Josh Harris gets strong grades from Commanders fans during his honeymoon period

Survey results!!

Josh Harris has one huge advantage as the owner of Washington’s NFL franchise: he’s not the guy who owned it for 24 years before him.

Right away, Harris and his 17 (or so) partners have the huge advantage of being the saviors for which fans of the burgundy & gold had been fervently hoping for years.

Add to that the honeymoon phase that nearly anyone gets when they take over a position of responsibility (and ‘stewardship’ as Josh Harris likes to say), and you’ve got a sports owner probably has only one way to hurt his standing, and that is by doing something stupid.

So far, Harris has avoided any egregious errors. Moreover, he has clearly enunciated the path forward that he and his partners want to take, and — so far at least — seems to be delivering on what he says.

Here at Hogs Haven, we asked readers in a recent poll to grade Harris. Unsurprisingly, 92% of respondents gave him an “A” or a “B”.

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There are a few key aspects to the Harris ownership era that have arisen in his first 8 months, some enunciated by Harris himself and others that have been more fan-driven.

The new stadium is one of the most obvious issues. Clearly, one of the most urgent requirements for the new Washington owner is to secure a site, design a stadium, arrange funding, and build something that will be good for players and fans. With Harris not quite into his 8th month of ownership, this can only be seen as an “incomplete”, but with most voices saying that the best outcome would be a return to DC, the political developments over the past year should be seen as a clear sign that there will be good options available to the Harris group as they get get to the point in the coming year when they can probably make a firm commitment to which piece of land will be the home of the team in the coming decades.

“Leadership” is a word that Harris himself has used a lot in recent weeks and months as the team searched for, first, its next GM, and later, its next head coach. There was almost universal praise for both the speed and result of the GM search, with the franchise landing Adam Peters as the new guy in charge of football operations. While the head coach search process did not seem to go as smoothly, and while a number of people questioned the resulting hire of Dan Quinn, it’s hard to argue that Quinn isn’t the kind of coach Harris described — a strong leader of men.

Involvement in the process of running the team is a touchy subject in Washington. A huge issue with the former owner was that he imposed his own will on the football people he had hired, often with terrible results. As a result, any mention of owner involvement tends to trigger a certain portion of Washington fans. Harris seems to have, so far, carefully walked the line between being very involved with the team and learning more about the NFL and being a ‘meddling’ owner. While some people were concerned that Harris was part of the search committee for the team’s head coach, it would have been unreasonable to expect otherwise. However, many more people saw red flags waving when it was reported that Harris was sitting in on Combine interviews with quarterback prospects. Concerns seemed to be mostly quelled when further reporting revealed that Harris was basically just in the room and observing as part of his self-orientation to the NFL, and that he was not actually part of the interview process. Still, for some fans, a Combine interview room was clearly not where they wanted to see the owner.

One big issue for a large chunk of the fan base has to do with the 2-2-22 rebranding when it was announced that “We are…the Commanders”. While some fans have embraced the new identity, a lot of fans want to see that rebranding undone, or redone, or recalibrated. While a few fans continue to insist that the team will never be anything but the Redskins, the vast majority know that there’s no going back there. What many fans are looking for is a “do over” on the rebranding. They recognize that, while there will never be universal agreement on any new team name, they feel like it’s worth going through the effort and expense to get a name that’s better. Some are driven by the lack of identity associated with the Commanders name, which somehow comes across as more generic than the previous Washington Football Team non-brand. Others simply see the failed re-brand as the last big middle-finger to the fanbase from the team’s former owner; many of those fans see another rebrand as the path to eliminating the last vestiges of that 24-year nightmare.

In this week’s Reacts survey, we listed 5 areas and asked readers to say which of them was the area that they would highlight on Josh Harris’s report card as the most positive, and which the most negative.

Again, I don’t think there were any surprises.

Nearly 8 out of 10 respondents said that Harris’s personnel decisions had been the most positive of the five aspects. The hiring of Adam Peters and Eugene Shen as the GM and Sr. VP of Football Strategy, respectively, seem to be the two most popular decisions. Of course, part of this equation also includes the decision to move on from Ron Rivera, and the hiring of Dan Quinn would also seem to belong here, along with the decision to trade Montez Sweat and Chase Young mid-season.

Fans also seem to have appreciated Josh Harris’s engagement and involvement with key decisions in his first several months as the owner.

On the other hand, about 6 out of 10 respondents pointed to Harris’s approach to the team name as the most negative aspect of his ownership tenure. Harris has repeatedly said that he is aware of fans’ concerns, but that he has higher priorities at the moment. It could be that he will eventually revisit the brand, or it could be that, as a businessman, he is calculating that if he continues to treat it as a back-burner item, fan passion for a rebrand will simply dissipate and eventually disappear. If he’s banking on the latter, our survey results indicate that it’s going to take quite some time for the issue to fade from consciousness.

While the team is searching for a new stadium site, it is stuck at what was until recently known as FedExField, and is now being called Commanders Stadium. Fourteen percent of our respondents identified the stadium search and upgrades as the aspect they would highlight as being most negative. It’s hard to guess what any fan could fault in terms of the progress towards a new stadium if the old RFK site in DC is to be part of the consideration. The political maneuvering to make it possible to put a new stadium on that site has moved forward quickly in the months of Harris’s ownership, and nothing more can be done with that site at the moment. Of course, fans could be unhappy that Harris didn’t immediately choose a site in Southern Maryland or Northern Virginia in order to get the process of breaking ground for the next stadium underway more quickly. It seems more likely that fans who highlighted this as the negative area were focused on the upgrades to the current stadium — presumably feeling that either not enough had been done, or that the wrong things are being done. It might also reflect fan reaction to the recent NFLPA survey of players in which Washington players, answering the survey during Harris’s tenure, gave failing grades to issues that seem as if they could have been quickly addressed.

Interestingly, more fans highlighted Harris’s personal involvement in key decisions as a negative (11%) than as a positive (7%). As mentioned earlier, the fear of a meddlesome owner is a hot-button topic for Washington fans, and any appearance of the owner being involved in the football operations is too much. These are the fans who want to see the owner hire the guy in charge (Adam Peters) and then leave him alone to do what he was hired to do. Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect any sports owner to be 100% uninvolved with decision-making. No one is going to empower an employee to make decisions involving tens or millions or hundreds of millions of dollars without a meeting or a phone call. But I can understand how Harris’s involvement in the head coaching search and presence at the Combine interviews are concerns for a number of fans; I don’t share those concerns, but I understand them.

Of course, these 5 areas addressed in our survey are neither comprehensive nor particularly granular. The views of fans are certainly broader and more nuanced than can be captured with 3 close-ended questions. Let’s look at some of the comments that accompanied this week’s survey article.

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