Snyder, Lerner man up amid man-made disasters

The reports of damage are still coming in from around the globe. Uprooted forests caused by high winds. Tsunamis forming throughout the Pacific. Tectonic plate shifting like cards being shuffled. Mayan priests throwing their calendars down in disgust and saying, "Three years, we missed by! Damn it!"

All because Danny Snyder caused the planet to stop spinning by apologizing for the Washington Redskins' bad behavior.

As owner of a team with a 2-5 mark -- and losses to Detroit and Kansas City -- Dan Snyder has a lot to (kind of) apologize for. (US Presswire)

Well, "apology" isn't the exact word because he did it quickly, without specifying what he was actually apologizing for. He did say, "We feel sorry for the fans," although he never got around to why.

But this is closer than he's ever come before, and is even more remarkable when you consider that he's the second owner this week to acknowledge monumental failure. Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner met with two members of the Dawg Pound to hear their complaints, offer some suggestions of his own and all in all come off like a hell of a guy -- a hell of a guy who just happened to hire Eric Mangini and fire general manager George Kokinis months after hiring him.

But Lerner's performance was nowhere near as startling as Snyder's half-performance, because Snyder is even more reclusive than Lerner and by all general accounts less comfortable having to explain himself at any time, let alone now. After all, the Redskins are now perceived as one of a hard-to-embarrass town's most embarrassing products -- and that includes the Nationals, Wizards and Congress.

Then again, the Nationals, Wizards and Congress don't have Vinny Cerrato as their front man, so there you go.

The Redskins have been laughably inept this year even by their laughably inept standards, from the bad results to the ban on signs (many of which have Snyder and Cerrato as their principal nouns) to their humiliating treatment of head coach Jim Zorn to Cerrato having enough time on his hands to have a radio show that lasts more hours per week than the team has wins.

In short, they have managed to enrage a town that has long been cowed by their imperiousness, a development so universal that Snyder popped up out of his warren to fall gently on an untwisted paper clip (as opposed to a sword) in response.

"It really hurts," Snyder told a group of teachers and students while congratulating the franchise for its contributions to renovate some Maryland high school football fields. "We are really trying very, very hard, everyone at Redskins Park, the coaches, the players. The organization's quite frankly held together well, and I think we've got an opportunity the rest of the season to hopefully get it going. But to date we've let everyone down, including ourselves, and we know that and we're just apologetic."

Not exactly Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and frankly, nobody there really wanted to hear how well the organization has held together when it clearly hasn't, but it was an acknowledgement that someone has to answer for this level of ham-handedness, and the pantsless coach had already been thrown into the fire as an offering that the fans did not accept.

After all, even an empty gesture works for awhile. And when it stops working, well, put it this way: We keep hearing the words, "Vinny, you're up" in the distance.

Lerner wasn't quite so dramatic, although he spent nearly two hours with the two Dawgs talking about ideas to spruce up the game-day experience (although there was no word whether Kokinis' head on a pike was considered part of the game-day experience) and convinced them at the end of the meeting that he was actually a grand fellow.

Of course, they concentrated more on the lack of championship banners inside the stadium and having the security arrangements lowered to that of minimum-security prison visiting pens than they did the actual football team, which is really quite awful. But again, it was an incremental acknowledgement, albeit one not in a news conference setting where actual pointed questions and follow-ups would be produced. It was, however, an admission that one cannot keep jamming a pistol in a customer's ribs and calling it fan relations and get away with it.

At least not without a .500 record.

The planetary damage caused by these two acts has not yet been calculated, but physicists around the world fear even worse if Al Davis, whose own little tire fire in Oakland just keep glowing redder and redder with each passing week, decides to improve upon the Snyder/Lerner trend.

"We've actually asked the Raiders not to apologize for anything," said one University of California physicist who asked that his name not be mentioned for fear of being interviewed about the Tom Cable situation. "We believe that could cause the planet to actually snap off its axis and hurtle into the sun. When we contacted them, they put us on hold and never actually did pick up the call again, but we're confident that they will stay the course."

A release by the team claiming credit for saving Earth from utter annihilation with the legend "Commitment To Solar System Excellence" at the bottom was expected by week's end.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.