Bumbling Our Way to a Staff

You know, every time I go away for the weekend, the Skins do something. Whenever we’re bored and looking for Redskins news, I’m going to book a trip. Anyway, for those who missed it, we officially announced Jim Zorn and Greg Blache and fired Saunders and Williams. It also looks like Ron Meeks is the leading candidate for the job and that we will also interview Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo and Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels after the Super Bowl. OK, some thoughts in no particular order:

1) If you told me a month ago that we’d end up with Ron Meeks, Jim Zorn and Greg Blache, I’d have been happy with that. Meeks looks like a great guy with incredible leadership skills who can provide everything Joe Gibbs did. Zorn is an up and coming offensive talent who has been known for improvising and turning young QBs into good QBs. Blache is a great defensive coach who can help Meeks on defense. This is a great group. So who cares if it was done totally backwards and with the finesse of a defensive lineman recovering a fumble for a TD?

2) And people might disagree with me, but if we go with Meeks, we will actually get more continuity than we would have with Williams. Gregg Williams is a great coach, but I simply don’t believe he has the same type of inspirational leadership, the same kind of moral character building ability, the same type of broader leadership that gets you through stuff like Sean Taylor’s death. This isn’t to say Williams isn’t a great leader in the football coach way. His men love him. But Meeks seems to have the same kind of depth to him that Gibbs and Tony Dungy have. He just seems to be an excellent man.

3) I don’t quite see why we’d go with Steve Spagnuolo. The success of that defense seems obvious. They have an incredible pass rush based on a dominant front four. Their secondary is a sieve if they don’t get a pass rush. We have the exact opposite defense. Our front four is there to occupy the o-line for our blitzes and we get just enough pass rush for our excellent secondary to make plays. I don’t know enough about his character and leadership skills to make a judgment, but fit matters a lot here.

4) Regardless of what we decided to do, Williams and Saunders deserved a better send off than this. They deserved clean breaks with respectful timing and wording. I hope Mr. Snyder understands that when you treat people like this, people see it and choose not to work for you. This might be one of the reasons why Bill Cowher wasn’t ready to come back yet.

5) On the other hand, let’s just say you’ve already decided to treat Saunders and Williams poorly. Since Snyder had done this, why not wait another couple of weeks to keep Saunders and Williams under contract so we could possibly have received draft pick compensation for them. Jacksonville wants Williams. Couldn’t we have gotten a 7th rounder or something? We’re already being terrible to them, we might as well profit from it? As it is, we’ve shown ourselves to be ridiculous and incapable of profiting from it.

6) By the way, I’m no media expert as you all know. But I do know the Skins lost the news cycle when they appointed Zorn and Blatche. The thing I want to know is whether they were too dumb to make the announcement when they’d get the news cycle or whether they were so embarrassed by the choices they made and wanted it out of the cycle. Either way, it is sad.