Hello World

It’s been a while since I posted anything substantive. Why start now? Instead, let’s talk about the Redskins for 1500 words or so.

First of all, let me just say that no matter how this season ends up, I am really enjoying the way this team plays under Jim Zorn. They dominate the line on offense, run right up the gut, and take their shots with deep passes and trick plays often enough to keep opposing defenses guessing. On the other side of the ball, they are playing confident, aggressive defense, making it very difficult for their opponents to put up points.

Here are some factors that I find to be very positive about the season so far:

• Clinton Portis (and the offensive line). Is Clinton Portis a new man? It’s hard to say. I think he’s been playing this well ever since Joe Gibbs arrived, but now he’s running behind an experienced, smart, enthusiastic (more on this below) offensive line, and his head coach is really calling on him to establish the parameters of the entire offense–run to set up the pass, run to set up the wacky gadget play, run to set up more damn running. From what little I understand about the NFL running back mindset, it seems like Portis is really responding to the confidence the team is showing in his abilities. It doesn’t hurt that his backups, Betts and Cartwright (and maybe, but probably not, Sean Alexander) beat the crap out of the other team when they get in the game. And he is great at picking up the blitz on passing plays. I love watching him lay out linebackers.

• Defense.What can I say? They’ve been pretty great. They came up huge in the Dallas and Philadelphia games, shutting down explosive offenses and really demoralizing those teams. The line is great against the run, and puts a decent amount of pressure on the quarterback

• ZORN. I wasn’t particularly happy to see Joe Gibbs go–he had a rough start, to say the least, but after a while his personnel and his game plans came around to something kind of like the Super-Bowl-winning teams he coached in my youth. Jim Zorn came in and did something very interesting: he didn’t mess with things too much. He took a hard-running, tough team, and stuck with its strengths. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t touch the defense, letting Blache take care of it. The results on that speak for themselves. And on offense, he’s interpolated his own playcalling preferences–quick passes aimed at creating yards-after-catch, and quirky gadget plays taking advantage of his personnel–with what the team has been doing well for a few years (running the ball down opponents’ throats). He hasn’t been perfect–his time management in the two-minute drill is still pretty questionable, for example–but for a guy in a head coaching position for the first time ever he’s done a great job.

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Joe Gibbs retired. Not shocking, but interesting.

I was extremely hopeful about Joe Gibbs’s tenure when he returned to the team, and although it hasn’t been all rainbows and puppy dogs I have to say he did a pretty good job. They made the playoffs twice, and more importantly they have a stability and patience from the front office down that they hadn’t had since the last time Gibbs coached the team.

I think this is good for him and for the franchise. He gets to leave on a good note, and the team gets to move forward. I thought this post over at the Sports Bog said it pretty well–this was a reasonable decision made for the right reasons.

If they don’t promote defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, the Redskins are a bunch of dumb jerks–he’s done a great job, and it seems clear that he’s at least been implicitly promised the right to be Gibbs’s successor. That’s not to say that he’s guaranteed to be a great head coach (he was middle-of-the-road as the Bills head coach a few years back), but he definitely deserves the chance to prove himself in DC.

While we’re talking Redskins, let me just say that the Seahawks game was pretty disappointing. I thought they had a good chance of beating them and giving the Cowboys a good game this week, but I guess they had expended all the energy and planning and luck they had in the 4 weeks before the playoffs began. I can’t complain–they made the playoffs and had a chance to win, and that’s all I could hope for this year. They went through a lot of misfortune, on and off the field, and I think their season ended well.

Yeesh.

The Redskins started out the game with 10 players on the field–the missing safety was a powerful tribute to Sean Taylor’s untimely death last week. That was a great start to a game with a miserable finish.

First, let’s be fair: it looked like that kick would have been good from the original line of scrimmage. The Redskins would have probably lost the game anyway.

But to make that kind of mental error–calling two timeouts in a row (which is against the rules)–is completely ridiculous. And, in this particular situation, more or less unforgivable. This is the kind of mistake the Redskins have been making all season, sometimes in critical situations, and sometimes when it didn’t make much of a difference. Suffice it to say you won’t see Bill Belichick doing this stuff. There’s no question that the mistake was Joe Gibbs’s fault. But there’s plenty of blame for this loss to go around.

As far as I can tell from what I’ve been reading on the internet, the offensive line didn’t do a great job today. That doesn’t surprise me in the least, and I don’t blame the players for it. The coaching staff has been throwing inexperienced backups out there all season long. The frustrating thing about that, though, is it makes things impossible for everyone else on the field. Can’t pass-block, can’t run-block. QB doesn’t have time to find open receivers, running backs don’t have holes to run through.

So we can’t play offense and end up depending on our defense to bail us out. And, to be honest, they have been doing that all year long. They haven’t been invincible (they’re suffering from their own injury problem, encompassing just about their entire secondary), but they have been good in just about every game (except the New England contest, about which we need not speak). It sounds like they weren’t at their best today, but they certainly didn’t lose this game.

So far I’ve said it’s not the offense’s fault, and it’s not the defense’s fault. Just to be clear, it’s not the special teams’ fault, either.

Two people are responsible for this game and this season: Joe Gibbs and Dan Snyder.

First, the coach. Joe Gibbs has to retire. He has yet to demonstrate an iota of creativity or flexibility in his return to coaching. His reign has been typified by mental errors (by his players and by him) and come-from-ahead losses. He hasn’t adapted to the new league, trying instead to shoehorn his old strategies onto his new roster. He gives good press conference, but at this point all he ever gets to say is how proud he is of the effort his team has given in a tough loss. He’s still the coach for one reason: pride. I’m sympathetic–he’s got an incredible history with the franchise, and he won three championships before I hit high school, and no matter how this ends up he’ll still be one of the greatest coaches ever, in my opinion–but past glory has not prepared him for the current reality of the NFL. He and his ancient coaching staff are tarnishing their own legacy with every crushing disappointment.

As for Dan Snyder… For some reason, probably the fact that he actually seems to care about how the team does (rather than just how much money it makes), I like Snyder, but he needs to understand the difference between “hands-on owner” and “meddlesome despot”. He needs to hire someone who knows how to evaluate players and let that person handle the GM duties–identifying draft picks and preventing idiotic trades/free agent signings. And Snyder needs to have a quiet chat with Gibbs, advising him that it might be a good idea to step down to “spend more time with his family.”

Ugh. I hate myself for even writing this stuff, but things have gotten absurd. There’s no reason for the Redskins to be in this situation. They have a huge fanbase and an owner willing to spend whatever it takes to put a good team on the field. But Snyder’s enthusiasm and resources have blinded him (and us, to be honest) to the fact that the organization is pursuing success in a completely backwards way.

Almost every decision they’ve made in each offseason of the last decade has been gilding the lily–polishing the turd. They have been spending money for short term gains, trading picks for aging veterans, and ignoring the low-profile positions that make the biggest difference (the line). They need to start over by focusing on drafting smart, dumping old players before they get decrepit, emphasizing line play and intelligence over glamor positions and “potential”. And, oh yeah, hiring a coach who was born after the Great Depression.