Redskins: Jay Gruden should be coaching for his job

Gruden doesn’t seem to get the first rule in competition. Do no harm to yourself.

While Gruden wasn’t the one dropping passes or fumbling balls, these blunders are products of a team lacking the focus required of those making a play for the postseason. Simply put, the Gruden-led Redskins can’t get details straight because he doesn’t bother with them. If he truly did, he’d realize that it’s important for your special teams players to understand that if you run the ball into the endzone, that will result in a touchback. Equally significant is your own wherewithal to grasp the incalculable value of timeouts late in a close game that you can’t waste with a worthless challenge.

Like so many franchises that flirt with mediocrity, the Redskins find a variety of maddening ways to lose games. And one principal feature of these losses is the team’s penchant for unforced errors, some of which are critical turnovers that cost them points against desperate opponents like the Cowboys. In contrast, lost among the numbers spelling out the Cowboys’ sputtering, low-octane offense on Thursday night was the fact that they committed none themselves.

It’s a lesson that Gruden overlooks when focusing on too many big picture issues: one of the first rules in any competition is to do no harm to yourself. That’s the responsibility of the head coach. When his team fails to do that, the sins committed by his players are properly borne by him, especially where they amount to the menagerie of errors they put on display on Thursday night.