Suprise: Not Much "Mania" For $20 Scratch Offs

Sometimes, you wonder if Dan Snyder thinks the smallest dollar bill the US treasury prints, is a $20 bill. It's like everything costs $20, or $40. Parking. Beers. Lottery tickets.

Yes, Dan Snyder can now add "Lottery Ticket" to his list of #EPICFAIL.

From Dave McKenna of the Washington City Paper, you apparently can't just gouge the shit out of degenerate scratch off addicts and get away with it, even if you plastered the mighty Redskins colors and logo on those scratchers.

Whatever caused the Redskins scratch ticket to flop, it wasn’t the medium’s fault. Other NFL scratch tickets did just fine, thank you. Take the game being offered by the team just up the road, the Baltimore Ravens Cash Fantasy, marketed through the Maryland Lottery. The state agency says it sold essentially every Ravens Cash Fantasy ticket that was printed. All three of the $1 million top prizes were given away.

The Ravens scratch tickets cost only $5. One Maryland Lottery official, requesting anonymity, tells me the agency and team were both surprised when the Redskins announced such an expensive ticket but briefly considered following Washington’s lead. Ultimately, the official says, they concluded that “people wouldn’t buy them for $20.”

The Ravens and the Maryland Lottery announced last week that the 2009 Cash Fantasy game “holds the distinction of being the best-selling $5 scratch-off ever sold by the Maryland Lottery.” So the lottery game offered by the Ravens, one of the most stable franchises in the NFL over the past decade, will come back basically unchanged for the 2010 season, with the same $5 price and three $1 million prizes.

The Redskins, of course, have had the least stable operation in the NFL, on and off the field, since Snyder came here in 1999. So it makes metaphorical sense that the team’s initial lottery offering is getting blown up after its one disastrous season. Though nothing’s been announced by the Redskins or the Virginia Lottery, the name and huge price point of the 2009 venture are gone; current plans hold that the team will market a scratcher called Redskins Legacy beginning in August.

REACT: Oh joy. A remarketed version of the game, that draws from the nearly bankrupt account of "old" Redskin success, dubbed "Legacy." You know, at some point, those "Legacy" checks with the Redskins are going to start to bounce.

And if you want MORE, of SnyderFail, you can read Mr. McKenna's excellent, and exhaustive "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder."

It won't make you feel any better about our beloved Belt Buckle Football King. But it will probably make you chuckle.