Trent Williams was careful not to blame Washington owner Dan Snyder for the dysfunctional situation that saw him miss the entire season.
But he pulled no punches when it came to team president Bruce Allen, saying it was his fault the situation became so acrimonious — and that the team has been so bad for the last decade.
In a lengthy piece from Les Carpenter of the Washington Post, the veteran left tackle said Allen putting him on the non-football injury list (and withholding his salary) when he reported to the team midseason was punitive.
“It just goes to show you how behind the times [Allen] is, and he still tries to use that money to hold it over black athletes,” Williams said.
Williams held out to begin the offseason, unhappy with the team’s handling of his medical situation. There’s some reasonable degree of he-said/she-said involved here (as in any situation as complicated as this one), and Allen called Williams’ allegations “comical.”
But it doesn’t sound like there’s any way Williams would return to the team as long as Allen’s running it.
“I don’t see how it can be reconciled,” Williams said. “At the end of the day I’m a human being, I ain’t like a dog and you can slap s--- out of me and I’m going to come back the next morning with my tail wagging. This was a conscious decision, they didn’t burn the bridge by accident. This was something they felt comfortable doing, so I got to feel comfortable with moving on, too.”
Williams believes as long as Allen’s in charge, it will be hard for them to be competitive, and that they’d have to overpay to get free agents to come there after the way he was treated. In Allen’s 10 years running the team, they’re 62-93-1.
“There’s no shortcuts to the top,” he said. “It’s a long, grueling road, and right now I don’t even feel like the organization is on a road, it’s on a track that’s going in circles. You get to a point where you say: ‘All right, we’re about to break through,’ and in less than a year, you’re back to rebuilding. . . .
“I just don’t understand. In any business world, when the employer has someone who is underperforming, he finds another one. I don’t know in the last 10 years if there is a worse record [for] someone who has held their job for 10 years and performed the way they performed and still have a job. I don’t know. That would be good to look up and [see] just who else is in that company. I would be thrilled to find out.”
When asked for a response, Allen said only: “I’m much more concerned about the Green Bay Packers than that.”
Snyder has stood by Allen through years of criticism, though recent reports suggest he’s considering moving on. Until or unless he does, it doesn’t appear there’s a road to mending the relationship with one of their best players of the last generation.