Former Washington Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan comments on firing

On Monday morning, in a move that was not the least bit shocking, the Washington Redskins fired head coach Mike Shanahan following the completion of the 3-13 season after Sunday’s loss to the New York Giants.

The move ends what was supposed to be a magical run for the organization when they hired the two-time Super Bowl-winning coach four years ago.

However, this season the wheels completely fell off the wagon as they dealt with a multitude of issues on their way to stumbling toward their terrible record.

A few hours after the firing, Shanahan held a brief press conference where he addressed the media, as well as his time in Washington.

"“One of the questions that’s been asked of me the last couple weeks, ‘Is this a better place today than it was when you came here four years ago?’” Shanahan said. “That one is probably asked of me more than any other one. So I’ll answer that: When we first came here, we knew that we were in a tough situation relative to the salary cap, and when we first came here as a staff, we knew we had to make some tough decisions. And any time that you release $100 million worth of players, you’re talking about a lot of football players, a lot of players who have been very successful, and that’s always hard to do. And to do that, a lot of people are involved. You watch a lot of film, you make some tough decisions, and we felt we had to do that relative to the salary cap. And the thing we felt pretty good about was that not one of those players played a full year the next year. So we did make some good decisions, relative to getting back to a base, relative to the salary cap, because we had made some mistakes in the past.”"

Shanahan also made reference to how well this team did under him, despite being hit with salary cap penalties prior to the 2012 season.

"“When we got that $36 million hit, we weren’t able to get some of those players we wanted to get,” Shanahan said. “We were still able to win the NFC East.”"

Then, despite what anyone thinks of him or the job he’s done in the nation’s capital, Shanahan believes that he is leaving this organization better than he found it four years ago.

"“We’re better off today than we were four years ago,” Shanahan said."