Peter Rosenberg had a major scheduling conflict last Sunday. With his first child due next month, he and his wife, Natalie, organized a baby shower to celebrate.
Unfortunately, it was during the Washington Commanders game.
Rosenberg, who grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, is a lifelong fan. He never misses a game and is particularly invested now that the team — after nearly three decades of poor performances on the field and multiple scandals off it — is good again.
“I’ve wanted to have kids for a long time, so this is very, very exciting. This is a really, really big deal,” Rosenberg, a 45-year-old radio and TV host, said in an interview. “But I cannot emphasize enough how big of a deal it is in my life that this team doesn’t bring me misery.”
With the Commanders vying for a postseason spot, every game is big. They were supposed to cruise against a hapless New Orleans Saints team that was starting a backup quarterback. Except late in the fourth quarter, Washington allowed a 17-point lead to diminish to one point.
“The party is really getting going,” said Rosenberg, who watched on an iPad. “I’m trying to be present and I’m trying to be a part of it, but all of a sudden they give up a field goal and then another field goal and then the touchdown.”
When the Commanders did not allow the Saints to complete a two-point conversion, winning the game, he finally felt comfortable returning to the event.
“I threw my arms up in the air,” he said. “I walked around the room and greeted everyone officially, appropriately and happily. Natalie and I hugged and celebrated for a moment, and then I was able to fully enjoy our baby shower.”
What Rosenberg experienced — joy in a team that has mostly provided him anything but that — is a shared sentiment across the fan base. A once-proud franchise with three Super Bowl wins with three different starting quarterbacks in 1982, 1987 and 1991 fell into the depths of despair after much-maligned owner Dan Snyder bought it in 1999. However, since he sold the Commanders in April 2023, there has been a renewed sense of hope. Washington, at 9-5, is off to its best start since 1992. It has not won a playoff game since 2005, meaning an entire generation of fans has not experienced what it’s like to root for a winning organization. Times are changing.
‘The experience had been destroyed’
When Jeffrey Wright was 6 years old, he won a raffle at Hecht’s department store to be the “Mascot of the Week” for that Sunday’s game. The team fitted him out with a full uniform and let him run out onto the RFK Stadium field before the matchup. He then sat in the end zone and “watched [them] kick the teeth out of the Dallas Cowboys.”
Wright, an actor who is now 59, smiles thinking back to that afternoon. He has gone on to win Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony awards, yet memories of attending games with his mother — who had season tickets beginning in 1970 — hold just as much significance in shaping who he is today.
But the team Wright grew to love as a kid changed completely when Snyder took over in 1999. A franchise once thought of as a pillar of the league has spent much of the last 25 years consistently losing on the field and embroiled in negativity off it. Under Snyder, there were more name changes (three) than playoff victories (two). So you can imagine why Wright was fine letting go of his mother’s seats when she died in 2019.
“It obviously wasn’t the happiest thing to do. But it wasn’t so difficult,” he said in an interview. “The franchise had been destroyed. The experience had been destroyed. I felt that something had been carved out of the heart of my childhood. I just felt, like a lot of us did, kind of abused by the relationship to the team. You just had to cut loose.”
It was a notion shared by much of the fan base.
In 24 seasons under Snyder, the team had just six playoff appearances, four NFC East titles and three double-digit winning seasons. He had 27 different starting quarterbacks and 10 head coaches. The team’s .427 winning percentage ranked 27th in the NFL from 1999 to 2022.
On top of the poor product on the field, Snyder found himself surrounded by negativity off it. The team was widely criticized for how it was run from the top down. In both 2021 and 2023, the NFL fined it $10 million and $60 million, respectively, after investigations of allegations of sexual harassment and workplace conduct.
Snyder also faced backlash for the way he treated fans, including charging to attend training camp — the first time that had occurred in NFL history — and suing people who tried to back out of ticket renewal plans. One of those fans, a 72-year-old grandmother, had had season tickets since the early 1960s.
The team’s name was also a hot-button topic. Snyder vowed publicly to “never change the name” from “Redskins” even though it had long been condemned as an anti-Indigenous slur. But in 2020, after years of pressure from the NFL, major sponsors and groups like the National Congress of American Indians, the franchise moved on.
While not all fans were happy with the decision, those who opposed the name felt they finally could root for a franchise without feeling in the wrong.
“We were not only the laughingstock of the NFL, but we were morally corrupt,” said Eddie Huang, a writer, director and chef. “I had Redskins stuff; we all did. But when you get older, you’re just like: ‘Whoa, this is terrible. Dan Snyder is terrible. The name is bad. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on.’”
Asked to sum up Snyder’s tenure in one word, Wright said, “Misery.”
Grant Paulsen, a local radio host at 106.7 The Fan, has been covering the team since 1999. He began as a beat reporter with the station and four years later transitioned to be a midday host.
With countless fans calling in each day, nobody else knows the pulse of the community like he does. He said Snyder was so unlikable that people refused to buy team merchandise and stopped attending games simply because it felt wrong to support him.
In Snyder’s final season in charge, a franchise that once led the league in average attendance ranked dead last.
“To me, if the fandom of his team was a block of ice, he was taking a chisel and just swinging it,” Paulsen said. “Little by little, just chipping away and chipping away until it was all gone.”
A new hope
For a while, it appeared there was no chance Snyder, 60, would sell.
When he agreed to sell the franchise for more than $6 billion to a group led by Josh Harris in May 2023, the decision sent shock waves through the fan base.
Harris’ group, which included NBA Hall of Famer Magic Johnson, brought on advisers like former Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers to assist in a search for a new general manager and head coach. They landed Adam Peters, previously the assistant general manager of the San Francisco 49ers, and former Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn.
But the biggest move came in the 2024 NFL draft. The Commanders selected LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels, the winner of the Heisman Trophy, at No. 2 overall to be the savior of the franchise. So far, he has lived up to the hype.Daniels has thrown for 3,045 yards, 17 touchdowns and only six interceptions through 14 games. He has also run for 656 yards (46.9 per game), the second most in the league behind reigning MVP Lamar Jackson.
“He’s the quarterback we’ve deserved for suffering all these years,” Huang said. “He’s the guy. I absolutely think this kid is the face of the NFL for the next 15 years.”
Nothing encapsulated that feeling more than Daniels’ Hail Mary touchdown pass in the final seconds against the Chicago Bears in October. Trailing 15-12 with six seconds remaining, Daniels avoided multiple defenders and launched a 52-yard bomb toward the end zone. The ball tipped off multiple players and landed in the hands of receiver Noah Brown for the game-winner.
More than 65,000 fans at Northwest Stadium in the Maryland suburb of Landover lost their minds, including Wright, who was filming Showtime’s “The Agency” in London. He said he immediately left for Washington Dulles International Airport from the game and, despite the jet lag, “could have stayed up for three days after that flight.” “There hasn’t been a moment like that in a stadium in D.C. in decades,” he said. “I was just so pumped. That was an absolute jet lag cure. That was a memorable, memorable night in the story of this franchise. It was just a stamp on the beginning of a new era.”