Playing the 49ers reminds of past failures, but Washington seems to have finally moved on

It’s a strange time for Washington. The team doesn’t have a name, Snyder’s co-owners are trying to sell their shares, an independent investigation into a longtime culture of harassment around the organization has lingered all season and yet on the field, the franchise may never have had a more optimistic 5-7 team. The return of Alex Smith, a three-game winning streak, a realistic shot to win a bad NFC East and the victory over Pittsburgh has given the team its first flickers of hope in years.

In a way, it’s fitting that Washington plays San Francisco this weekend, for the 49ers are filled with relics of the last, calamitous decade — a death spiral of dysfunction and double-digit losing seasons that sent the franchise slumping into irrelevance.

There’s the Niners Coach Kyle Shanahan, the son of Mike Shanahan to whom Snyder bestowed all football power in 2010, whose Super Bowl run last year was a constant reminder of the young, bright offensive assistants — including the Rams’ Sean McVay and Packers’ Matt LaFleur — who left the team only to win big as head coaches elsewhere.

There’s Trent Williams, the star left tackle and one of the faces of Washington’s franchise in the 2010s whose refusal to play for the team after a botched cancer diagnosis enveloped the team in a fog of gloom for all of last year.

There’s Jordan Reed, the gifted tight end whose brilliance was squelched by constant injuries — symbolic of a team that ended the previous three seasons with more than 20 players on injured reserve.

All of them are unwitting but glowing tokens of what Washington football had become in the second decade of Snyder’s ownership. But their arrival now is a milepost that shows just how far the team has moved away from the disaster of the past. At this point last season — just as Rivera and Snyder first talked — much of the conversation surrounding the team was about how Shanahan and McVay had gotten away, how hurt and outraged Williams felt about the only team he had ever known and how the organization couldn’t keep its best players healthy.

Now, the talk is about belief, about anticipation, about Smith’s miraculous return, about the end of Rivera’s treatments for cancer, about promising young stars like Terry McLaurin and Chase Young, about a three-game winning streak and about beating an undefeated Pittsburgh team in Washington’s biggest victory since beating Dallas in the last game of the magical anomaly that was the 2012 Robert Griffin III season.

“You remember what the conversation was that we had?” Rivera said Snyder told him in that Monday night phone call when Rivera brought up the meeting a year before.

“Yes, it was about culture and changing the culture of the team,” Rivera said he replied.

So far, it appears Rivera and Snyder have worked together better than any coach Snyder has had, save for Joe Gibbs. Maybe this is out of necessity — the restrictions brought by the coronavirus pandemic as well as the mountains of litigation and investigation — but Rivera and Snyder have maintained a harmonious, collaborative relationship that might surprise many former Washington coaches.

“I wish people knew the truth of what’s happening,” Rivera said in a phone interview early this season. “He’s given me carte blanche to run the football team. He’s been true to his word. Everything he said he would give me in January he has given me.”

This week, through a team spokesman, Rivera said he and Snyder speak regularly about the team and that Snyder’s only interest on these calls is to be informed about what is going on, leaving the decisions about players, coaches and plays to Rivera. As the coach went through his grueling cancer treatments over the season’s first two months, Snyder began each of their calls by asking Rivera about his health, Rivera said through the spokesman, not the team’s slow start to the season.

Many of those who know Rivera have said in recent months that he might be the ideal coach for Snyder, a man who commands respect from his players but with the right, even temperament to withstand the explosions of an impulsive owner. So far, they have run from the end of the last decade together and if nothing else, that’s a big change from the past.

“I think that’s pretty [much] gone,” Kyle Shanahan said on a conference call, Wednesday, when asked if he still has the old feelings of revenge in facing Snyder’s team.

Those old memories were from the last decade. He’s a head coach now, with an NFC championship on his resume. He sounded as if he had moved on, even offering praise for this new Washington team: “I can tell they’re being led very well.”

And as Rivera phoned Snyder on the way to Washington’s buses, beaming at the memory of a year-old phone conversation, it seemed his football team had moved on as well.

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