Chris Cooley was flowing, building up to his bombshell. The former Redskins tight end, who’s now paid by the team as a radio host and TV color analyst, put forward his supposed theory on radio, knowing so many news outlets would pounce: Perhaps the team’s general manager, Scot McCloughan, who’s had a history of problems with alcohol, is drinking again.
Why did someone on the team’s payroll speculate about something so sensitive regarding one of the valued minds of the team? And why did the Redskins remain silent after Cooley’s accusation? The questions don’t have answers, but may offer a peek into the Redskins’ internal power struggle.
Cooley’s comments came the morning of Feb. 14, but signs that something was off within Washington’s brain trust surfaced long before. McCloughan has been silent throughout this entire offseason, even as the team lost its offensive coordinator and canned its defensive coordinator. According to the Washington Post, team president Bruce Allen has muzzled the team’s GM, not letting him speak at the Senior Bowl. As Redskins followers wondered why their GM since 2015 was cosseted from media, Cooley offered up some unsubstantiated speculation.
“You start to wonder, what the hell is going on here?” Cooley said about McCloughan on ESPN 980, via the Washington Post. “And I start to look at this and say, ‘Do we not trust what Scot McCloughan is going to say to the media, and is that why he’s not allowed to talk to the media?’ And if we don’t trust what he’s going to say to the media, why don’t we trust what he’s going to say to the media? Now, if you look at the history of Scot McCloughan, I think the one thing that you’d immediately start to flush out as to why we don’t trust what he’s going to say is that he’s had a drinking problem over his entire career. And so you ask right away, is he drinking?”
Someone paid by the team hypothesized that its general manager, whose problems with drinking cost him jobs in San Francisco and Seattle, had relapsed. In response, the Redskins had no comment.
It’s a serious claim that, without the team quickly disputing, can turn Redskins fans on their GM — who hasn’t been allowed to speak out in defense of himself.
The team wouldn’t want to debunk the drinking assertion if it wanted fans to hear it. According to a former program director for WTEM, the radio station on which Cooley made his remarks, the drinking allegation wasn’t Cooley’s — he was just a vessel.
“That’s not Cooley at all,” Chuck Sapienza said on 106.7 The Fan last Thursday, via CBS. “He’s not a bad person. He’s also a very smart person. He’s one of the smarter athletes that I’ve been around in my career. But he’s also very connected with the front office. He’s too smart to not throw something out there unless he was either told something, heard something or he’s seen something. There’s no way that he just speculates. Nobody with the intelligence level of Chris would speculate on somebody having a drinking issue unless that was something that he, like I said, had either seen, heard or was told.”
McCloughan has been the GM over two Redskins teams: last season’s 8-7-1 near-playoff miss, and 2016’s stunning NFC East title. For a franchise that has been seemingly perpetually mired in slumps, there has been hope. The credit McCloughan has been receiving for turning the tide may have gotten to Allen, according to the Washington Post. McCloughan’s silence — at Allen’s command — shows the true power structure, in which McCloughan cannot even fight rumors spread by a team employee that he has an ongoing alcohol problem.