Do you ever think about the Hall of Fame, or is that something you look at after your career is over?
“I don’t ever think about that to be honest with you,” Mike Shanahan says.
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Come on. Never?
“I really don’t. I just know that if you take care of today’s business good things usually happen. The people that I’ve been around that think about those things, usually they’re retired — or thinking about retirement.
“The one thing I’m excited about is turning this organization around.”
At the least, he has turned it over. Just London Fletcher, DeAngelo Hall and Brian Orakpo remain as starters since he took over in 2010 — 19 of 22 on offense and defense are now his guys, players expressly acquired by Bruce Allen and approved by Shanahan. “If you count the kickers, that’s 22 out of 25,” Shanahan adds.
Can’t believe you got rid of Graham Gano. (I was half-kidding.)
“You never know with kickers, he may be kicking for the next 10 years,” Shanahan says, half-smiling. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
It’s Year 3 of the My-Way Mike Refurbishing Project. After two seasons of laying concrete, building foundations, raising walls, he finally got to shop for chandeliers and linens this offseason — and, my, Robert Griffin III pretties up the place, doesn’t he?
Now, hours before a decibel-splitting opener in New Orleans’s Superdome, we begin to find out how much progress amid the hype has actually been made.
If the franchise stands at a crossroads, waiting to see when or if Griffin emerges into a perennial playoff quarterback, so does Shanahan, a football lifer the past 27 years, who mortgaged much of the franchise’s future draft picks to acquire the Heisman Trophy winner from Baylor with the No. 2 pick in the draft.
Every QB-coach tandem is linked in some fashion, but Griffin is tethered tighter to Shanahan — for his emergence represents more than mission accomplished in rebuilding the Redskins; he gets Washington to a Super Bowl under Shanahan, that’s a ticket punched to Canton for his coach.
Otherwise, if the grand gamble implodes, if Shanahan can’t become the first Redskins coach to win more than one playoff game in the Daniel Snyder era of ownership, the coach begins to descend into George Seifert-Tom Flores territory — multiple Super Bowl winners who have never been thought of as the best in their profession, thereby deeming them unworthy of Hall-of-Fame induction. (Flores not getting in is a crime.)
The offensive guru, whose teams always competed, would be undone by the architect, who enters his third season in Washington with a record of 11-21. Though south of Jim Zorn’s two forgettable years, the record barely considers the big picture, which Shanahan is used to.
For instance, the most convenient indictment of Shanahan’s career post-Elway has been the oft-repeated fact that he hasn’t won a playoff game since the 2005 season or a Super Bowl since Elway retired.
But excluding 2009, the one season Shanahan was out of football, his numbers are dizzying as either a head coach or a coordinator with total control of the offense.
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