Earlier today Vinny “Blinky” Cerrato made one of his twice-weekly appearances on Danny Snyder’s ESPN 980, the official station of the Washington Redskins. He some time out to chat with the fans and announced some exciting plans to rip off Pittsburgh’s beloved Terrible Towels. You know, the brightly colored hand towels that Steelers fans have utilized for thirty years.

Yeah, in a move startling both for its timeliness and its originality, 50,000 burgundy ESPN980 towels will be handed out on Sunday night, 50,000 apparently being the estimated number of Redskins fans who will be on hand.

“I can’t get tickets,” one caller said Inside the Red Zone today.

“Everybody else could,” Vinny Cerrato replied. “All the Pittsburgh people could. You must have been calling the wrong people….We’re going to have nice towels so we won’t have the yellow Pittsburgh towels in the stadium. We’re going to have burgundy Redskins towels.

Yeah, asshole, why can’t you spend one of your precious bi-weekly paycheck to take in one of the worst stadium experiences in the NFL?! Don’t you know how badly we need the support of you fans? We thought we made that clear when we bled every cent out of your pocket over the last decade. Hell, we’re even throwing in FREE RAGS!

That’s right, after last week’s embarrassment against the Steelers we’ve determined that the best possible way to keep out rival fans is by handing out poorly made rags. Why if it weren’t for this mind-numbingly brilliant marketing ploy our beloved town of Raljon might be overrun every week! Did you see how cool all of those yellow towels looked? Just try to picture 50,000 burgundy rags flapping away!

Seriously Vinny, these weak-ass rags are going to look like one of your week-old maxipads. But hey, at least you’ve figured out a way to drown out all the Terrible Towels that will surely be waving when we play…Dallas. That sir, is why you are the VP of Player personnel, and why everyone hates you so much. Seriously though, good work on the radio show and cross-branding. But maybe, just maybe, you could fit in some actual player personnel work in between snarky comments about Jason La Canfora and all of your creepy cackling duties.

That fucking putz.

Oh yeah, one other thing from the show. A caller asked a question about USC’s star linebacker, and surefire top-ten pick, Rey Maualuga and our beloved personnel director couldn’t even manage to say the guys fucking name. But hey, don’t blame Vinny, because as he says, Rey (somethingorother) will likely be off the board before the Redskins pick. And as Vinny is surely aware, the Redskins have never been known to trade up in the draft. Thank god this guy is in charge.

Redskins to Copy Terrible Towels

Oddly enough, only one of these guys is one of the schmucks in question.

When Dan Snyder announced his takeover of DC’s SportsTalk 980 I knew we were in a shitload of trouble. Just two weeks into the season Mr. Snyder, unhappy with the negative tone of the local media, inserted his own right-hand-man Vinny Cerrato into the station’s lineup. So now the Redskins Executive Vice President of Football Operations (basically a castrated GM) gets to play radio host a couple of times a week in an attempt to skew the coverage back towards the positive along with Snyder-approved guests like the loathsome George Michael.

Needless to say, nobody in their right mind thought this was anything close to a good idea. And not just because the guy running the team should probably have something better to do with his afternoons than to shill for his own franchise, instead it’s because everybody knows that Vinny Cerrato is a worthless prick.

Why all the hate for Vinny? Well for starters he has absolutely zero qualifications to run an NFL franchise, unless you consider working as Lou Holtz’s “recruiting coordinator” (bag-boy*) at Notre Dame to be executive experience. This is the guy who traded for Brandon Lloyd, gave him a huge (and completely unnecessary) contract only to cut him loose and claim that he’s reverted back into a capable receiver in Chicago because he’s “desperate” without a huge guaranteed contract. Logic like that is what makes everyone in this city want to knock the chicklets out of his self-satisfied smile with a length of rebar.

Now for a little bit of background on this story’s (there is a story coming eventually) other player…

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the schmuck pictured above is one Jason La Canfora (an avowed fan of the Red Sox). He is the Washington Post’s beat writer for the Redskins, which is hard because he and Cerrato are not on speaking terms. The hatred between these two jackasses is nothing new, and for a while nobody could really blame LaCa. Hell, every Redskins fan I know would wait in line to tell Vinny to fuck off in their own colorful way. But that doesn’t excuse his attempts to subvert the franchise out of spite.

So what did he do that was so bad?

The Redskins beat writer called the NFL offices to “inquire” as to whether or not the Redskins could be considered guilty of tampering after Vinny and the guests on his new radio show were merely speculating as to what might be next for Lane Kiffin if he were in fact to be fired. It was clear to anyone who doesn’t have their head planted alongside their colon that Vinny was nowhere in the neighborhood of tampering. The only reason La Canfora pursued the issue at all is because he’s always on the lookout for anything that could possibly undermine the Snyder-Cerrato machine.

Now of course the league called up Vinny to let him know what was going on, and the fuckwad brought up the situation yesterday’s radio show. Only the way Vinny told the story, it wasn’t an inquiry so much as it was La Canfora attempting to “charge us with tampering.” This little bit of misinformation (the one field in which Vinny is actually competent) actually turned Vinny into a sympathetic figure (for a few hours), albeit one with the world’s most weaselly laugh.

While calling the league to “inquire” about a rule seems innocent enough, it seems pretty obvious that La Canfora was in fact trying to find a noose with which to hang his nemesis.

So how can we settle the bitch-fest between the world’s most misanthropic beat writer and the world’s shittiest front office executive? Normally I’d suggest a trip to the Thunder Dome, but then one of them would get to live.

*H/T to Czaban.

On Jason La Canfora, Vinny Cerrato and Tampering
Cerrato’s Special Working Relationship