The Redskins effect: Fans spend to spread their home-team spirit

On Sundays, Lori Pierce Howard looks like a walking Redskins-themed economic stimulus, a spending package wrapped in burgundy and gold.

She sports a retro Darrell Green number 28 football jersey ($100). She totes a Redskins purse ($20). From her headband ($15) to her tennis shoes ($55), from her earrings ($10) down to her underwear ($29), her entire wardrobe is festooned with the Redskins' colors and logos.

That's not all. At her home in Hagerstown, there are the pompoms ($25), the shower curtain ($45) and the Redskins towel set ($50). Then there is the money Pierce Howard spends at the grocery store stocking up on wings, snacks and beer for the neighbors who stop by to catch the game.

Thousands of loyal Redskins fans like Pierce Howard have created their own micro-economies across the Washington region. On Sundays, they spend money on grocery store runs for game-time noshing. They thrust cash at the vendors lugging boxes of beer and snacks at FedEx Field. They ring up tabs at sports bars and phone in credit card orders to pizza delivery joints.

While their spending may be little more than a blip in the region's economy, their spirit and the sport they follow has helped shape the area's culture as it alters the rhythm of weekends each fall. It affects when people go shopping and, when the Redskins are playing at home, determines which roads people drive on- and which ones they avoid.

This is the Redskins lone weekend off in the 17-week National Football League regular season. The bye week could give Washington a sense of things to come if a labor dispute between NFL players and team owners leads, as many expect it will, to a cancellation of at least a part of next season.

The NFL's 32 team owners and its players' union are negotiating an extension of their collective-bargaining agreement, which expires after the current season. They are sharply divided over how much of the league's revenue should go to players. Players and union officials have said they expect the owners to lock them out next season.

Some say it would deal the area a psychological blow - at least temporarily - akin to that suffered by Baltimore when the Colts abruptly abandoned the city in 1984.

"We were lost," says John Ziemann, who joined the Colts' marching band in 1962 and kept the organization together for the 11 years that Baltimore was without an NFL team. Now president of Baltimore's Marching Ravens, Ziemann says, "That's the only way I can say it. It's like all of a sudden you're missing a favorite relative, a dear friend. It's gone."

Most economists shrug off the impact of professional sports teams, the Redskins among them. They say that regional economies aren't built on peanuts, popcorn and pompoms.

"This is a $410 billion economy," says Stephen Fuller, director of the center for regional analysis at George Mason University, "and Uncle Sam is spending almost $140 billion." He said that the Redskins aren't nearly as important to the area's economy as the World Bank or George Washington University or a host of other institutions.

Moreover, Fuller and other economists say, football-deprived fans would spend their money elsewhere.