Let me know if you’ve heard this before.

The Washington Redskins are hapless. They’re a bumbling, horrible mess. Just plain old damn terrible.

After giving their fan base hope of a better future over the course of the past two seasons, the Redskins are back to their incompetent nature. They have regressed to the mean. In the span of a month, the franchise has tripped over their own shoelaces, stepped on countless rakes, and in 2017 performed the “cinnamon challenge” with the irrational confidence of someone living in 2003.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Current — well, for the time being — General Manager Scot McCloughlan appeared to have the franchise on a path to success. The offseason champs were sensible draft picks, avoiding poor signings in free agency, and building a team that seemed to love playing for their fans and each other. It was an upward rise that was similar to the first two acts of a “Behind the Music” episode.

(edit: McCloughlan was let go shortly after this was published, the team cited alcohol abuse for the reasoning behind their termination)

But it was only a matter of time before the bottom fell out.

And fall out it did, in a major way.

It started with the conflicts between Redskins Park and quarterback Kirk Cousins. Despite two years of steady play, the team refused to ink the fourth-round pick from Michigan State to a long term deal. Negotiations lasted for what felt like a lifetime, but was more realistically 18 months.

And sure, tense negotiations between teams and their stars can commonly produce bad blood. It was a classic exercise in poor management, but wasn’t a situation from which the franchise could never recover.

Then, however, things got even stranger in the DMV.

Scot stopped showing up to work. The team explained his absence as an issue stemming from the death of his grandmother in early February.

“Ok, that makes sense,” fans of the team assured themselves in unison, “whatever it takes.”

Then the absence became longer, and longer, and stranger, and then longer still.

McCloughlan missed the scouting combine, a must-attend event for an NFL GM.

Which got the rumor mill churning in the nation’s capital. The Redskins took over offseason headlines, despite stellar play from the city’s winter teams. “What in tarnation is going on over there?” Redskins fans questioned collectively.

And in between questioning whether Scot’s past issues with alcohol had manifested themselves once again in the stress of grieving for a loved one and prepping for the Hogs’ critical offseason, the simplest answer made itself known.

This was an obvious power move by President Bruce Allen, jealous of the attention and success of his team’s GM, to regain control of the front office happenings within the franchise. Allen was petty enough to sink the Redskins’ chances at greatness for his own gain.

In another, separate slap in the face to the fanbase and Redskins players, Allen and the front office didn’t even reach out to fan favorite Chris Baker before the big man, a mainstay on the defensive line, left to Tampa Bay in free agency earlier today.

There is not enough alcohol in the world, folks, I swear.

I’m not done with this team, I will never be. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t wish I were.

There is no hope. Hope came and was shown the door because the brother of a former Virginia Governor was too insecure to accept help from anyone. Too sad, too self-centered, too greedy, and much too pathetic to be of any use to the team.

Bruce Allen knows this. We all know this. And another thing we all know is that this ship will continue to sink into the mirey, swampy Potomac as long as Allen and team owner Dan Synder are pulling the reigns at Redskins Park.

It’s a nightmare we can’t wake up from.