Alex Smith, Dan Snyder, and a ridiculous road to recovery

Alex Smith spoke at a medical conference recently and reportedly told a room full of people that his broken leg has required 17 total surgeries.

While speaking at an Inova Sports Medicine event two weeks ago, Alex Smith dropped a bit of a bombshell on the room of medical professionals. According to Thom Loverro of the Washington Times, Smith mentioned that his injured leg had endured 17 surgeries to get him back to this point—this improving yet non-football-playing point.

That’s seventeen.

Besides my own tonsilectomy, that’s 16 more surgeries than I’ve ever had in my life. Of course, I’m not a professional athlete. I’ve never been in a medical trainer’s tent or needed to be checked by someone for a concussion. I’ve never kept playing because a crowd of tens of thousands was cheering for me. I’ve never need smelling salts or an ice bath.

There was that one time when Wendy’s gave me a regular chicken patty when I clearly ordered the spicy one.

Back to the ridiculous number: seventeen. All I can think to write is, “That’s so Snyder.” Yes, I mean Daniel Snyder, a buffoon of a leader who somehow is rich enough to own an NFL franchise. I’m assuming he got there because he inherited vast sums of money. If not, I don’t even want to be corrected because then it will mean that someone so obviously stupid can make that much money in this world (and I have not).

Snyder has taken one of the NFL’s most iconic franchises and run it into the ground—like completely into the ground. He distracts us from Jim Irsay’s Affliction jeans and Vaseline hair. He can look at completely incompetent leaders and pay them for years on end. He can try and re-try proven methods of losing again and again. He creates new spending thresholds in March only to create new losing thresholds in December. Is there a team so clearly going nowhere in the National Football League? And has this not been true for about as long as Snyder has been the owner?

All of this about Snyder is important because the Redskins are known as a toxic organization and when it’s that reported and understood, then it’s a leadership issue from the top down. Players don’t want to play in Washington. Coaches don’t want to coach. It’s the place you go when you either don’t have a choice (drafted) or you, well, don’t have a choice (only team interested).

Trent Williams doesn’t even want their money anymore. He just wants out. The team’s reportedly so bad at handling injuries that it’s messed up their best player. It’s clearly also messed up their quarterback import. One gruesome spiral fracture of the leg was already going to be tough to handle and would require a long recovery. Then came reports of infections. Seventeen surgeries later, we can only hope Smith is finally out of the woods.

There’s not a Chiefs fan that would ever want to go back to the days before Patrick Mahomes. He’s a gift from the gods, the sort of generational player that makes the game more exciting than we ever knew it could be. But that doesn’t mean there’s also not a soft spot in our hearts for the quarterback who helped turn things around, someone who minimized mistakes, embodied great leadership and delivered over 10 wins per year in his five seasons as a starter.

Alex Smith deserved better than to be cast into the abyss known as Dan Snyder’s screw-ups. If Smith thought it would take long to recover just because of the injury, he’s now learning how much more of a task it is to climb out of whatever hole Snyder’s leadership has put his players in, too.