Rich Tandler's Real Redskins

ESPN Mag says Redskins will go 3-13, sort of

I just got my copy of ESPN The Magazine in the mail and after ploughing through 154 pages mostly dedicated to Michael Vick (including one bizarre article imagining what would have happened if Vick had been born white), I looked at the NFL predictions section. As I had read in some places on the Internet, the official prediction at the top right of the Redskins page is for them to go 3-13, which would, of course, be last in the NFC East.

They really don’t justify such an awful record in the nuggets of analysis that they present in the article. In fact, in one of them they directly contradict themselves.

Each team’s analysis page has a section called “Vegas Vibe” where they discuss the chances of the team going over or under its projected win total. The over/under for the Redskins is six. So, here is the pick: “They face the NFL’s fourth-easiest slate, with only six games against teams coming off of winning records. Take the over.”

So that would mean that the pick is for the Redskins to win at least seven games. The last time I checked seven is more than three. A lot more, like the difference between a full-fledged disaster of a season and a season that could indicate that things are moving in the right direction. 

So ESPN The Magazine has it covered either way. If the Redskins are awful, they predicted that. If they make the playoffs, they had that scenario covered as well.

There are some other nuggets of analysis in the article that don’t quite seem to be in touch with reality. Former Redskins linebacker Antonio Pierce writes, “Then look at the defense. Who’s back there?”

Well, in case Antonio was too busy grinding axes to notice we can point out that the Redskins did lose Carlos Rogers but added Oshiomogho Atogwe, Josh Wilson, Stephen Bowen, and Barry Cofield in free agency and drafted Ryan Kerrigan in the first round. Pierce says LaRon Landry is “banged up” but it is not as though he is expected to miss a significant number of games, if any. Add in Pro Bowl performers Brian Orakpo, London Fletcher, and DeAngelo Hall and you don’t have the ’85 Bears by any stretch but you have what almost certainly will be an improved unit.

You would have to be paying attention to know all of this, as there were no headline-grabbing acquisitions like Nnamdi Asomugha. Of course, they tried things that way in the past and it has not worked. The only course of action that will make the national media types pay attention to what the Redskins are doing is one that leads to winning some games. But, in the meantime, perhaps ESPN should get its various stories straight.

 

The court documents, Snyder vs. City Paper

Here are the links as emailed to me by the Redskins. Take a look, comment if you'd like, I'll be back in the morning with my take on what's developing.

• The complaint
• Exhibit A--the front page
• Exhibit B--back cover
• Exhibit C--the article
• Exhibit D--letter from David Donovan requesting a retraction of the story

There is a lot here and there are many layers but let me snip out one from Donovan's letter that seems to be the heart of the matter.

Jenkins: Blame at the top

I don't know if Sally Jenkins is getting smarter or if my own views are coming into line with hers. In any case, up until about a year ago virtually any column she wrote would be panned in this space for containing misinformed opinions. Lately, though, her contributions to Redskins thought have been right on target, none more so than her column this morning. There isn't much to add to it, just go over and read it. The whole thing is on the money here's the key quote:

For a decade now, Daniel Snyder has made an utter mess of the team, and yet he seldom, if ever, takes responsibility for it. He operates from behind a phalanx of security, proxies and media managers, routinely declining to comment and be accountable. He wants all the fun when they win and none of the blame when they lose. The most damning anecdote I've heard yet about Snyder came this week from his former player-confidante LaVar Arrington, who described how Snyder would stand outside the locker room and shake hands with players when they won, but glared and declined to offer a hand when they lost.

Kudos to Jenkins for nailing it.

Tandler on WRC 4 Video

WRC TV did not post my 15 seconds or so of fame from appearing on their newscast on the Web, so here is the video camera from TV version of it.

Tandler on NBC 4 at 6:00 Monday

I just finished a shoot (I think that’s what they call it in the TV biz) with Chris Gordon of NBC 4 in Washington. The segment was about the reaction of the fans to yesterday’s game. It will air tonight, Monday, during the first 15 minutes or so of their  6:00 newscast. Please tune in and let me know how it was so that I can find out. I won’t see it, I’m heading back to Richmond in a minute here. There’s a possibility that it will be on line and I’ll be sure to post how to find that if it does make it to the web.

Sally ’s sorry, Jerruh’s gutless

I'm certainly one to bust on the media when they get it wrong, so I'm stepping up here to send out kudos to a couple of writers who got it right.

One, shockingly, is Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. After the Redskins' opener, she couldn't wait to bash Jim Zorn and the rest of the Redskins players, coaches, and front office personnel. I think the only reason she didn't lambaste the crew that cleans the Redskins Park offices after hours was due to a lack of space in the paper.

The fact is that Zorn is quite clearly just another underling who is working with what he has been so hastily given. As he stood on the field at Giants Stadium, watching the Redskins commit assorted miscues on their way to a lamentably bad 16-7 loss to the Giants, he at times barely seemed to be part of the organization, much less in charge of it. He followed the action on the field 10 yards away from any of his coaches and players, his arms crossed contemplatively, checking a clipboard occasionally, identifiable as a head coach only by the red challenge flag sticking out of his back pocket.

Today, she is singing quite the different tune.

[Zorn is] astute, tactically exciting, and he makes people believe. Under another coach it would be tempting to write the Redskins off as inevitably mediocre after a loss like last Sunday's to the previously winless Rams, 19-17. But Zorn has done something that didn't seem possible, which is to get the organization working together in a coherent, functional way. Whatever the problem is, you get the feeling that he'll fix it.

She gains a great deal of credibility in my book by using the "w" word:

After their dreadful opener against the Giants, a mortifying occasion for Zorn, I wrote them off prematurely, and was wrong.

You don't hear many who were prematurely shoveling dirt on the grave of the 2008 Redskins saying that they were wrong. They have changed their tunes, but few have looked back and admitted that they were rushing to judgment.

There has been no rush to judgment when it comes to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, but the media still have him painted as some sort of genius even though his team hasn't won a playoff game in a decade. Even now that the Pacman Jones experiment has blown up in his face, few are calling Jerruh "It was a Nothing" Jones out on it.

Ian O'Connor, writing on FoxSports.com, is one of the few. He opens up on the Cowboys owner with both barrels. Here's the opening salvo:

All these years later, Jerry Jones finally got what was coming to him. Roger Goodell emasculated Jones the way the Dallas Cowboys' owner once emasculated Tom Landry.

Goodell exposed Jones as a gutless wonder, as a leader afraid to lead. By suspending Pacman Jones for at least four games, the NFL commissioner was only doing what the Dallas owner was terrified of doing.

The right thing.

O'Connor says that Jones' gutless ways manifested themselves in the Cowboys' loss to Arizona.

Jerry Jones will never know if his team would've been energized by a firm and just decision to suspend Pacman, because Jones didn't have the nerve to make that decision. Even though the owner had admitted that the cornerback "had created with his actions no benefit of the doubt," Jones gave Pacman the benefit of the doubt, anyway, because he thought it would get him to 5-1.

There's plenty more excellent O'Connor commentary on America's Owner, be sure to check it out.

Post gets it right--almost

I don't intend to make this into a media critic blog or anything like that, but the media coverage of the Redskins is a topic that seems to be of interest to many of the readers here, judging from the hit counts and comments that posts about the media generate. So, here's one more quick word on the Washington Post's coverage of the Redskins.

This time, it's kudos—sort of.

George Solomon, the paper's former sports editor and current Sunday-only columnist, wrote of the overblown, negative reaction to loss to the Giants. First he reiterated the team's sins of commission and omission in the Meadowlands and then he talks about some of the coverage of it:

"This is a playoff team?" asked John Riggins of his cranky cohorts Andy Pollin and Kevin Sheehan. "I see a mushroom cloud of goo."

Pollin added: "They got nothing from their draft picks."

Of Zorn's debut, Riggins said: "Jim Zorn has underestimated what it takes to be a head coach."

"Jim Zorn is in over his head," Mitchell said after the game. "His team was not prepared."

(Note: it's a good thing that Dan Snyder owns the station and controls the message. Those guys might really have let loose otherwise.)

After quoting Riggins, Pollin and the king of cranky, Brian Mitchell, Solomon asks the question:

All this after one game against a championship team? We have a mushroom cloud of goo hanging over the city? The coach in over his head? The quarterback at risk?

Welcome to the NFL -- that, according to old coaches, stands for "Not For Long." But not for long has to be longer than one game, or one season, without the fans or front office hitting the panic button and googling Bill Cowher's name.

He then reminds the reader of Joe Gibbs' 0-5 start in 1981 and we all know how that turned out.

Good for George Solomon for preaching that some degree of patience is in order here. Apparently, however, it doesn't seem that he reads his own newspaper.

He didn't have to transcribe the Red Zebra broadcast to find nattering nabobs of negativity. All he had to do was read Jenkins, Carpenter, and LaCanfora in the Washington Post to find a rush to judgment about the Zorn era.

Still, that detracts just slightly from Solomon larger point of it being way too early to hit the panic button. He just needs to go down the hall and suggest that to the current sports editor.

Doom and gloom from the Post

I expect the message board community and the postgame show callers to overreact after one season-opening loss. After the Washington Redskins' loss to the New York Giants on Thursday, the knee-jerk brigade is led by the bench Campbell contingent and running close behind with torches lit and rope in hand are the fire Zorn mob, the Portis stinks gang, and the throng that wants to send the Redskins' entire O-line on a one-way retirement cruise immediately.

What astounds me is how many sky-is-falling pieces we see in today's papers. The pros are the ones who are supposed to bring some perspective to the situation.

Apparently the editors at the Washington Post believe otherwise.

Sally Jenkins believes that she can come up with "inescapable facts" about the Redskins after one game, 6.25% of the first season under a new head coach. The Skins will have to "claw mightily to be better than a .500 team", says Jenkins, who reached this conclusion by halftime, or after 3.125% of the season.

Elsewhere in the Post, Les Carpenter had this reasoned analysis of the Skins' first play. It was a sack, the Giants' only one of the game, in fact.

Still it was a harbinger of the calamity to come, one in which the Redskins only had 11 first downs, 1 touchdown and 133 passing yards with an offense that was supposed to make everyone forget previous coach Joe Gibbs and his conservative, run-first game plans that had grown stale to many Redskins fans.

Did anyone really expect the offense to hum like a well-oiled machine on the road against the Super Bowl champs? It was a "calamity"? I'm no pro writer, but I would suggest to Mr. Carpenter that he save such words for actual calamities. In 2005, 36-0 in the Meadowlands was a calamity, at least in football terms. Last night, 16-7, even though the game wasn't that close, was not cataclysmic.

And one game, 27 passes into Jason Campbell's adaption to Jim Zorn's offense, and into Zorn's real-life experience as an NFL play caller, Jason LaCanfora found a guy who said that Campbell was doomed to fail. Quoting an NFL personnel executive (someone who, by the way, has a vested interest in seeing the Redskins fail):

When I watch that team, I think something's going to have to give. Is it the scheme or the quarterback? At some point either the coach is going to have to change what he does to fit the quarterback, or they're going to need a different quarterback. . . You can trace it all back to that, and if that doesn't work then your team is in trouble. It could take four years to dig out of something like that. If the coach doesn't have the right personnel to run his system, then you're starting over again.

So we have a season's that's over, depending on which Post scribe you want to believe, after either the first game, their first half of that game or even the first play of that game.

I'd call that static analysis, but that gives it credit for being analysis.

Why do Jenkins, Carpenter, and LaCanfora have to rush to judgment? Are they afraid that the Redskins will be 1-8 and the Post will be out of ink and paper for them to blast Snyder, Cerrato, Zorn, Campbell, Justin Tryon and Durant Brooks then?

Don't get me wrong, the Redskins and Zorn deserve all the criticism they are taking for what happened on Thursday night. They were tentative, they blew a boatload of opportunities, they were whipped on both sides of the line of scrimmage, and were thoroughly outclassed by a team that is very good, but not great.

But to think that things will stay this way, that Zorn won't adjust, that Campbell won't learn, that the quality of the opposition will stay the same, is lazy journalism at best.

Unfortunately, in these days of the Post-Redskins feud, it's what I've come to expect.

Redskins.com Puff

I don't expect what's written on Redskins.com to be hard-hitting or even mildly critical of the Washington Redskins. I haven't even heard the PR department refer to the site as "unfiltered" Redskins news lately. There is no pretense of objectivity. It's definitely "sunny side up" coverage of the team.

Generally, there isn't anything wrong with that. You see the brand, you see the label, and what you see is what you get. Don't expect to go on to the GOP website and read the dirt about John McCain. Don't visit Exxon-Mobile's site to find stories of consumer hardship caused by the price of gas.

Sometimes, though, positive spin can go too far. Such was the case in a story on Dexter Manley that appeared on Redskins.com a couple of days ago.

The article, written by Michael Richman, summarizes Manley's on-field accomplishments and speaks of his emotion and flair. It's a nice piece, as far as it goes. But where it doesn't go is the issue.

There is no mention of Manley's problems with substance abuse anywhere in the article. Not one word.

You just can't talk about the career of Dexter Manley without talking about his problems with drugs any more than you can reflect on the presidency of Richard Nixon without talking about Watergate. The scandal was the latter's downfall just like cocaine derailed Manley's chances of becoming one of the all-time greats.

His sack totals went up every year from 1982, when the NFL started officially counting sacks, through 1986. That last year he totaled 18.5 sacks and made his first Pro Bowl.

It proved to be his last appearance in Hawaii as well. A first positive test for banned substances resulted in a warning. In July of 1988 he served a 30-day suspension for a second positive test. After recording 8.5 sacks in the strike-abbreviated 1987 season, he got just nine in '88.

The end came not too long after that. Ten games into the 1989 season, at the age of 30, he played his last down for the Redskins. A third positive test landed him an indefinite ban from the NFL.

When he was reinstated after a year, Joe Gibbs and the Redskins wanted no part of him. He played a year in Phoenix and one more in Tampa Bay before a fourth positive test got him banned for life.

These are not trivial, salacious details about the career of Manley. They are a relevant part, even a major part of the story. The substance abuse issue answers questions such as, "If he was such a good player, why did the Redskins ever let him leave?"

But the skies are never cloudy at Redskins.com. Never is heard a discouraging word, even when the credibility of the articles is at stake.