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Yep. It's been two days since the Game of Thrones' episode "The Rains of Castamere," and I have trouble sleeping.
Events from The Red Wedding have been carved into my subconscious and are now making their way into my writing. There is no escaping them. You could say someone figuratively put a latch on the church door of my brain, and then of course murdered everything inside of it with crossbows. I should be able to subject myself to something less violent on Sunday nights, like 22 men on a field smashing the crap out of each other to get a ball past a certain point on a field.
But because the events in the penultimate episode of Season 3 will go down as the worst wedding in television history, it got me thinking what the worst "wedding" in Redskins history is. Which pairing was supposed to be happily sent off into the sunset but instead broke an axle before it hit the freeway?
Maybe it's because he's in the news, but the Donovan McNabb and Mike Shanahan pairing comes to mind, and it didn't exactly wash the bad taste of the Jim Zorn era out of the fanbase's mouths. McNabb was routinely booed and perceived to be under-appreciated in rival town Philadelphia, and it would have been a lovely slap in the face to the Eagles had McNabb succeeded in Washington. Instead, he got benched midseason for Rex Grossman and was publicly criticized by his head coach. The team ultimately went 6-10 that season, and McNabb was granted his divorce papers.
On a larger scale, the Dan Snyder and Vinny Cerrato tandem called the shots in the Redskins front office for 10 miserable years. In those seasons, the Redskins had two playoff wins and countless busts in free agency and the draft, despite being granted an entire team's worth of draft picks in 1999. Mercifully, ties with Cerrato were cut for good in 2009, and Bruce Allen and Shanahan have done a commendable job in roster building ever since.
Or how about the pairing of Albert Haynesworth and Mike Shanahan? Or Albert Haynesworth and the 3-4 defense? Or maybe Albert Haynesworth and work ethic? Or how about Albert Haynesworth and the sport of football?
Face it— there's been plenty of heartbreak in Washington over the course of recent history, and much of it has to do with failed "marriages." The comments section is wide open for other awful duos in Redskins history that may have been too painful to recount before. Here's hoping that venting about it will alleviate the pain of some of those arrows.