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MIAMI GARDENS, Fla.
Would you like a blindfold, Mike?
Redskins and Mike Shanahan will be in this together for a while
“We will do whatever gives us the best chance to win next week.”
How about one last cigarette, coach?
“We will do whatever gives us the best chance to win next week.”
Any final words for Rex Grossman or John Beck?
“We will do . . . ”
If Mike Shanahan ever faces a firing squad, the guys with the guns better be worried. By the time he finishes telling them, over and over, the NFL coach’s equivalent of name-rank-and-serial-number, they might turn the guns on each just so they don’t have to hear the “royal we” anymore.
The Redskins better hope Shanahan is still the first-rate coach they thought they had hired less than two years ago, because he’s probably going to be their coach for a long time. More discipline, less drama, a couple of more drafts, oh, and a new quarterback, better be the right Redskins answer.
Daniel Snyder has little choice but to stick with Shanahan, not just through the Redskins current five-game losing streak but probably much longer, unless the owner wants to return to the netherworld of do-not-touch franchises where few men with a fine NFL reputation want to work for you.
No matter how humbling this 20-9 loss to 2-7 Miami may have been — and the Redskins, in the last 40 years, have never looked more lost on offense than they have in the last three weeks — nothing is changing at the top.
Snyder has been to the pits and never wants to go back. Shanahan saved him — it seemed — from that purgatory of cursed franchises, like the current Orioles of Peter Angelos in Baltimore. When Shanahan agreed to coach for five years for $35 million and bring his son Kyle, the offensive coordinator, along as a possible, and pretty darn obvious, potential heir, order looked like it would be restored. Playoffs, title runs, who knows; but competence, yes.
The league, or most of it anyway, agreed that, “If Shanahan can’t fix it, who can?” When the Redskins reached their bye week at 3-1, you’d have had to turn over half the rocks in the Northern Hemisphere to find anyone who thought Mike Shanahan was losing his touch.
“Everything was very promising. We liked our football team,” linebacker London Fletcher said. “It just shows you how quickly things can change in this league.”
Or, perhaps, what it really shows is how quickly things can simply revert to the way they were before, which seems like the reasonable operating assumption since the 3-6 Redskins were 6-10 and 4-12 the last two years.
The Redskins are simply a shattered organization in a total rebuilding mode. Whether Shanahan is up to such a challenge will be the central question for the rest of this year and, very likely, next season, too.
When Shanahan arrived, I assumed he wasn’t as great as John Elways made him look (47-17), but that his 10 non-Elway years (91-69) were proof he was a very good coach. With his son on board as offensive coordinator, it was unlikely that, on attack, his teams could be out-of-step with the times. As for his ego, wear earplugs and enjoy those 9-7 years.
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