Disaster is waiting in the wings. So let’s frame things for a moment.

For the six years prior to Dan Snyder owning the team, the Redskins averaged 6 wins.

Under him, they’ve averaged a game and a half better, at 7.6.

In those prior six years, their average Offensive ranking was 16, their average Defensive ranking 20 (both points, not yards — I personally think yards deceive, because it’s points that really matter).

In ten years under Snyder, their average Offensive ranking was 21, their average Defensive rating 15.

In other words, all that’s happened is that the units have flipped. One side got better, the other side worse. The six years prior to Snyder’s arrival had a better offense than we remember — an average offense — and the past ten years they’ve had a defense ranked in the top ten half of the years he’s owned the team (six times if you measure it by yards, but again, I don’t).

This year, the Redskins have an Offense ranked 29th in points scored, 24th in yards. They have a Defense ranked 6th in points allowed and 7th in yards allowed.

In other words: as bad as it seems, this is really par for the course: a below average Offense has become a terrible one, and a Defense has remained a top ten entity.

A top ten defense coupled with a terrible offense makes for a solidly below average team. This is all the more frustrating when you consider that the defense is primarily composed of free agents (only four out of eleven current starters were drafted by the team), while the reverse is true of the offense, a majority of which was drafted by the team in the person of Mr. Vinny Cerrato, a yes-man caricature of a disastrous front office man, whose incoherent style has translated to a misbegotten mashup of players, none of whom fit the offensive scheme the Redskins currently run.

The lesson of the past few years, as told via the Worldwide Leader and countless commentators, is that Defense Wins Championships. This is actually, upon further inspection, a lie — the Baltimore Ravens of old are the exception that proves the rule. There are plenty of examples of top ten defenses, including the Redskins teams of the past decade, that have missed the playoffs or made no mark in them. The truth is that you can’t win without a defense — that Balance Wins Championships. A top flight offense without a capable defense is chewy fodder for better teams in January, but everyone needs to be able to manage the clock, control possession, and score points.

So how do you fix this terrible offense? There are two solutions, both of which the Redskins, in my opinion, are likely to follow: a new scheme (which means a new head coach), and a new front office (which means a new GM).

Let’s take the front office first. This week has, for Redskins fandom, been primarily focused on the injury to left tackle Chris Samuels. Arguably the best and most consistent Redskins player of the past decade, Samuels has consistently faced some of the best attacking talent in the NFL in recent years. What is amazing, if you pause to consider it, is the list of Redskins quarterbacks he’s protected in that time.

• Brad Johnson
• Jeff George
• Todd Husak
• Tony Banks
• Kent Graham
• Shane Matthews
• Danny Wuerffel
• Patrick Ramsey
• Tim Hasselbeck
• Rob Johnson
• Gibran Hamdan
• Mark Brunell
• Jason Campbell
• Todd Collins

There’s something you’ll notice about this list, and it’s not good: only two of these quarterbacks could ever have been considered in the top tier of passers in the league, and only one of them — Johnson — had his best season in a Redskins uniform (in 1999, Johnson threw for 4,005 yards, 24 TDs, 13 INTs, and a 60.9% completion percentage). The next best single season is the veteran Brunell’s, in 2005, when he threw for 3,050 yards, 23 TDs, and 10 INTs — a shadow of his former self, but good enough in a run heavy offense. Both, as you might expect, were playoff years.

There’s something else you may notice here: very few if any of these quarterbacks have the same skillset or similar talents. A consistent offense demands a consistent passer. While Campbell has proven himself to be an acceptable if limited pro-caliber passer in the past two seasons, the rest of these players are backup quality at best. Consistency demands a signal caller who has the capability to make a variety of throws, limit turnovers, lead a two minute drive, and force defenses to stay honest. Surveying the league, this can be said to be true of, by my count, 22 out of 32 franchises — the exceptions being the Raiders, Bills, Dolphins, Buccaneers, Jets, Lions, Browns, Niners, Titans and yes, the Redskins.

Collectively, no team in this grouping has more than three wins, several are winless, and most are at the bottom of their divisions. Only two teams with terrible records — the winless Rams with an injured Marc Bulger, and the one win Chiefs with an injured Matt Cassel — have quarterbacks who have proven themselves to be in the top tier of quarterbacks in the NFL in the recent past.

Under Snyder, the Redskins desperately need someone who can build, run, and sustain an offense. That means adopting a mentality, drafting players who fit that mentality, and going from there. Most importantly, it means having a quarterback who fits your system: there’s a perfect example of system-shock in the circumstances in Chicago, where Jay Cutler’s inability to adapt to Ron Turner’s offense is proving disastrous, versus those in Denver, where the previously mediocre Kyle Orton has shown himself to be an excellent fit in Josh McDaniels’ system.

It does not require years of effort to build a consistent above-average offense with acceptable personnel. One need not look at the Colts, Patriots, Eagles or Saints as the model here: instead, look at a team like Houston. The Texans have built a showstopping offense around the solid Matt Schaub (seeing Schaub several times at UVA, I always believed he’d be an excellent quarterback at the pro level, but even I am amazed at his skill at this point in his relatively young career), a field-stretching receiver, a relatively light but agile line, and a quick athletic scatback in Steve Slaton.

These pieces fit together well, after being assembled in essentially three years, in ways that contrast notably with the schizophrenic pursuits of the Redskins — a team which has shifted from Norv Turner’s Dallas attack, to Martyball, to Fun-and-Gun, to Gibbs’ Smashmouth 2.0, to Al Saunders, to a hybrid West Coast attack all in less than a decade. Inconsistent offensive schemes make for inconsistent offensive drafts, and while the Redskins’ defensive scheme is for the most part unchanged, and the consistency there has proved rewarding, the back and forth nature of the demands and requirements of the offense has resulted in a soup of ridiculously unmatched talent, with an aging offensive line nearly bereft of depth and aging skill players backed up by a mix of mediocrity and outright busts.

The front office has to take the blame for this circumstance, and in this team’s arrangement, that translates to the aforementioned Cerrato. Cerrato is not the worst personnel head in the NFL, and he deserves credit for his strong, defense-focused first round picks — he ignored pleas from the fanbase in taking Sean Taylor over Kellen Winslow, Carlos Rogers over Mike Williams — none of whom were embarrassing busts (which cannot be said of nearly any team in the NFL over the past several years). The worst first round pick arguably happened in the one year he was absent (Rod Gardner). That said, Cerrato fails not on the big questions, but on countless little ones — his drafts have failed to produce the cheap raw talent in the middle rounds that grows into starting caliber players.

In my opinion, entirely from the outside, Cerrato now understands his destiny is tied to Coach Jim Zorn’s. His recent statement of support for the coach is just the last domino in a long chain of events — particularly Cerrato’s notable failures in the 2006 free agent period and the 2008 draft, both of which had wide-ranging ramifications for the franchise — which has put his head in the stocks. If this season doesn’t turn around for the Redskins — and a turnaround, ridiculously unlikely at this point, would mean a better than .500 season — it is altogether too convenient for Snyder to send a signal to the fans by dismissing both Zorn and Cerrato, and starting anew: a new scheme, and a new front office to fuel it.

Snyder is not an awful owner. There are clearly worse ones in the league — in my opinion, I’ll always favor an owner who’s willing to take the money gained on a team and re-invest it, as opposed to one happy to stand pat with below average personnel and a system proven not to work — and Snyder is clearly a fan of the franchise, not merely a money-grubbing businessman looking to benefit himself. Unfortunately, it’s clear that Snyder has many of the same weaknesses as Jerry Jones in Dallas: a tendency to meddle, to waste money on subpar or over-the-hill talent (Dallas tends to overspend for young while Washington overspends for old — the Cowboys trade a third round pick for Drew Henson and hands him $3.5 million guaranteed without playing a down, the Redskins trade a second and sixth round pick for Jason Taylor), and to make excessively petty moves. Snyder has more playoff wins in his tenure than Jones, of course — but otherwise, their teams are remarkably similar: they make a great deal of money for their owners, they dominate the offseasons, and their fans are watching someone else in January.

If Snyder truly wants to change that, he’ll hand the reins of the front-office to a proven GM — there are a solid five or six names in the market this coming year — who will select and approve a proven offensive-minded head coach, and allow him the time to build, run, and sustain that offense. That’s the only way you’ll achieve balance on this team, and in my opinion, it’s the only way the Redskins will ever be a real contender.

For all the forced comparisons to the other man from Illinois, when it comes to domestic policy, thus far there is no presidency that Barack Obama’s resembles more than John F. Kennedy’s. Kennedy won the 1960 election by a narrower margin, but was still swept into office in Washington as a history making figure beloved by the intellectual elite. Both were (and are) young, inspiring politicians, who broke political lines once thought impregnable — the one religious, the other racial — buoyed toward the White House by the adoration of the press. On Capitol Hill, both found themselves the beneficiaries of large, filibuster-proof Democratic majorities. And both, when it came to getting things done with those majorities, failed dramatically.

You can also find it at TNL, along with the rest of my work.

Football teams have windows of opportunity in the NFL. They have a handful of years to make a run, usually tied to the tenure of an established quarterback paired with a solid defense. Pittsburgh is in the middle of their window right now, as is San Diego and Baltimore — for the Colts, the Eagles and New England, those windows may be closing. Looking at the Redskins of 2009, it’s hard to feel like this is a team that has several good years ahead of it. While the defense is young and solid, the offensive line is one of the oldest groups in the league, and it’s thin to say the least — young talent like RT Stephon Heyer and RG Chad Rinehart look more like backup quality players than starters. Stud running back Clinton Portis likely has only two more years of life, if the 30-year mark for RBs in this NFL holds true, wideouts Santana Moss and Antwaan Randle El are aging, and last year’s crop of second-round pass-catchers has failed to impress thus far. Once again, this looks like a team that will hold opponents to low scoring outputs, but be frustrated from putting points up on the board.

Prediction: Mediocrity! But at least it’ll be entertaining mediocrity.

I bring all this out to show the parallels between sort of post-modern (for lack of a better term) sports writing on the internet, twitter, blogs, and the like, and the greatest sports writing ever, which has very little to do with the alternatively obsequious or bellicose 800 word columns and maddening boilerplate recaps we have become accustomed to.

“The Four Horsemen” would not have been published by a reputable institution anytime in the last fifty-years. By modern standards, it is not a very good sports story.

It is merely the greatest sports story of all time.

Follow him on Twitter here.

Francis is a brilliant venture capitalist and old Wall Street hand who’s now a tech businessman in New York, and his insights are particularly valuable in this kind of economic climate. I’m just asking questions, but I think it’s fast becoming a must-listen Podcast, and the reaction we’ve gotten from readers has been fantastic.

The RSS Feed for the Podcast is here. It goes up every morning at 9 AM, give or take a few minutes. If you prefer to subscribe to Coffee & Markets via iTunes, you can do that too.

In short, whatever Michael Bay’s sins may be, the sum of his talents definitely adds up to a kind of cinema. This cinema is what Sergio Leone referred to as “cinema cinema,” that is, cinema for its own sake, cinema in and for itself, cinema that exists for no other reason than to be cinema. Cinema as cinema is best expressed by the famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou: “A film is like a battleground. It has love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word: emotion.”

Michael Bay’s entire cinematic language consists of nothing but love, hate, action, violence, and death, and every one of his films is self-evidently a battleground. They are pure visual pageantry, possessed of an élan that seems to be nothing less than a cry of love for cinema as cinema. And this is precisely why the critics hate him.

Some of the most eloquent writing is in defense of what some view as indefensible.

Our Cosmopolitan President
Do the Wrong Thing: Obama’s War on Giving
The Centrist President
Burning Down Detroit
The End of Starbucks
Don’t Stop Believing
The War on Philanthropy

Hope you enjoy these.

I have the feature today, on The Right and the Challenge of the Environment. I hope you’ll check it out – I’ll be editing the Conservation section of the site going forward.

It’s true that the free market is, oftentimes, the enemy of the environment. It’s one of the greatest forces for freedom in the world, yes – but when it comes to many of the issues, I believe the marketplace espouses a view that is focused on the short term, not the long. It often makes perfect financial sense to operate at the narrow edge of irresponsibility, to stamp your feet about government ignoring property rights and bureaucracy passing ridiculous regulations, because it’s true that such things are often fundamentally unjust. Yet the actors in the market don’t usually evaluate land or sea in terms of stewardship – they evaluate it in terms of the immediate bottom line.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that overwhelmingly, the vast number of nations that can afford to make the decisions to protect and conserve land and sea, and be good stewards of the resources and creatures within them, are those that are thriving members of the global marketplace.

On Monday night at Father Neuhaus’s wake at Immaculate Conception in New York City, there were (by my estimate) roughly 1,200 people in a church that could hold about 800. I arrived far too early and not wanting to conflict with the evening service, went across the street to wait in one of the thousand dirty basement Irish bars there seem to be in that city, listening to the Brooklyn vowels of some angry Jets fans discussing personnel moves made and unmade.  New York is such an odd place.

After it got really packed I let an old woman have my seat and stood in the back.  The church was packed to the brim and every New York Catholic of note was there, it seemed like, interspersed with people who just knew him as “Father Richard, who baptized my son or my daughter,” and had no knowledge of his other work.  They seemed amazed to learn what he had achieved.

There were three eulogies after the homily. George Weigel’s was good, Jody Bottum’s was powerfully personal, and Robert Louis Wilken’s was inspired.  Of the three, Jody’s was the most political – at one point noting that, when the regime of abortion in America is finally ended, Father Neuhaus will be hailed rightly as a mighty champion for the cause of life, without whom it could never be achieved.  There were letters from the President, and not just of this country, and hundreds from around the world, filled with sorrow and prayer.

There were stories of his time at the church he described as “St. John the Mundane.”  There were stories of his conversion from Lutheran to Catholic, from liberal to conservative, but in both cases, it seemed more that the world turned around him than that he changed.  There were recitations of his favorite quotations – perhaps one of his favorite being one of Alexander Hamilton’s remarks, that “I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided.” There were notations on his favorite words – “Winsome.” “Egregious.” And favorite of all, “Convivium.”

When invited to “Convivium” at Fr. Neuhaus’s house, one was expected to arrive promptly by seven PM, in order to stand together and sing the evening prayer.  The discussions over his dinner table, usually surrounded by young Catholic men and women, were the stuff of legend.  His house was always a mess, but a mess with unique stories hidden in it, and some excellent wine.  Perhaps the oddest furnishing was his bathroom wall that was papered with photographs of all these young people, so that he could see them while he shaved, and be reminded to pray for them as he walked – or jaywalked, which he was famous for, with a Calvinists’ sense that those cars would do what they would do – during the day.

There were many, many tales of his addiction to cheap liquor (Jack Daniels at its finest) and good cigars (two a day on average), and more tales of his long friendship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who would always stay with him once a year. Rabbi Heschel always said that he would bring the liquor if Father Neuhaus brought the opinions, but in truth, he brought both.  Neuhaus called him “Father Heschel” – and Heschel called him “Rabbi Neuhaus.”

He made terrible coffee, but it motivated him to stay up later and talk more, so everyone always encouraged him to make it.  He wrote 12,000 words a month for print, on average, and near the end, confided from his deathbed that he only wished he had the time to write more. He was motivated always by a longing for “prudence, justice, courage, wisdom, holiness,” and his mantra of “fidelity, fidelity, fidelity.”

Father Neuhaus once confided that the secret to his prodigious ability was to make sure he said his morning prayer every day before he read the newspaper.  Putting God first, he could get to the work God asked of him with a mind set to the right purpose.

The next morning, the day of the funeral mass, the church was even more packed – I would estimate as many as 1,600.  I stood in the back behind what seemed like the entire editorial board of National Review, First Things, and the bevy of priests who were there.  I missed a small amount of the mass, as there was an elderly woman who had come out with a cane who I ended up helping around quite a bit.  But I heard the whole of the homily first, by Father Raymond de Souza.  Fr. de Souza began by saying “Cardinal Ratzinger once said…” and had a quote that seemed relatively minor.  He then explained that he thought Fr. Neuhaus would have approved of any funeral homily that began, “Cardinal Ratzinger said,” because it was one of his favorite things to begin any conversation with in life.

Fr. de Souza’s remarks focused on this verse from Isaiah, one of my personal favorites which apparently was one of Fr. Neuhaus’s favorites as well, and its description of what he called “the eternal Convivium” of believers.  It is the Convivium that begins at the Altar, and ends in the Kingdom of God.

We recited the RSV translation instead of the NAB (to avoid, they said, setting the Father to spinning before he was in the grave):

The loss of Fr. Neuhaus, Hadley Arkes said, “For his friends this is the kind of loss that tilts the world on its axis; for so many things marking the world around just cannot be the same.”  But having been to this vigil and this mass, I feel like this is not true.  It may seem the case to us – it may seem wrong, unjust, unfair.  But I think now that it is right, and good, and the way things ought to be.

He once wrote of the cross: “This is the axis mundi, the center upon which the cosmos turns.”  He liked that phrase.  And now he knows it in full.  I have no doubt of that.

For this is the way the story should end: a sinner becomes a man of God, a man of God becomes a great warrior for God, and a warrior for God, triumphant in his work, goes now to be with God – welcomed as a champion.