Survey results!!
I saw a comment on Hogs Haven this week that compared the situation for Commanders fans to children of divorce being forced to choose between mom & dad. After all, Adam Peters is the guy that we’ve all put our faith in to restore the Washington franchise to its former glory, and we’ve heaped praise on him for a year and a half for making a bunch of great decisions. But now he’s locked in a tense negotiation with a fan favorite who was a shining beacon of light in the dark years that immediately preceded the coming of AP — Terry McLaurin, the player who has probably done the most in the last decade to give Washington fans someone to be proud of and to cheer for. McLaurin is also probably the player you’d pick out of a lineup if asked to identify the one guy who defines what Adam Peters and Dan Quinn are talking about when they describe what it means to be a Commander. McLaurin is tough, competitive, hard working and likeable. By nearly any definition, he’s just a great guy.
In this week’s Reacts survey, we focused on the feeling Hog Haven readers have towards Adam Peters for his overall work as Washington’s GM, and then asked how perception of him might be affected by the outcome of the current standoff with the team’s star receiver.
It turns out that Peters rates pretty damned well with our readers, which is no surprise. Nearly two-thirds of all respondents gave him the highest rating, and 94% of voters gave him an above average rating on a 4-point scale.
But it’s clear that the McLaurin negotiation, which has somehow started to play out in the press since the start of training camp despite a lack of sourced or concrete information being made public from either side, is putting some strain on the fan base due to conflicting loyalties.
While some fans see this as a matter of everyone just taking care of business, others have let some of the emotion attached to the player or the faith invested in the GM color their thinking about the process and outcome. With recent reports of McLaurin’s camp asking for a trade, the stakes have simply been ratcheted up in what is increasingly looking like a game of ‘chicken’.
The largest percentage of respondents in our survey said that the outcome of the negotiation, whatever it is, will not change how they perceive Adam Peters; those respondents feel as if he’s already proven himself.
But well over half of the respondents (58%) feel that the outcome could change the way they view Peters as the GM, with 28% of total respondents seemingly focused on a trade or failure to get a deal done as some sort of critical failure for the GM, while only 7% said that they would be unhappy mainly if Peters pays too much.
Anyone who watched Terry’s impromptu press conference in mid-July would have seen that this is an emotional issue in which he is deeply and personally invested. Many fans are also deeply invested in the outcome of the current negotiation. The importance of it to many fans combined with the lack of transparency in the process heightens the feelings of concern and frustration that comes with uncertainty and lack of control.
Kind of like children with parents fighting and possibly separating, fans can only look on from the sidelines, have faith in both parties, and hope for the best.