Down a Familiar Path

And so another era comes to an end in Washington. I can only say that it's fitting that Sunday's loss to San Diego comes with a point margin of three since that's about how many points were needed to defeat the Redskins in majority of their games this year. After two years that began with some amount of hope followed by the bitter truth of reality, it's with some sadness that we heard this morning that Coach Jim Zorn, coach of the Washington Redskins had been fired from his position. I mean it when I say it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. If you've ever seen any of his press conferences he's probably one of the most congenial and kindest coaches to speak to the press, even in the face of some of the most embarassing and unkind situations that Zorn found himself in this year.

Though I agree that some of the blame for Washington's performance these past two years can be piled on Jim Zorn, I think there's plenty of blame to be passed around and now that one spot for piling on the blame has been let go, there's little other place to hide it. First off I think a step in the right direction has been the removal of Vinny Cerrato. Friendship notwithstanding, Cerrato and owner Dan Snyder formed a partnership that had more misses in their acquisition decisions than hits. Sure they've had a handful of good players come along during their tenure at making personnel decisions but it hasn't always been the case. They've had more busts (at times) than a Roman colleseum. But they weren't initially content with looking at themselves when the chinks in the armor of the team became apparent.

Sure it was embarassing to lose a game to the Detroit Lions (a team which had not won a game in nearly 20 starts) in front of the American public. But it was embarassing still to see it happen multiple times in the early part of a season where victories were expected to come without any effort whatsoever. What was anticipated to be a potential 6-0 start became anything but. Then in the tail end of the season, despite the turmoil and the turnover in terms of starters, backups and backup backups the team showed that they had the potential to put together drives, to set up a strong defense and push opponents (even those that were clearly infinitely better) to the edge of defeat. But in the end it was always just a little less than what was needed to secure victory.

When it came time to pin the blame a lot of it fell squarely on the shoulders of Zorn and despite having his play-calling duties stripped from him or the fact that he was almost always being targeted as a scapegoat he showed good character and integrity by continuing to look foward to each and every week with the same vigour that would lead one to question whether his team was actually scraping the bottom of the NFL barrel or if they were bound for the Super Bowl. To me it only says one thing, that one person does not make a team but one person can certainly break one.

Jim Zorn can be blamed for a lot of things but certainly not for all of them. I don't know how keen he was to get some of the players and personnel that he did. It often seemed that name recognition counted for a lot more than actual skill with some Redskins acquisitions. It wasn't always that way but more often than not it was. It's like trainers in a gym will tell you; if you want to lose your gut then you have to do more than just sit-ups. Spot training and fixes will only do so much; you have to do an overall workout that gets the whole system working right. Perhaps losing Zorn on the heels of Cerrato is a good thing but the whole system (i.e., the Redskins) need to be shaped up. It's a whole new year and about eight months to the start of the next season. Time enough to see some change; hopefully for the better.