Party Like It's 1999

As published in The County Times (countytimes.somd.com)

By Ronald N. Guy Jr.

Greetings and salutations, fellow Southern Maryland dwellers.  2023 is drifting off in the rearview; 2024 is front and center.  After a brief pause to celebrate the rotund, sleigh-driving dude in the red suit and pursue merriment, I’m back home, perched high in the bleachers looking out over the vast sports hinterland and pondering another year of “Views.”

How the heck are you?  Well, I hope.  Cowboys fans aside, is 2024 suiting you?  Contemplating any broken New Year’s resolutions yet?  Failed at maintaining a daily calorie deficit?  Already dropped a few wrinkle words?  Trips to the gym left…untraveled?  Dry January already soaking wet?  I feel you.  This column is a safe space.  No judgment.  Tomorrow isn’t just another day, it’s another opportunity for your 2024 self. 

Before the future stuff, let’s time travel back to late 2023.  Imagine driving west and climbing into the Shenandoah mountains just after Christmas for a three-week sabbatical from…everything.  Politics.  Sports.  The internet.  Consumerism.  Eggnogg and your neighbor’s fruit cake. 

After living the hobbit life, you return in mid-January - full beard and unique odor, craving a hot meal, a bed with a mattress, running water and elite toilet paper – to news that Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll and Nick Saban are no longer the head coaches of the New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks and Alabama Crimson Tide, respectively.  Keep those mental musings rolling.  Imagine too that you’re a fan of the Washington Huskies.  You learn that the Huskies lost the national championship game and that your coach, Kalen DeBoer, was poached and will be Saban’s successor at Alabama.  Not good! 

Keep imagining (with a Washington twist): You’re a fan of the Washington professional football team and you discover that the prior coaching regime was whacked and Adam Peters, formally of the 49ers’ front office, was hired as the new General Manager.  The hire is not only solid, it indicates an apparent shift, for the first flipping time since 1999, to a traditional GM and head coach power structure, where the former builds the roster and the latter coaches up the compiled talent – you know, the approach that just about every elite NFL franchise follows.  This…is good.  Potentially very, very good. 

This “View’s” words are rifling across my screen on the 43^rd anniversary of Joe Gibbs being introduced as the new head coach of the then Washington Redskins.  The Twitter/X-verse has produced a few videos of the 1981 press conference – this is the kind of world history I would have thrived studying.  It would have been impossible – unbounded optimism - to project then what played out over the next dozen years – four Super Bowls, three Lombardi trophies and six Hall of Famers (four players, one executive, and, of course, one coach).  As Mark Twain once said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”  Indeed.  The reality between 1981 and 1992 exceeded any conceivable fairy tale.

Spend enough time in the workforce, in any field, and you will intersect with cringy coworkers, terrible leaders, disastrous supervisors and toxic professional cultures.  The Commanders had it all in spades.  Success in such scenarios is rare; in Washington, where it all coalesced into a foul cesspool, success proved impossible.  New Commanders owner Josh Harris has received much goodwill just because he is the new guy and he ain’t…that other guy.  Very quickly the challenge will be this: prove that he is different, much, much different from his predecessor.  What Peters’s and the coach-to-be hirings ultimately mean on the field, on the scoreboard, in the win column and in the history of the franchise, only the future can answer. 

As for Harris, so far, so good.  His words indicate a mature professional with an understanding of the complexity of organizational development.  In scoring a highly sought after GM, he’s backed up his words and provided tangible evidence that Washington is again a desired NFL destination.  Like the new year, this is starting to feel like a legitimate new beginning.  Premature to party like it’s 1999 (pre-Dan Snyder)?  Sure, but get the beer on ice and music ready.