This past week, all week long, we published 10 reasons each of the NFC East teams will be a dumpster fire in 2025, in which we pointed out the biggest flaws of each team heading into the season. In case you missed it, you can catch up here:
🔥 DUMPSTER FIRE SERIES 🔥
Cowboys | Giants | Commanders | Eagles
Every year, we publish some of the angry reactions to the series. The whiniest of the bunch this year, by far, were Commanders fans. After getting back to the playoffs and actually making it to the NFC Championship Game, Commanders fans' typing finger beer muscles are back, much like Giants fans had a brief offseason of confidence after their team won a playoff game in 2022.
I didn't hear a peep from Cowboys fans. 🫡
Anyway, the following is a collection of the emails, DMs, and Twitter replies that I received, with spelling and grammar left unedited, but some of the bad words starred out. There are also some Commanders bloggers who wrote articles about their 10 reasons, lol.
Name, fan affiliation: Kerem, Commanders
Subject line: 10 Reasons Commanders Will Be A Dumpsterfire
Body of the email: Hey staff boy... heres a real article, from a real writer, from a real publication...
(He then linked to this.)
Go work hard climbing a greased up lamp post and eat horse s***!
Youve arrived! Your own great publication hahaha...
(He then linked to this.)
#JimmyNote: I don't know what "staff boy" means. Maybe it's because my bylines look like this...
062925Byline
Anyway, that's a new "insult" I haven't heard in over a decade here.
The article he linked to -- "from a real writer, from a real publication" -- is a 278-word aggregation of something CBS published about the Commanders that basically just said that the Commanders have Jayden Daniels and they traded for some guys.
He also linked to an article by us about the guy who ate horse poop after the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2017. People do crazy things when their teams win the Super Bowl. I'd google their fans' behavior when they last won the Super Bowl following the 1991 season, but GeoCities didn't even exist yet in those days.
Name, fan affiliation: Tom, Giants (I think, since it was the day theirs was published)
Subject line: F*** you, you still live in the armpit of the US
Body of the email: (Empty)
#JimmyNote: It fascinates me every year when I get these emails in which the sender types out the entire message in the subject line and leaves the body of the email empty.
Name, fan affiliation: Mike, Commanders
Subject line: Loser
Body of the email: Your city is trahs and Jason Kelce sucks HTTR
#JimmyNote: Lol, Kelce catching some shrapnel for no apparent reason.
Name, fan affiliation: Big Blue Banter Podcast
These guys did a podcast episode about my Giants' dumpster fire edition.
My favorite part: They read the first bullet point, "How the hell did Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen keep their jobs?" and noted that I had a clown emoji after it.
The other host then emphasized, "Two clown emojis, not just one. He wanted that clown to have a clown friend, because both Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen here are clowns. I think that's what he's going for."
That is indeed what I was going for. Anyway, I didn't listen to all of it (maybe on my next long walk), but they came out hot seemingly ready to rebut my points, but from what I listened to, they mostly agreed.
Name, fan affiliation: George, Giants
Message: How did you get into journalism Philly fans have an average high school gpa of 1.3
#JimmyNote: Mine was 2.4. I did my part in bringing up that average. Boom.
Name, fan affiliation: Chuck, Commanders
Message: You are a magnificent ass clown.
#JimmyNote: Thank you.
Name, fan affiliation: Gage, Commanders
Message: This is one of the most brain dead articles I’ve seen in some time, and also fails to mention Jacory Croskey-Merritt
#JimmyNote: Jacory Croskey-Merritt was the Commanders' seventh-round pick this year. My apologies for not noting that he's going to carry the Commanders to a Super Bowl, Saquon-style, in 2025.
This guy spent a big portion of his day arguing with Eagles fans on Twitter, and one of his points was that the price to trade for Deebo Samuel was only a fifth-round pick, which is kind of funny given his extreme love for a seventh-round rookie.
Name, fan affiliation: Chunk, Commanders
Message: Never in my life have I seen the reigning Super Bowl champs so worried about a division rival. Truly unreal stuff
#JimmyNote: There was a lot of this. One, the team didn't write it. It was written by a bored beat writer putting out "middle of the deadest period of the NFL calendar" content that people seem to like. I also wrote them for the Cowboys, Giants, and Eagles, which, you know, I explain in the first paragraph of every one of these articles.
The whole dumb "Look how worried they are about us" thing is usually reserved for Cowboys fans every year, but that torch has been passed.
Name, fan affiliation: George, Commanders
Message: Bro you can’t be making these vids about other teams in the division when you guys have the least amount of superbowls ðŸ˜
#JimmyNote: What vid?
Also, I have zero Super Bowls. Presumably, so does George. But if we're talking about team Super Bowls, two of the Commanders' three Super Bowls were in strike shortened seasons, partly with scabs. Do they really count? They deserve an asterisk, at a minimum. (Also, it's been almost 35 years.)
Fan affiliation: Eagles
Message: somebody needs clicks, attention deficit anyone?
#JimmyNote: Yeah, if you're a beat writer and nobody reads your stuff, you won't have a job. And again, first paragraph.
I don't know what the "attention deficit" part means.
Fan affiliation: Commanders
OK, so, a fan site called "Riggo's Rag" published an article called "Commanders’ explosive rise has Eagles fans shaking in their boots." Lol.
I mean, they read the dumpster fire article, and attempted to refute some of its points. It's not like this was some moron on Twitter who didn't read the article and merely commented on the headline. These guys actually read it, and did not process the fact that we did one for every team in the NFC East.
My favorite part was this:
Kempski argues that Washington will regress simply because other teams that had major improvements in the win column regressed (often barely) the following year. Not to beat a dead horse, but this is a laughable omission of context.
How many of those teams were led by a rookie quarterback, a first-year head coach, and a debuting general manager? How many of them were as aggressive the following offseason as the Commanders have been in acquiring major pieces to improve their roster?
Word of advice to aspiring sportswriters: If you're refuting another writer's arguments, back up your rebuttal with facts. Research it. I mean, I listed all the teams that had major improvements, and then their subsequent downturns the following seasons. They were all right there in print. Like, 80 percent of the work was already done for you!!!
But to answer the question that was posed, like half the teams on my list had new head coaches during their resurgent seasons, because, you know, they all had dreadful seasons the prior year and the old coaches got fired.
A bunch them also had rookie quarterbacks, and good ones at that, like Dak Prescott, Ben Roethlisberger, and Philip Rivers. And then we could probably also include Kurt Warner, who wasn't a rookie, but who played for the first time.
Asking a very answerable question and then not answering it is amateur hour. It's not the reader's job to go research your question. It's yours.
There were some other articles or video reactions about the Commanders edition here, here, and here, if you're interested.
And finally, yesterday I was going through some old "hate mail" posts, and discovered that a Giants fan owed $500 to a charity of my choice, based on an agreement we made in 2023.
I contacted the gentleman who was on the losing end of this agreement, and he promptly made a $500 donation to The Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) of New Jersey program, which "supports and promotes best interest child advocacy so that every child and youth placed in foster care and other out-of-home placements can be safe, have a permanent home, and the opportunity to thrive."
Dumpster Fire series for the win.