I Approve

Position(s) of need

Trent Williams over Russell Okung? All the predraft hype was over Russell, I will give the Redskins braintrust the benefit of the doubt, Trent is a great prospect, had a great combine and is flexible enough to play multiple positions. The only way this can be a bad pick is if this was a bad pick. Now barring a trade Redskins fans can take a walk until Saturday, we do not pick again until number 103.

The Redskins have their new tackle.



Trent Williams: Sooners Illustrated from here.

Separated

Those two parts are supposed to be together

Monday on my way home from work I took a bad turn on my bike and wiped out, for my trouble I separated my right shoulder, medically a sprain between grades three and five. Needles to say typing is somewhat troublesome so I will be enjoying the draft over the next three nights like any non blogging Redskins fan, which is to say doing a lot of talking and surfing but not typing.

For whatever it is worth I hope they go Russell Okung or Trent Williams at tackle and be done with it. Back in March I selected Trent Williams at number four in the 2010 No Logo Needed Blogger Mock Draft, only because the Buccaneers blogger selected Russell at number three. Have a look at what I wrote here.


The Redskins are on the clock.



X-ray image of my right shoulder by the helpful folks at the Arlington County Hospital emergency room.

Breaking: Donovan McNabb Traded to Redskins, News Conference 9:30pm ET, ESPN News

Update 11:15pm ET: Three hours to reflect on the situation and I am with the program, ring me up, I am on board with Donovan McNabb, already in the market for a new number five jersey.

Update 10:30pm ET: Curly R quick take: Donovan McNabb becomes our starting quarterback for 2010, serious questions about blocking and offensive line play and receiver quality may hamper Dono, and age and injuries may play a role as well. On the upside, Dono will for the first time have a legitimate ground game to back him up. Overall this will be good for Washington. This clears the way for Washington to select a tackle in this month's draft. Sadly, the Jason Campbell era is over.

Update 10:27pm ET: Adam Shefter was on, thinks the Eagles traded Dono to Washington out of respect for Donovan, to prevent him from going to the Bills or Raiders, given the Redskins offer for compensation. The unspoken opposite position is they traded Dono to Washington because they think he has nothing left in the tank and or that the Redskins are such a poorly run organization that they cannot win with him.

Update 10:21pm ET: Ron Jaworski now on ESPN News, he is as shocked, shocked that the Eagles would trade Dono to a division rival. Also thinks Dono is a perfect fit for Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan's offense.

Update 10:08pm ET: ESPN analyst and former Redskins offensive lineman Mark Schlereth was as surprised as I am that the Eagles would trade Dono to a division rival. That tells me the Eagles have little respect for Donovan McNabb or the Redskins, likely the latter.

Update 9:59pm ET: The presser is over and the ESPN talking heads tell me the first person Dono reached out to was Redskins incumbent quarterback Jason Campbell. The end of the Jason Campbell era is upon us.

Update 9:54pm ET: When asked to name his top Donovan McNabb memory, Andy said oh garsh there are so many but I would have to say fourth and 26, that was a pretty good day right there. Andy was referring to Dono's 11 January 2004 pass to Freddie Mitchell on fourth and 26 in the division round of the 2003 playoffs against the Packers, that pass saved an Eagles drive that ended in a tying field goal, then the Eagles won in overtime, it was an incredible come from behind win. I was at that game.

Update 9:46pm ET: Another text to my phone points out that the background behind a wheezing Andy Reid at this press conference reads FLUANDASTHMA.COM

Update 9:40pm ET: My phone is lighting up with texts and emails, sample from a friend in Kansas City, still guffawing about the Larry Johnson deal, on watching the Andy Reid press conference: "Reid is so tensed up he may not take a shit for weeks."

Update 9:37pm ET: Dono and Andy Reid came to the Eagles at the same time, in 1999, this is not how I thought that marriage would end.

Update 9:32pm ET: Andy Reid is hosting the Eagles press conference, says the timing was right, the compensation (from the Redskins) and Philadelphia has a great quarterback in Kevin Kolb in the wings, saddy though that he has to part ways with Dono.

Update 9:30pm ET: The blow dried talking heads on ESPN News tell me that Adam Shefter reported that Dono wanted to come to Washington. Why? That btw is a real question, tell me what you think.

Holy shit. The Redskins traded a second round pick this year and a third or fourth round pick next year to the Eagles for quarterback Donovan McNabb.

Live coverage now on ESPN News, there is a press conference scheduled for 9:30pm ET, tune and let's see what the fuck is happening.

We Need to Be More Careful with the Joe Gibbs Parallels

Everyone's going to be the next Joe Gibbs. Stop it.

Last week Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs, twice the head coach of the Washington Redskins, three time winner of the Super Bowl, was back in town for an appearance at Redskins Park, nominally it was about some Joe Gibbs charity, the real significance was as plain as the picture you see above; to link the Redskins' past glory with its hopeful future.

Joe Gibbs and Mike Shanahan, standing side by side, smiling and joking, assuring that even before Shanahan has coached a single game that he is in the pantheon.

That Mike Shanahan had his own Maroon and Black moment at this event, when he incorrectly tallied the number of points the Redskins scored in the second quarter of Super Bowl 22, it was 35 not 28 coach, that is a number burned into the brains of every Redskins fan old enough to remember it and Washington set seven Super Bowl records in that game, coach Shanahan's moment will not be remembered significantly.

What will be remembered is that image, of the two superstar coaches together, one hoping to bring the Redskins and himself back to the upper echelons, one humble and fading but still relevant.

And so that image and the media circle jerk around it leads, intentionally, to the notion of Mike Shanahan inheriting the mantle of Joe Gibbs, that Redskins fans can have their cake and eat it too, the football world can move on from Joe Gibbs and still Redskins fans can have a wizened old man of football, an acknowledged guru at the helm.

And maybe it is a good analogy, perhaps Mike Shanahan will return the Redskins to glory. Perhaps coach Shanahan can produce something akin to eight playoff appearances, four Super Bowls with three championships and a .674 regular season winning percentage with a 16-5 playoff record in twelve seasons.

But we do not know obviously, and therein lies the risk of making the inevitable comparison to Joe Gibbs. This experiment with established football royalty may succeed, it may tantalize while disappointing, it may crash and burn. We will have to wait and see.

But do you know who else was compared to Joe Gibbs on his way in the door at Redskins Park?

Jim Zorn.

Back in February of 2008, the day after the promotion of Jim Zorn from offensive coordinator to head coach, the Washington Post's Mike Wise wrote a column titled Redskins Looked Below the Radar, and in this piece Mike writes that shadow general manager Vinny Cerrato's ultimate selection of Jim Zorn as Redskins head coach had strong echoes of former general manager Bobby Beathard's selection of Joe Gibbs in 1981.

Both were from the offensive side of the ball, both continuing to serve under their mentors, Jim Zorn under Mike Holmgren and Joe Gibbs under Don Coryell. Both were selected out of relative obscurity and did not have many or any other suitors at the time of their hiring, and both succeeded team icons, Jim Zorn following Joe Gibbs himself the second time around, and Joe Gibbs following Jack Pardee, former Bear Bryant Junction Boy and George Allen protege, as a player Jack had helped get the Redskins into Super Bowl 7.

And both are evangelical Christians.

So that 2008 bottle spin of conventional wisdom was that someone [Bobby Beathard : Vinny Cerrato] sensed something about a head coaching candidate [Joe Gibbs : Jim Zorn] that caused him to go out on a limb with the owner [Jack Kent Cooke : Dan Snyder]. From Mike's piece:

...Zorn might be the most out-of-the-box Redskins head coaching hire since an anonymous offensive wizard in San Diego was plucked from obscurity by Bobby Beathard in 1981 -- when coordinators didn't have cult followings and $2 million-a-year deals.

Before he's portrayed as Everybody's Eighth Choice, Jim Zorn could turn out to be Cerrato's Joe Gibbs. In his first genuine decision as the team's executive vice president of football operations, there is real potential for symmetry here.

Like Gibbs, Zorn is principled, passionate and extremely candid. Zorn is said to have no fraud in him and plenty of authenticity. He says what's on his mind, which might endear him to the fan base but (now that Gibbs's spell has worn off of Snyder) might drive his perception-driven employers up the wall. (op. cit.)

We know how it worked out for Jim Zorn and Vinny Cerrato, cigarettes and blindfolds.

So yeah, Mike Shanahan might be the next Joe Gibbs. Redskins football history is littered with the next Joe Gibbses. Even Joe Gibbs was not the next Joe Gibbs.

=====

As a final note to this piece on the dangerous Joe Gibbs parallel, the day after that February 2008 piece, Mike Wise wrote another (op. cit.), wherein Mike discusses how, after two days Jim Zorn was displaying deference and independence in the right mix, how he was saying all the right things and how

...[T]he Redskins got the man they wanted, no question. Snyder and Cerrato wanted someone who wouldn't rock the boat or reinvent the wheel on offense, someone who could cut his teeth -- someone new, who has yet to believe the myth about his own coaching prowess.

Could that be a distant early foreshadow to Mike Shanahan, now in total control of every aspect of the Redskins football program? It would seem that being the next Joe Gibbs means different things at different times.



Joe Gibbs and Mike Shanahan: Ricky Carloti / Washington Post photo from here.

Time to Let Them Smoke Up

Or at least stop caring if they do it on their own time

Interesting story in Sports Illustrated this week, you can look at this piece as a serious cultural commentary or you can look at it as a bullshit fluff piece of the type that spontaneously erupts in the vacuum between NFL free agency and the draft.

Actually it is the former, marijuana use has achieved such a commodity status in society that we can now talk openly about first round NFL talent having a quote history of marijuana use unquote, or not seeing where admitted use would be problematic in a workplace like the NFL that expressly bans the drug and enforces that ban with suspensions and forfeiture of pay.

And those facts and circumstances in draft consideration are not accompanied by the words jeopardizing his career.

We are so far from 1995, when University of Miami defensive tackle Warren Sapp, who ran a 4.7 forty at the combine, fell from maybe number two or three overall down to number twelve overall to the hometown Buccaneers over stories of marijuana use, stories that I am fairly certain were backed in leaked college drug tests.

At this point NFL general managers and talent evaluators do not look at marijuana use, past or present, as something that automatically disqualifies a player from their draft boards, but rather a predilection toward pot use is something that is managed.

One anonymous NFL head coach is quoted in the Sports Illustrated piece thusly:

"It's pretty significant as a trend,'' the head coach said. "But if you knocked everyone off your board who has experimented with weed, you'd lose about 20 percent of your board, not to mention disqualify a few recent presidents. A third sounds a little high to me, but it's not a rare occurrence to have a player with some pot use in his background. You have to make a judgment on each individual guy."

That same head coach said that earlier in his NFL coaching career, if a player had failed a drug test for pot in college, his name would be quickly removed from the draft boards of most teams. But times have changed. Clubs are doing more work to try and identify whether a prospect's pot use falls under the experimentation heading, or is done with regularity. (op. cit.)

Look at how NBC's own Pro Football Talk reported on this story:

The issue would better be described as an epidemic of guys getting caught.

At this point you may as well decriminalize it in the NFL culture, that is the way it is heading in this country. Put the same rules on marijuana use that you would with alcohol, cigarettes, model glue or nitrous oxide, which is to say you do not come to work baked out of your gourd and try to fake it through practice.

See that's a problem, like when Chris Webber got pulled over on his way to Bullets practice, he was in his bigass SUV with a burning joint and no identification. Ok that's bad, that's not good and should raise a red flag just as would a guard hiding a flask in his gut or a safety with a whippetizer balloon hanging out his facemask.

That is where we are as a society. It is simply not considered bad anymore at large to have smoked pot, or even to smoke it occasionally. And we know it is not a performance enhancer, that argument is done. Remember Ross Rebagliati?

Ross was the Canadian snowboarder in the 1998 Nagano Japan Winter Olympics that won gold in the snowboard giant slalom, that medal was later stripped for a positive test for mary jane, then returned to Ross when a court of sports arbitration ruled the Olympics had no established policy for marijuana, which even then was acknowledged as not a performance enhancer.

Unless that is, you are trying to eat a whole pizza, drink a whole case of beer, reconcile Jerry Garcia versus Duane Allman and finish Legend of Zelda in one day, in this case marijuana definitely enhances performance but we will only see that sport in the Olympics if they come to Charlottesville in 1989.

The hilarious thing about the Ross Rebagliati story is that marijuana was added to the list of substances banned by the Olympics after this episode because, even as Olympic spokesperson the unfortunately named Dick Pound admitted pot could not possibly enhance an athlete's sporting performance, the Olympic committee

...[D]ecided in the case of social drugs we should take a stand, and Olympic athletes should be put to a somewhat higher standard than society in general, said the committee's vice president, Dick Pound...(op. cit.)

So the Olympic pot ban was all about social perception of marijuana use, not about its strict legality, which is not uniform across the globe. So they should not smoke pot. Eat all the McDonald's you want, fuck like bunnies, all fine. Just no getting baked and watching Ren and Stimpy DVDs.

But wait it gets better. That same year, 1998, Chris Webber was arrested a second time for pot, this time trying to bring eleven grams, a nug less than a half, through the airport in Puerto Rico. He paid his local fine and moved on but the publicity around the incident spurred talks between the league and the NBA Players Union about adding marijuana to the league's list of banned substances, which at the time consisted principally of cocaine and heroin.

Fast forward twelve years and our social perception of marijuana use has changed. The kids that grew up hearing horror stories about gateway drugs and psychotic rages and alleyways full of begging stoners too high to keep a job then grew up and realized science bears out no physical addiction, no propensity for migration to other habits and maybe even finds some medical benefits.

In California voters will see a November referendum on the legalization of marijuana, the measure proposes to legalize, regulate, sell and tax the hell out of it. Suddenly something we always knew, pot could be taxed like tobacco or liquor and sold safely to the public with the state reaping billions in new tax revenues of the only kind you are allowed to raise, sin taxes, that whole idea is now a serious economic and strategic idea by Very Important People, not just some hippy mumbling wouldn't it be great if into a smoky bong then immediately forgetting what he said.

Stop testing for it in the NFL, or make it a periodic test rather than a random test and enforce zero tolerance for showing up to practice stoned and just move on, pot's a thing now.



Marijuana bud from here via here.

I Need to Be the Best Player I Can Be for the Seven in Ten Plays I'm Out There For

I guess you could call that a paraphrase

So everyone is not on board. Is anyone surprised that the one that is not all in with new coach Mike Shanahan's plans and offseason regimen is defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth?

I will go ahead and give you the bottom line up front, the BLUF as my brother the writer Marine calls it: prima donna with guaranteed money coming has no motivation to subordinate his ego to the team dynamic.

First it was the musings, the random comments that perhaps in this slow motion transition from a 4-3 base defense to a 3-4 base defense, a scheme the Redskins have never ever run, Albert thought Albert was not the right fit at nose tackle, that he was not quote built to be a nose tackle unquote.

Actually Albert, at six feet six inches and 350 pounds, not 330 or 340 as he self reported (op. cit.), you would happen to be built exactly like a nose tackle. Whether you can play the position is a legitimate question. A nose tackle in the 3-4 lines up in the zero technique, right across from the center and occupies two or three offensive linemen. A hold the line guy so the more athletic players can get through or around to make a play.

Young Albert envisions himself running all over the place, creating havoc and keeping the offensive line off balance, in fact when he first came on board the immediate conventional wisdom was that maybe he should be allowed to do just that.

The same day there was also a Remember Dana Stubblefield piece in the Washington Post, Dana was an overpaid guy that came from a great 49ers team and never lived up to his contract and is now universally recalled as a Redskins failure.

Last season, Albert's first in Washington, after some initial misgivings about how he would fit into then defensive coordinator Greg Blache's strict assignment based scheme, Albert made the transition; less than a month before the season Albert even said last year's Redskins line of Andre Carter, Cornelius Griffin, Phillip Daniels and himself was the best line he had ever played on.

How did it all work out in 2009? Well between occasional flashes of domination Albert kind of came and went. From the start of the season he spent a lot of time on the turf watching the sky or limping off to catch his breath. He seemed to be poorly conditioned, if unable to play a full NFL game is considered poor conditioning. He only appeared in twelve games, or seventy five percent of the schedule.

Thirty seven tackles and four sacks last season, there may have been an Albert Haynesworth Halo Effect when he was out there and effective, if there was it was exactly that: a halo effect of the exact type from which the team would hope to benefit if Albert could get in the trenches and strain against the middle blockers, take away center running lanes and push the pocket back from the center.

He's a nose tackle, play him that way, maybe with less running around he will not need to take so many in game smoke breaks.


Then it was the offseason conditioning, Mike Shanahan was pretty open about how his offseason workouts are VINO, Voluntary In Name Only, he wants everyone to buy in, with no performance expectations this season and no salary cap and a new real actual general manager in Bruce Allen, coach Shanahan will only play the players he wants, the ones that earn it.

Except for Albert Hanyesworth. Albert is guaranteed twenty one million dollars next month and despite the wild west of the no salary cap era, the team does not want to waste money and like all other teams may be concerned about retroactive cap penalties from this season when we resume with a new cap in a year or two.

So Albert is tenured and gets to do whatever he wants, including train and condition on his own. Albert will not be participating in the team's offseason conditioning program, he says he needs to do this, to get back to being the premier tackle in the league which I guess is an admission that he was not last season and for good measure Albert also throws former coach Jim Zorn and the team's offseason conditioning program from last season, in which he participated, even further under the bus.

For my part, I was unhappy back in the Joe Gibbs II days when Sean Taylor and Shawn Springs and Santana Moss and Clinton Portis all worked out on their own, it makes those hamstring pulls and that tendinitis and that torn abdomen seem more preventable with a professional staff overseeing but that said I always thought the Joe Gibbs regime had a cookie cutter approach to offseason conditioning and not one focused on an individual player and individual positions. So I guess maybe it was a wash. With Jim Zorn who knows who was really in charge of that program.

But with Mike Shanahan I will wager he has everything laid out for each player and for each position. Telling coach that you respect him but will not be there for the team's first taste of how he does things just serves to push you away.

You better come back a lean 350 and ready to do whatever the hell the team wants.



Albert Haynesworth heading off the field in a football game, he would come back after a blow: Getty Images from here.

An FYI to the PTB

Tailgating is apparently not a food related activity

Food bloggers and sports bloggers should NEVER mix socially.



Clique t-shirt from here.