Anger, and lots of it

I walked out of FedEx Field with the crowd Sunday afternoon. The first guy I saw was waving his arms and sort of grunting in obvious disgust. I asked him if we could chat.

"Don't talk to me, sir," he said.

Seemed like he meant it. So instead I talked to his friend, 37-year-old Ron Curington of Olney, who first swore loudly, then changed his message to "Goshdarnit!"

"In reality," he said, "we're the worst team in the NFL."

I'm not sure how to describe the scene after the game. I walked one entire loop around FedEx Field. Some people were just sitting around and eating hamburgers. Some were falling over drunk, or trying to start fights. That's pretty typical. But there were also people like John Shermer of Frederick, a season ticket holder who was striding horizontally through the parking lots, screaming "No more Dan Snyder!" Or Allison Barnes of Fairfax, who was trying to get a "Dan Snyder's Got to Go!" chant started in front of the Comcast SportsNet set.

Or Ben Reiffen, who plays his saxophone outside sporting events in Baltimore, D.C., College Park and Annapolis. His jazzy tunes were shouted down by the crowd, which asked for something more depressing. So Reiffen played "Amazing Grace." And he played "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." And he played "Let It Be." And he played "Taps."

There's something sort of eerie, walking around a massive asphalt expanse seeing people mumbling to themselves, or shouting out in anger, or chanting slogans, while listening to a saxophone belt out funeral songs. That's not what sporting entertainment is supposed to feel like, exactly.

"I'm yelling at the whole damn system," screamed Tony Peden of D.C., when we chatted inside the stadium. I found Tony just kind of ambling around the 400-level concourse, yelling. This happens a lot, nowadays.

"If we could impeach a [dang] owner, I wish we could do that," Peden continued. "I've been angry for two years."

Yeah, anger, that was the main emotion. It was kind of a diffuse anger, people letting the fury simmer in their own personal halo. There weren't really mass chants, although about two dozen or so fans started a "Sell the Team" chant in front of the owner's box at halftime. There had been lots of talk about a Blackout, but virtually everyone I approached who was wearing black had no idea what I was talking about.

So it came down to individual displays of anger. Mike and Chris, with their "Dumb and Dumber" signs, posing for dozens of photos with other fans; "We're fed up," Mike told me. "Sick and tired of the same old thing."

Kasey Currle of Fairfax, in a homemade sweatshirt protesting the Snyder and Cerrato regime; "I'm just absolutely disgusted," he said. "I decided today that enough was enough. It's over."