Time to Take a Pass on the Running Game

On behalf of Jason Campbell, I asked Al Saunders this past week what I thought was a perfectly benign question:

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If the Redskins' offensive pooh-bah allowed Campbell to run more of the no-huddle offense again today -- thereby calling a good majority of his own plays for the second straight week -- would the starting quarterback be entitled to half of Saunders's weekly salary?

"Well, if he gives half of his to me for designing what we do within the two-minute concept," Saunders said.

Let's see: Campbell's base salary is $572,500 this season; Saunders earns $2 million. What a deal for the kid, no?

And you thought they ran the ball for philosophical reasons. Ha!

But I digress.

As some of you know, the Redskins play the Cowboys today in Dallas. This is being forecast as a beat-down of epic proportions, a blowout that will clearly illustrate the haves and the have-nots in the NFC East.

It's the youth and glitz of the Glamour 'Boys -- Tony Romo, T.O. and their fuel-injected, attack-mode offense -- vs. two Golden Oldies: Joe Gibbs and something called a Jumbo Package.

For you non-football fans, a Jumbo Package involves a team's behemoths lining up very closely together and reenacting one of the game's oldest rituals of brute force and will. The goal is to hopefully advance the ball, oh, eight inches.

Depending on your bent, this physical style of play is either a) blood-and-guts football the way Gibbs has always liked it. Or b) A mumbo-jumbo package -- essentially Vince Lombardi's outdated offense from 41 years ago.

Look, Gibbs has every alibi at his disposal to run the ball to his heart's content today. Clinton Portis is coming off another 100-yard-plus performance. They're corn-silk thin at wide receiver: Santana Moss is still hurting, Brandon Lloyd is out for the year and the Redskins are so desperate they brought back the kid they always cut -- Jimmy Farris, whom George Solomon believes should have a movie made about him starring Mark Wahlberg.

And yet Gibbs should take Farris over the Jumbo Package today. Saunders should take the no-huddle over a run-heavy attack.

If the legacy of Gibbs indeed hangs in the balance the next few weeks, it's not time to return to what he knows and what was once successful; it's time to go down swinging, to take the fight to all these pass-happy teams stretching the field and ditching conservative play-calling in the new-millennium NFL. Use the new league motto: attack. Score on others as they score on you.

Gibbs, who always leads with his heart, might appreciate this confession: I don't do numbers well, either. In the past 20 years, I've never witnessed a single statistic win a game I've covered. I have seen intangibles such as perseverance and grit somehow result in championships.

The best line I ever heard about stats came from Han Solo as he was negotiating an asteroid field. When he told by the droid C-3PO that the odds of surviving such an ordeal were something like 37 million to 1, he replied, "Never tell me the odds," before gunning the throttle.

In some hope-against-hope lecture, I envision Gibbs telling his assistants and video coordinators the same thing; Lord knows that, at its core, the running game plays into every one of Gibbs's values about hard work and will being able to overcome other limitations.

But here's the problem with that logic: You can't win in the NFL with just a lightsaber anymore. You can't win with the Force alone.

Every week, there is incontrovertible evidence against the running game, against even balance, in the NFL.

The four division leaders that seem on a collision course to meet in the respective conference championship games -- the Patriots, Colts, Cowboys and Packers -- all feature spread-the-field passing offenses that put up points.

Twenty-one teams did not have a back rush for 100 yards last week, including six teams that scored more points than Washington. Eight teams won that did not have a back rush for 90 yards.

Everybody throws now. The Rams, for goodness sake, put up 37 points; Steven Jackson ran for just 76 yards in their win.

The Patriots are the standard; for all this talk of how multidimensional pro football's best team is, New England has had a running back rush for more than 100 yards in just three of their nine wins. The day they annihilated the Cowboys by scoring 48 points, the Patriots had 75 yards rushing and averaged 2.6 yards per carry.

These numbers are not used to dissuade Portis from carrying the ball more than 20 times per game, because he might be the Redskins' best hope right now. It's also not to lose sight of winning a game any way possible, even with a smash-mouth set near the goal line.

It is to encourage Gibbs and his staff to abandon fear and all the worries that go with clock management. Campbell sifted through a barrage of questions last week regarding how much liberty he felt in the no-huddle offense. At one juncture, he was asked if he felt hamstrung by his own staff.

"You have to do what you're allowed to do," he said, diplomatically.

Campbell does not have Romo's arsenal of receivers. But if he shows the same creativity and ingenuity from last week -- and Gibbs and Saunders trust his instincts -- all of a sudden you've got a genuine shootout in Texas instead of a projected blowout. That's a much fairer fight.

Whatever happens from today forward -- postseason or bust -- at least they can finish with the knowledge they all went down swinging together.

Whatever Saunders has to forfeit to Campbell in salary, it will come back tenfold in respect for him and Gibbs.