Boo-birds

This whole mess about Robert Henson (who? exactly...) is ridiculous. I saw an interview with him after his tweet about how 'Skins fans were "dimwits" for booing the team during Sunday's 9-7 squeaker against the lowly Rams. Seemed like a nice guy who genuinely liked fans, but just thought they should be positive all the time. I'm not too concerned with his statements about this, mostly because the guy a) doesn't play a lot and b) seems not terribly savvy when it comes to these sorts of things. I am, however, very concerned with the comments from Chris Cooley and Antwan Randle-El that basically said the same thing. From the D.C. Sports Bog, I'll quote Cooley for you:

I think Washington prides themselves on being the best fans, and I think that they should try to be the best fans. We won. I understand they wanted us to beat the Rams by 40, but we still won, and we if we continue to win games, that's great. Booing's unnecessary.

Chris, I love this team just about as much as anyone around, but here's the deal. The people in the stadium, they just spent an average of probably $75-80 to get in the door. They spent another $40-50 to park. They pay $8 a beer...hell, they pay $5 just to buy their kid a coke. They do all these things because they love the team and they love the game. I think there are plenty of poorly-adjusted, no-perspective fans out there starting premature boos for no real good reason, and I imagine that's the root of this. But fans have a right to expect a couple things from their professional team: effort and competence. Talent's on the G.M. and the owner (no comment there), and luck gets left to a higher power. I don't doubt the Redskins effort at all (though I will say that Jason Campbell's interception against the Giants was at least in part due to a lack of effort from Santana Moss, whose stock has seriously plummeted in these first two games), but I do doubt their competence. Particularly that of the coaching staff, and I bet that if you polled the boo-birds at FedEx on Sunday, that's who most of them would blame.

The common tagline is that the players don't come to our "9-to-5" jobs and heckle us, so we shouldn't do the same. A better comparison is with another public persona very common to our town -- the politician. His or her competence is subject to public debate and derision on a near daily basis. It's part of the job that they very willingly entered into. The equivalent of boo-ing -- protesting, writing heated op-eds, starting a blog, etc. -- is fair game in the political arena.

I understand the Redskins asking for a little patience. And yes, if they continue to win games, even if it's 6-3 or 9-7, fans should probably keep a lid on it. But does Cooley really believe they even have a chance to win many more games if they keep playing like this? If not, then the fans are just expressing their dissatisfaction with an unacceptable performance. If so, well...that would be the most shocking thing coming out of all this.