Dan Snyder is Basically the Worst.

Dan Snyder has always appropriated culture. But that goes far beyond the name.

In 1999, Dan Snyder purchased his favorite team. And with that purchase of the Washington Football Team, there came a pedigree. Sure, it had been 8 long, grueling years since they had last gone to a Super Bowl, but they weren’t quite the league’s laughingstock. The Hogs, John Riggins, Doug William, Mark Rypien; all those names still had weight, at least in Washington. Even if the team wasn’t winning, if they could just right the ship a little, maybe things would get better.

That never happened. Snyder has owned the Washington Football Team for two decades, and almost the entire time, the franchise has been marked by the kind of brutal dysfunction usually reserved for letting a reality TV star become President. There might be cheaper owners, there may be more overtly racist owners, their may even be more sniveling and greasy owners. But no one has Dan Snyder’s knack for being all those things, all at once, all the damn time.

Snyder has never had what it takes to be a successful owner, or even a shitty owner whose team manages to win despite him. Dubbed a wiz kid when he bought the team, Snyder was always more a product of his rich father than he was a self-made man, always more of a con artist than a savvy businessman. It has become glaringly obvious that Snyder has careened from one easily avoidable mishap to another, to the detriment of the team and it’s fans, who are so tired and over it that they can’t even be arsed to get upset when fans invade Washington’s toilet bowl of a stadium. When there’s a team right down I-95 with an electrifying quarterback and a functional coach and an owner who is only 50% an asshole, why would you watch this team except out of loyalty?

It says something that Snyder’s team being the subject a disgusting, horrifying cycle of sexual harassment is big news to most of the world, but barely makes a dent in the minds of Washington fans, who know all too well that the team has been a clusterfuck for years. Nor was it a surprise when reporters, desperately trying to leak a story without leaking a story, insinuated that the sexual harassment stuff was the tip of the iceberg. There is so much organizational rot in Washington that “Snyder silently enabled a culture in which women openly wept at their desks for the disgusting manner in which they were treated” is only a blip on the collective radar. Trust me, folks; even with his article, you don’t even know the half of it. Things are much, much worse than they seem.

Snyder was never directly implicated in any of these dealings, but that’s almost more damning than if he had been involved. 14 of the 15 women signed non-disclosure agreements with team, and there’s no way that happened with Snyder’s tacit approval. He knew what was going on was enough to sink him, but rather than putting an end to it, he let it fester. He let the cancer grow, sucking the life out of innocent women. That doesn’t even take into account the Washington Football Team cheerleaders being treated as escorts for weird corporate sponsors, being forced to change in front of strangers and having nude photoshoots.

Dan Snyder knew of these things, knew they were wrong, and regardless of if he was personally involved, allowed it to happen under his team. Silence is complicity. If the buck stops with the boss, Snyder has failed in his duty not only as an owner of a sports franchise, but as a human being.

One of the weirdest things that spawned from Bruce Allen’s mind during his mind-numbing ten year tenure with the team was the “Homecoming” game. At some point in the middle of the season, starting in 2013, the Washington Football team would don classic uniforms. The team would bring back the legends of old from those glorious Super Bowl years, introducing them to a crowd that was 40% the other teams fans and 60% fans who cheered out of a moral duty to cheer more than actually wanting to do so. Usually, they’d go out of their way to lose those games (it turns out that away teams don’t like being treated like they’re going to get steamrolled in a “homecoming game”, who knew?), and the legends would be there on the sidelines, probably wanting to be anywhere else in the world than watching the fan base they fucking built head for the exits early.

At the end of the day, all Dan Snyder had to sell to fans was 1.) hope and 2.) the past. When hope finally ran out, all Snyder had was those Super Bowl trophies he hadn’t won. All he had was Homecoming games for legends who were forced to watch the embarrassing product Dan put on the field. All he had was a culture of winning, built by Joe Gibbs and Bobby Beathard and Jack Kent Cooke, that he could shove out there while refusing to build one of his own. All he had was the name, because the name is the only thing of value that Snyder owns.

He doesn’t have the drive to make the team better. He doesn’t have the decency to protect women. He doesn’t have the brains to stay out of football operations, which he clearly knows nothing about. He didn’t have the courage to change the name until his beloved sponsors threatened his cash flow. Snyder has nothing.

Nothing but two cultures he stole; one from Native Americans, and one from the coaches, players, front office personnel and fans who have had to watch this Trump-light fuckboi ruin the thing they loved and turn it into something to be embarrassed and ashamed by.

For some, the revelation that Washington’s culture is toxic, destructive and horrifying was a shock for a well known, national sports franchise that could a black mark on the NFL forever.

For Washington football fans, it was just another Thursday.