinny Cerrato, said the NFL assistant and offensive coordinator who last coached in 2004 will provide the struggling offense with “a fresh set of eyes,” but in the mainstream media and the blogosphere it is being decried as yet another poor decision by the owner.
New blogs quickly popped up for the sole purpose of blasting Snyder and his decisions. A group of fans created the Web site SELL THE TEAM DAN just yesterday. They wore SELL THE TEAM DAN shirts to the Buccaneers game last Sunday, and the shirts proved so popular among other fans and this week’s incident so infuriating that the group rushed to put up a Web site, writing, “In order to respond to demand as quickly as possible, we’ve thrown together is VERY RUDIMENTARY page for SELL THE TEAM DAN. We’ll have something else up soon.”
Another blog, Snyder Sucks, actually started in August, but the writer had only posted once until Wednesday, the same day Lewis started working. There have been seven posts since then, and this blog too is already selling T-shirts. (See left.)
Still more sites started the week before, after the 19-14 loss to the Lions, and have been gaining steam. Boycott the Redskins has only one post from the day after the game, but has been linked to by Dan Steinberg’s D.C. Sports Bog and other Web sites. Buy Out Snyder also began after Lions game and has 66 entries on a petition for fans to buy out the team. The Burgundy Revolution started Oct. 1 and now has its own Twitter account, @boycottsnyder.
Someone even joined Twitter yesterday with the username @extraeyes, pretending to be Lewis and providing biting satire of the state of the Redskins, with 19 tweets so far.
Though none of these sites is close to seriously threatening the multimillion dollar franchise, these blogs of a few disgruntled fans are showing the World Wide Web’s power as a tool for dissent. I leave you with Redskins legend John Riggins, MVP of Super Bowl XVII.
Comments
One Response to “Blogging the Burgundy Revolution”
Great job! Can’t wait to start my own blog.