Rich Tandler's Real Redskins

Will Redskins Vets Just Say No?

The group that decides personnel matters for the Washington Redskins may get a whole lot bigger this coming offseason.

The team may add a general manager to the mix, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m referring to is a group of about a dozen veterans, players who carry 2007 salary cap numbers of about $3.5 million and over. Some of the members of this group are Shawn Springs, Marcus Washington, Jon Jansen, and Chris Samuels. Many of them will be asked to restructure their contracts to create more 2007 cap room. Unlike in the past when many veterans were willing to redo their deals “for the good of the team”, there is a growing feeling around Redskins Park that many of them may balk at restructuring for what they perceive is also the good of the team.

As of right now, according to both our WarpathInsiders.com capologist Robert Large and David Elfin of the Washington Times, the Redskins are within $1 million of the 2007 cap of $109 million or perhaps slightly over. That’s uncomfortably close at best and it’s worse because that number is comprised of the cap numbers of just the 41 players who currently are under contract for 2007. Because the salaries of the top 51 players count towards the cap the Redskins will have 10 more salaries count against that number meaning that they will have to find $3 to $4 million just to be able to fill out a roster with minimum salary bodies.

The good news is that most of the team’s starters are among those who are under contract. (Or, given that the team will finish with a double-digit loss total, that may be the bad news). But the team desperately wants to retain guard Derrick Dockery, who will be an unrestricted free agent and that move will cost considerably more than the minimum salary. Even if a cap-friendly deal can be worked out another million or two of cap room will need to be cleared. On top of that the team has a draft pick that is likely to be in the top ten and, unless they trade down, that will eat up some cap space as well.

Still, $5 or $7 million over hardly is cap hell. That could be cleared out by releasing such players as John Hall, Christian Fauria and David Patten and a few minor renegotiations. Few will refuse to restructure under such circumstances because the job they save may be their own.

It will get sticky, however, if the team asks for players to redo their deals in order to go on a free agency spending spree. What happened last year may make some players hesitant to do so. They agreed to the restructures and looked on as the team used the savings to make Adam Archuleta the highest paid safety in the history of mankind and to bring in an unproductive Brandon Lloyd and pay Antwaan Randle El good #2 receiver money to be a #3 receiver and punt returner.

Around Redskins Park, there are grumblings from some players that they wished that they hadn’t acted as enablers in the team’s drunken sailor spending spree. Some are wishing that they had just said no to the team’s request. Perhaps if enough of them had refused to restructure then the team would have retained the popular Ryan Clark for a reasonable price instead of having to figure out how to spread out the approximately $8 million in dead cap money that will have to be written off when Archuleta gets cut in a few months.

These players who feel that they were burned last year could be very reluctant to make the same mistake again. While there is a high degree of respect for Gibbs the coach and Gibbs the man among team members, like any thinking people the players have to be skeptical of the abilities and effectiveness of Gibbs the personnel director. In essence, players like Springs and Washington control the purse strings. If they don’t trust Gibbs to spend the money wisely, if they see another Archuleta disaster or Lloyd misstep coming, they may well not provide him with the money to spend.

So, the current starting cornerback may well have a hand in deciding whether or not the team can go out and hire his replacement. Do the members of the offensive line want to see the defense overhauled or do they think that things just need a few tweaks? Are veterans going to be concerned that dead cap money in the next few years will cost them their jobs?

Offseasons are always interesting times in Ashburn. This year promises more intrigue than usual with the players having so much say in what the team can and can’t do.

This Blog is Moving

No real big deal here, I'm just moving the blog to a spot on the Website for my book. You'll be able to get there by clicking on http://blog.RedskinsGames.com. Blogger is a nice, free application, but I need a little bit more out of my blog software, so I'm moving up.

It will be a slow transition. I'll post on both for a while, then post links to the new site from here and then just post a permanent pointer on Blogger.

And, as always, you can catch both the blog, everything else I write about the Redskins, and lots more at the Website I am the editor for, http://www.WarpathInsiders.com.

It's a good group that comes here, hope to see you at the new home,

Rich Tandler

The Shape of Things to Come?

If the Redskins 16-10 win over the New Orleans Saints is a look at the shape of things to come, there is a lot to like. In no particular order:

• Jason Campbell wasn’t perfect, but he was more than good enough. In front of a charged-up hostile crowd in a dome, he made no apparent mental mistakes. He did misfire on a few passes but none came close to winding up in the hands of a New Orleans defender. You just can’t throw a pass any better than the touchdown he threw to Santana Moss. Campbell rolled right and he launched the ball from about the 42. It traveled 50 yards right into the hands of Moss, who has split the two defenders.
• The offensive line played extremely well, especially considering that one of its starters was missing. Todd Wade filled in for Jon Jansen and the unit didn’t miss a beat. While the Saints rushing defense is not very strong, they do have a good pass rush. The Redskins blocked well enough for Ladell Betts to go over the 100-yard mark for the fourth straight week and well enough to keep Campbell upright almost the whole day. Casey Rabach finally is living up to his contract, Randy Thomas just might be the team’s best player, Derrick Dockery seems to play smarter and more refined every week and Chris Samuels likely will be the team’s Pro Bowl representative if they have one.
• The defense tackled. You’re not going to shut down opposing receivers all day long, especially with a quarterback like Drew Brees throwing to them. But you can make a solid tackle as soon as they catch the ball and minimize the gain. That’s what the Redskins did all day long. New Orleans’ yards after catch was negligible. The first man almost always brought Deuce McAllister down. And while the first defender there didn’t always bring Reggie Bush down, he was always knocked hard enough at first contact to allow the rest of the defense to swarm to him. The tackling ability turned around all of a sudden against the Panthers and it’s kept up.
• Specifically on defense, Carlos Rogers is getting his game together. Many of the long plays he was giving up earlier in the year did not come as a result of him being clearly beaten by the receiver. He often was close enough but for whatever reason he wouldn’t make a play on the ball. In the past few weeks he has been making the plays instead of being a spectator. While he’s not quite playing up to the level one would like to see from the ninth overall pick in the draft, he’s heading that that direction.
• And nobody’s calling Andre Carter a bust any more, either. Again, he isn’t quite living up to his contract but his picture no longer belongs on the side of a milk carton. On the third down play on the Saints’ final series he came from the other side of the line to make a stop on Bush for a loss. There hasn’t been any question about his motor; now, the effort is beginning to show some results.
• Shaun Suisham has made seven straight field goals. That’s not a Moseley-like streak by any means, but it is possible that the Redskins have a young leg that can stick around for a few years. Nobody will be completely sold until he makes a game-winner in December, but the early signs are good.

It all bodes well for 2007. Of course, we all thought that the way the team finished off 2005 was a sign of things to come this year, so we will have to wait and see.

Going for it

One other piece of business from the Saints game needs to be discussed. There is a chorus of criticism out there coming from the message boards and call-in shows about Joe Gibbs’ decision to kick a field goal on fourth and three with his team holding a three-point lead. They wanted Gibbs to go for it and make it a two score game. This complaining is coming despite the fact that the strategy worked and the Redskins won the game. They agree with Fox talking head Brian Baldinger, who said that Gibbs should go for it.

That is ridiculous. It was not only the right call to make, it was the only call to make. First of all, it was fourth and three, not fourth and two. The graphic on Fox said fourth and two but the line for the first down was at exactly the one and the ball was spotted at the four. The cameras were on Gibbs during the whole time in between plays so you couldn’t get a good view of where it was, but you can clearly see that the ball is being snapped from the four when they go to the shot of them lining up for the field goal attempt.

But whether it was two or three to go, or even if it was two feet, you have to take the points in that situation. You are on the road in a noisy dome. You have already experienced some problems with crowd noise. If you don’t make it the Saints need to get only a field goal to send it into overtime. It’s always easier to play defense when you know that the other team absolutely has to cross the goal line. Your defense has been playing well all day.

Given the same situation, an NFL coach will kick the field goal 99 times out of 100. It’s a no-brainer. On top of that, it worked. I’ve said that I would like to see Gibbs be a little more aggressive and go for it on occasion, but not on this occasion.

Tuesday Take: The Best Loss of the Year

You can reach Rich Tandler by email at WarpathInsiders@comcast.net

Yeah, I know. It’s all about winning. Joe Gibbs will tell you that. Every other coach from Al Saunders to Bob Saunders will tell you that. Every player from Albright to Yoder will say the same thing.

Still, all losses are not created equal. There are good losses and there are bad losses. That’s the case when you are in playoff contention and it’s especially true if you are eliminated, as the Redskins are. The elimination became official when the game ended on Sunday—the Redskins can’t finish any better than last in the division as the Eagles and Giants hold all of the tiebreakers even if one of them finished 7-9 and a team that’s 4^th in its division can’t be a Wild Card—but it has been waiting to become official ever since the Redskins lost to the Tennessee Titans on October 15.

Ever since then, the Redskins have had a string of ugly losses. They withered in the second half in Indianapolis, they were utterly unproductive offensively in Philly, they got run over by a weak Bucs team, and they couldn’t keep a reeling Falcons team down despite holding a 14-0 lead at home.

On Sunday, they seemed to be headed to another bad loss. After a crisp opening drive the turnover bug bit. Jason Campbell didn’t see a linebacker and the Philly pick in Redskin territory set up one touchdown. Safety Michael Lewis returned a tipped ball for another. It looked like the defense might be packing it in after Jeff Garcia completed a long pass to Reggie Brown and the Eagles easily completed the drive to make it 21-3. A collapse to a 30+-point loss seemed to be in the offing.

But the Redskins didn’t let it happen. Campbell and the offense cobbled together a drive to a field goal before halftime to make it 21-6. That was the first of four scoring drives in their next five possessions. The Redskin defense tightened up, forcing two three and outs. After Jason Campbell scrambled to set up a first and goal at the three with the score 21-16 it looked like the Redskins would come all the way back.

But they did not. The last seven minutes of the game demonstrated why the Redskins will finish with a losing record for the eighth time in the last 15 years. They had stuck with giving the ball to Ladell Betts, who has having a career day, even when they were down by 18, right up until they got that first down at the three. In three plays their best offensive weapon got zero touches. A penalty and a sack precluded going for it on fourth down. And then, after having held the Eagles in check for most of the second half, the Washington defense let up, allowing Philly to get a couple of first downs and kill the clock without giving Campbell a chance to try to rally the team to a game-winning field goal.

It was the season in a nutshell. Questionable play calling, confusion leading to a dumb penalty, bad luck (Chris Cooley was the primary receiver on the second and goal pass but he stumbled), and the inability to get a key defensive stop adding up to not getting it done.

Still, the good thing was that they were in a position to blow the game at the end. Again, that sounds dumb, but in a season like this one it’s reality. You’d like to think that players making six- and seven-figure incomes wouldn’t mail it in no matter what the score in a game or the situation in a season. But the stark reality is that they do (did anyone see the Rams last night?).

The game also could have been a key in the development of Campbell. He rebounded from a dreadful first half to post a QB rating of 118 in the final 30 minutes. His TD pass to Antwaan Randle El was as perfect as his first interception was ugly.

Tough times don’t mold character, they reveal it. At 21-3, this game was as much of a gut check as being down by four in the fourth quarter of a playoff game. The Redskins passed the test, even though they revealed some of their many flaws in doing so.

Rich Tandler is the author of The Redskins From A to Z, Volume 1: The Games. This unique book has an account of every game the Redskins played from when they moved to Washington for the 1937 season through 2001. It makes the perfect stocking stuffer for the Redskins fans on your shopping list. For details and ordering information go to http://www.RedskinsGames.com

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Tandler's Redskins Blog Ver. 12.08.06--Mike Wilbon is one of the most respected columnists out there but he's going to lose his reputation if he continues the shallow, vapid analysis he cranked out in his article today.

You can reach Rich Tandler by email at WarpathInsiders@comcast.net

Generally speaking, I’m a fan of Mike Wilbon. He is one of the most reasonable, knowledgeable, and respected newspaper columnists in the business. Rarely does he say or write something outrageous just for the sake of doing so or ask a question of a coach or athlete that is carefully crafted to draw attention to himself. This sets him apart from many of his brethren who have also become print/ESPN hybrids.

That’s why I was disappointed in his effort in today’s Post. Not that I disagree with his main thesis, that the Redskins desperately need a personnel manager who isn’t wearing a whistle. That is becoming more and more obvious every play that T. J. Duckett and Adam Archuleta watch. No, there were two points that he made that need to be examined here. First there was this one:

Look no further than the Redskins' loss to Atlanta four days ago. Okay, neophyte quarterback Jason Campbell certainly didn't have a good day. He played like what he is essentially -- a rookie. But Campbell was nowhere near as incompetent as his coaches on Sunday. How, in good conscience, could Al Saunders or Gibbs (and whoever else might have called plays) allow a kid making his third NFL start to throw 38 passes? Coaches talk all the time about how they must put players in position to do well. How does asking a newborn quarterback to throw 38 times work to his advantage?

Too busy traveling to the Monday night game city to do PTI or to wherever you’re doing the NBA pregame from, Mike, to do any more analysis of the Redskins game than to take a cursory glance at the final stats? If Wilbon had just taken a moment to pull up the Gamebook he could have figured out, just as I did, that in the first half when the Redskins had their 14-0 lead, Campbell threw 11 passes. In the third quarter, as the Redskins fell behind by three, the pace of passes increased slightly as Campbell threw seven times. Even after Atlanta took a 10-point lead with 12:26 to play Saunders tried not to place the entire game on Campbell’s shoulders. On the ensuing series Saunders called Ladell Betts’ number three times before calling for Campbell to throw. His third and two pass was incomplete. If anything, one might be tempted to call that series too conservative.

It was only after the Redskins regained possession with 6:22 left trailing by 10 that Campbell passes started to fill the air. In two futile attempts to score to try to pull the game out, Campbell threw 19 passes, exactly half of his total for the game. I don’t think that any reasonable person would conclude that Saunders was in a position where he had to call passes on virtually every single play. The game situation greatly inflated Campbell’s pass attempts. Anyone who was paying attention should know this and acknowledge it before taking potshots at the play calling.

And then, along those same lines, there’s this:

The Saunders experiment should be about over now. Twelve games of disaster isn't enough?

Mind you, Wilbon says this after stating that, “Any routine examination of the Redskins now reveals a team that constantly (and unsuccessfully) tries to remake itself. . .” in the second paragraph of the column. So since they try to remake themselves too often and that damages the team they should remake themselves again and get rid of Saunders? Again, he’s probably too busy to look it up but one can easily discover that the Chiefs’ offense struggled in Saunders’ first season calling the plays in Kansas City. I suppose that Wilbon would have had Dick Vermeil pull the plug on Saunders three quarters of the way through that season, too. Of course, once the Chiefs got things figured out they became the NFL’s most prolific offense for the next four seasons.

Let’s look at it this way—is it better to have Jason Campbell pass 19 times in the last six minutes of a game that this team is trailing by 10 points or to have him learning his seventh new offense in the past seven seasons.

Such "analysis" is more worthy of Wilbon’s vapid PTI and Washington Post sidekick that it is of a Pro Football Hall of Fame elector. Perhaps if he’s too busy to do the kind of in-depth analysis he needs to do in order to maintain his top-notch reputation he needs to hire a research assistant. I’m available, for the right price.

Rich Tandler is the author of The Redskins From A to Z, Volume 1: The Games. This unique book has an account of every game the Redskins played from when they moved to Washington for the 1937 season through 2001. It makes the perfect stocking stuffer for the Redskins fans on your shopping list. For details and ordering information go to http://www.RedskinsGames.com

The Offseason Begins

You can reach Rich Tandler by email at WarpathInsiders@comcast.net

This week’s Tuesday Take was essentially going to write itself. All I would have to do is refer back to last week’s edition, the part where I wrote about the Redskins’ training camp workload vs. that of the Falcons. After the Redskins’ first two drives, both crisply executed touchdown marches, it was obvious that Atlanta was a dead football team walking. Jim Mora’s brutal camp in August had left them with nothing in the tank in December. And while the Redskins’ relatively easy training camp regime had probably cost them the season since they weren’t ready to play when the season started they were ready to get on a patented Joe Gibbs December roll. In addition to being able to bang out this piece with my eyes closed an article breaking down the Redskins’ playoff possibilities was in the offing.

But then they had to play the last 45 minutes of the game.

While the Redskins didn’t seem to weaken--especially Ladell Betts, who kept on ripping off 12 yard runs--the Falcons got their legs under them and established control. They started holding on to Michael Vick’s passes, Vick started scrambling and they climbed back into the game. Jason Campbell did a couple of things that made him look like a quarterback playing in his third NFL game. Once the Redskins got behind they never got a sense of urgency to try to rally. Their offense in the last five minutes of the game seemed to be confused. On several occasions they wasted time decided whether or not they needed to huddle up before huddling, wasting precious seconds.

When Jason Campbell’s fourth-down pass fell incomplete with 26 seconds left, ending any chance at a miracle finish, the Redskins’ offseason officially began. While it’s true that an 8-8 NFC team probably will make the playoffs, perhaps even two of them, the Redskins aren’t going to finish at 8-8. They haven’t demonstrated the ability to string together more than five quarters of solid football all year long; it’s sheer fantasy to think that they could suddenly get hot for 16 quarters, run the table, and get to .500.

There will be plenty of time to break down what the Redskins should do this offseason in the coming weeks. At first glance, however, I think that they need to resist the urge to make massive changes. Their salary cap situation will prevent them from doing much in the free agent market, which is a good thing. The team needs some stability. They made relatively few changes after the 2004 season and they went 10-6 the next year.

Jason Campbell spending seven games plus a full offseason as the team’s #1 quarterback will do a world of good for the offense. So will spending a second offseason absorbing and adjusting to Al Saunders’ offense. The players and the organization seriously underestimated the difficulty of that task this year. Let’s not forget having a healthy Clinton Portis back in the lineup in addition to all of that.

One thing that they can do right now is play Rocky McIntosh at weakside linebacker. It seems that Warrick Holdman is to Gregg Williams what Mark Brunell is to Joe Gibbs. Williams can defend Holdman’s play all he wants but the fact is that the Redskins invested a pair of second-round picks in McIntosh and they have to see what they have in him.

But there is no need to make changes for the sake of making changes. Instability has been the hallmark of the Redskins organization since 1999. What we’re seeing now is largely the result of that continuous upheaval. Some adjustments and refinements are necessary, but the core of the team, both in terms of players and coaches, needs to remain intact.

Rich Tandler is the author of The Redskins From A to Z, Volume 1: The Games. This unique book has an account of every game the Redskins played from when they moved to Washington for the 1937 season through 2001. It makes the perfect stocking stuffer for the Redskins fans on your shopping list. For details and ordering information go to http://www.RedskinsGames.com