A million little pieces

I’ve been writing about Dan Snyder, Vinny Cerrato and Jim Zorn on this site for over a year now. This week seemed as good as any to excerpt these writings, reproduced below in reverse-chronological order from the original posting dates, and with as few edits as possible. I don’t know what the moral of all this is, except that my relationship with Joe Gibbs is a less than healthy one.

October 24, 2008

(The Redskins are 5-2 heading into a Week 8 matchup against Detroit. Excitement is high, but Jim Zorn’s public persona is already starting to rub players, fans and media members the wrong way.)

“Jim Zorn is quietly feeling his oats this week in D.C. First was his public tiff with Vinny Cerrato over the fate of punter Durant Brooks. Then, during his news conference after the Browns game, Zorn took a shot at Joe Gibbs’ habit of not being able to watch field goals. When a reporter asked what he was doing when Phil Dawson lined up what would have been the game-tying kick, Zorn replied, ‘I was trying to get a series of plays for overtime…I wasn’t lowering my head and not watching.’ Gotta say, that’s not gonna make the kids go out and buy a “Stay Medium” T-shirt.”

December 5, 2008

(The team is unraveling at 7-5 as it heads to Baltimore for a Sunday night showdown.)

“As the song goes, ‘Keep in touch, baby, just don’t charge me with your rescue blues.’ Ugh, I hate this team the way I hate my ex-girlfriends, which is to say, not at all, not the least bit. And I wish I could, because I’d really like to have time to see ‘Rachel Getting Married’ again.”

December 12, 2008

(One week later, a road win at lowly Cincinnati is needed to keep playoff hope alive. They would end up losing 20-13. The matchup prompted me to speculate about the similarities between Dan Snyder and Bengals owner Mike Brown.)

“In the past, mainly on matters of principle, I’ve defended Dan Snyder in a strictly hypothetical sense: sharp elbows aside, I argued there’s a certain redeeming quality to a free-spending owner whose only goal is to win a Super Bowl. Now I’m not so sure. For nearly a decade, the most powerful image of the Snyder narrative has been the story of young Danny going to bed every night in his Redskins varsity jacket. Getting your paws on a bottomless pit of cash and buying your favorite team — what better way to do right by your inner 8-year-old? It’s a good image, one that Snyder has tried to glom on to, with varying degrees of success. But in the way he runs the Redskins, young, wide-eyed Danny takes a backseat to adolescent, insecure Danny — the Danny who grew up poor, was too nerdy for sports, and wasn’t quick enough to hack it at the University of Maryland. He’s not the guy who never got over high school — he’s the guy who makes a point out of telling you he never thinks about high school. That’s just not how life works. He’s a man who never bothered to learn any history, choosing instead to double-down on modernity. To listen to the conventional wisdom about shelling out a $10 million signing bonus, or setting another new coaching salary benchmark would be like admitting he can’t blaze his own trail after all.”

December 26, 2008

(The Redskins are playing out the string in San Francisco during the last week of the season.)

“Congratulations, 2008 Washington Redskins, you’ve pushed aside the 1999-2000 squad for No. 5 on the all-time, inexplicable Redskins implosion list. I mean, really, Matt Turk bumbling away the NFC divisional game in Tampa — not all that damaging, in the long run. But Jim Zorn using a botched Mike Sellers run and Pete Kendall fumble as bookends to a coaching meltdown of Leonard Hamiltonian proportions? Welcome to the list, Zorny. No. 5. With a bullet.”

April 10, 2009

(Unsuccessful attempts to trade for Jay Cutler and Mark Sanchez prompted me to offer this defense of Jason Campbell.)

APNobody throws a prettier pass over the head of his WR.

“Jason Campbell’s first pass as an NFL quarterback was the most beautiful throw I’ve ever seen. I’m wary of folks who rhapsodize about the aerial flight of a hallowed-out pig bladder filled with pressurized air, but if this thing were any prettier it’d be wearing a black North Face and drinking a whiskey sour.

“Like most beautiful things, this one happened in Tampa. It was Week 11 of the 2006 regular season and the Redskins, after starting the year on the short list of Super Bowl contenders, limped into town with a 3-6 record. Earlier in the week Joe Gibbs named Campbell — then in his second season out of Auburn — the starter for the rest of the year, finally relegating veteran Mark Brunell to backup duty.

“Brunell was a first-rate locker room presence and a key component in the team’s miraculous playoff run in 2005; nonetheless, he provoked a singular kind of hatred from Redskins fans. As a rule, Washington sports fans protect players and lambaste coaches — with the notable exception of Joe Gibbs. Brunell was really just a surrogate that enabled people to express their displeasure with Gibbs 2.0 — you couldn’t just come out and say Gibbs wasn’t the man to fix things in D.C., because that would have meant things were unfixable. There were too many dicey-implications tied up in the prospect of Gibbs failing. Thus, Brunell became the fall guy. A more forgiving lot would have seen his fluttering deep balls and slides on scrambles where there wasn’t a defender within 10 yards and called it ‘gutsy’; to us, though, he looked desperate and overmatched. It was like having Jack Lemmon’s character from “Glengarry Glen Ross” quarterback your team.

“All this fatalism in the air made Campbell’s debut in Tampa a bigger deal than it had any right to be. It felt like a seismic moment, as much as you can have a seismic moment during a 5-11 season: The most beloved figure in team history, reversing course and turning over the team to the canon-armed prospect he personally tabbed in the 2005 draft as franchise QB in-waiting. Surely, the ship now had been righted.

“Towering over his offensive line, Campbell stared down the Bucs and their famed Tampa 2 look. The guy just looked like an NFL quarterback. The exchange from center was clean, and Campbell smoothly went into his drop. He looked off Santana Moss short, and fixed his eyes down the right sideline where Brandon Lloyd was sprinting uncovered, about to rack up the easiest touchdown in NFL history. The glance to Moss was all it took — there wasn’t a Tampa defender within 25 yards of Lloyd. With a flick of his wrist, Campbell aired the ball out — Brunell used to take a crowhop for anything longer than 15 yards, and here was Campbell launching a 60-yard bomb like a darts player trying to split the 11.

“And then, of course, Brandon Lloyd drops the ball. Actually, it wasn’t even a drop — a drop implies one or more of an individual’s hands engaged the football in some meaningful way. The ball just landed in the space between his forearms. It didn’t even touch flesh.

“Such is the life of a Redskins quarterback.”

September 25, 2009

(The Redskins traveled to Detroit a week after being booed by the crowd at FedEx Field following a 9-7 win over the Rams. The team would lose 19-14, giving the Lions their first win since 2007.)

“Would a win against the Lions this week ease the hard feelings in D.C.? Of course. Here’s the thing — the boos at the Rams game didn’t have anything to do with Robert Henson or Mike Sellers or Devin Thomas. It was for two men — Vinny Cerrato and Dan Snyder — who have brought cynicism to a love that was once unadorned and true. Washington doesn’t want to worry about the Redskins — we want them taken care of because they take care of us. That’s what made Joe Gibbs’ return so special to everyone in town under the age of 25. For those of us born too late for Doug Williams and Mark Rypien but right on time for Norv Turner and Heath Shuler, Gibbs 2.0 showed that it wasn't crazy to think being a Redskin meant more than being a Panther or a Cardinal or a Jaguar. It did and it does. And that’s what makes the Snyder/Cerrato regime so frustrating. This man sums it up nicely: ‘I’m not booing Justin Tryon. He’s trying hard. I’m booing the fact that he plays for us.’ ”

October 16, 2009

(A home game against the Chiefs seemed to be the team’s last best hope for salvaging the 2009 season. Instead, the Redskins lost 14-6 and Jim Zorn was stripped of his play-calling duties.)

APHead coach-in-exile Gregg Williams

“Future scholars of the Burgundy Revolution may debate this point, but I maintain the snub of Gregg Williams during the 2008 offseason is ultimately what convinced Redskins fans to turn once for all on Daniel the Boy King. Before then, you could always make the ‘He’s one of us’ argument. Every bad signing could be spun into a positive, an example of just how much Snyder cared. It’s impossible to overstate how much Sean Taylor’s death affected people in Washington, especially young people. It was another piece of random ugliness for a region that had gone through 9/11, the Beltway Sniper and the Anthrax scare. Of all these, Taylor’s death had the biggest impact because everyone knew Sean Taylor. There was no counting your blessings that everyone you loved made it home safe. If the team’s subsequent playoff run was a blessing, then Joe Gibbs’ decision to step down after the season was a gift. I’ve always maintained Gibbs’ second retirement stemmed not from burnout but from his almost psychic relationship with the Norv Babies, that beleaguered generation of fans who began following the team just as Gibbs first left town. These were the people he came back for and the people he left again for. Gibbs knew how much we needed to see Williams — Taylor’s defensive coordinator and fiercest defender — take over as head coach. Taylor and Williams were synonymous with each other in Washington. You couldn’t talk about one without talking about the other. Passing on Williams sent a brutal message, one that can never be forgiven. You’re wrong to remember Sean. Hiring some guy from Seattle who couldn’t even get the team colors right only made things worse.”

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