After an offseason of change, the Washington Football Team’s most important question remains

Eight-and-a-half months later — 8½ months in which Washington has taken exactly zero competitive snaps — Snyder’s team, and his world, are transformed, in some ways that were absolutely expected and in others that still seem astonishing. For Snyder, changing coaches is like changing clothes, and Callahan was only the interim replacement for Jay Gruden, anyway.

That Snyder hired Ron Rivera as the 10th head coach of his tenure gave us a new personality to study, just as we had studied Gruden and Mike Shanahan and Jim Zorn and all the way back to Marty Schottenheimer. In Ashburn, changing the nameplate outside the head man’s office door is business as usual.

But for a franchise fully familiar with tumult, this offseason trumped all others, as full a reset as can be achieved without the owner selling the team — a topic we now must address. But first, the turnover. The name: Redskins out, TBD in. The team president: Allen fired, Jason Wright in. The play-by-play voice and head of all media: Michael gone in disgrace, Julie Donaldson in.

And then, most importantly, the owners: Snyder’s minority partners want out — or maybe want to buy him out. Whatever happens on the field under Rivera, that’s the story most worth watching.

Think about those pieces as a whole before we break them down: There’s not an aspect of the organization that doesn’t have new leadership. The football operation. The business operation. The media operation. Shoot, extend the overhaul to athletic training, and there is scarcely an area of the building in Ashburn that looks the same as it did before. Given all the suffering — inside that building and in the fan base — that’s warranted.

But as all those people take on all those new jobs and responsibilities, it’s worth remembering that the one constant over the past two decades — two absolutely futile, dispiriting decades — is Snyder. I’ve written it before. It can’t be written enough.

So tread cautiously here. Does the whole of the recent changes add up to more than the sum of the parts? Or does the continued presence of Snyder override whatever deck chairs have been thrown overboard and replaced?

To that end: Even as the Sept. 13 opener against Philadelphia marks Rivera’s debut as coach and Chase Young’s first game as a potential disruptive force on defense and Dwayne Haskins’s chance to emerge as a franchise quarterback, the owner’s suite is where the action is.

Changing the name after Snyder swore it would never happen was jarring, but it also felt inevitable. Yes, it took the societal unrest that swept the nation from late spring through the summer to finally force change. But even without the police killing of George Floyd, it was hard to stand there at the beginning of 2020 and say, “This team will be called the Redskins in 2030 or 2025.” Given how many people consider it an outright slur, it didn’t make logical sense or business sense, and the latter is what ultimately pushed Snyder to move.

So the most significant pivot surrounding the franchise this offseason wasn’t Rivera’s arrival or Allen’s departure or the change to being called, for now, the Washington Football Team. Rather, it was whatever infighting is going on between Snyder and his long-standing minority partners — Robert Rothman, Dwight Schar and Fred Smith.

The first issues in these relationships became public in early July, in the hours before Snyder announced the club would explore the idea of changing the team’s name. FedEx, the company that has its name plastered on the team’s stadium and boasts Smith as its CEO, formally and publicly asked what it called “the team in Washington” to change its name. At the time, that might not have seemed like a salvo from Smith to Snyder. Maybe we should have seen it that way.

From there came the news that Smith, Rothman and Schar — all minority partners since 2003 who together control about 40 percent of the team — were trying to sell their stakes. They no longer considered Snyder a worthy partner. Imagine that.

Now, looming over Snyder’s franchise — and therefore Snyder himself — is the investigation of the team’s culture by attorney Beth Wilkinson following a pair of stories in The Washington Post in which more than 40 women, many on the record, detailed an environment in which degradation and harassment occurred daily.

There’s so much worth tracking about this franchise. But we have to be clearheaded about the issue that could trump it all: the result of the investigation and whatever impact that might have on ownership. Yes, pay attention to how Wright — the NFL’s first Black team president — handles his forward-facing role with this team. But also watch how he speaks about and relates to the owner, because his statement following the latest damning Post story differed in both tone and substance from Snyder’s. Watch how Donaldson, the franchise’s highest-ranking woman, transforms the content both on game day, when she’ll work with Bram Weinstein and former Washington defensive back DeAngelo Hall, and during the week, when the team’s television shows will surely have a different tone.

And watch how Rivera, who has garnered almost nothing but respect before he even coaches a game here, brings together a team and a coaching staff that has some pieces to work with. The novel coronavirus pandemic dictates that there won’t be fans at FedEx Field, but the games — against Philadelphia this first weekend, at Arizona and at Cleveland the next two — still count. There will be progress, meaningful progress, to track.

But in a year in which the football team changed its coach, its president, its radio team and its name, the most significant change is still afoot. Right now, Daniel Snyder still owns the Washington Football Team. If there’s a chance — even a tiny chance — that could change before 2021, then it has to be more important than whether Rivera can coach or Haskins can throw or Young can dominate. The only constants since 1999 have been Snyder and losing, and it’s possible — even with the otherwise complete overhaul of the franchise — that the former must go so the latter can stop.

Read more: