Time to Think a Little Harder About the Redskins, Gibbs, Religion and Death

I kid you not.

The Redskins are now 31-36 after four years of Gibbs II. They have had two awful years and two decent years. They have won one playoff game -- which makes two playoff wins total in nine years of the reign of King Danny I. The Redskins won six playoff games during his first three seasons in Gibbs I, won a Super Bowl and lost another. Of course, back then he had a real general manager (Bobby Beathard) and an owner who could be mean-spirited and overbearing, but could also be charming and knew that he knew nothing about football.

Gibbs was named to the Hall of Fame based on his coaching in the 1980s and early '90s. Even now, he's still a very good coach who is as good as anyone who has ever lived at convincing his players that the only people in the world who believe they can win are those in the locker room. No one this side of Dean Smith has ever done more to turn his team into an underdog in every single game than Gibbs.

That's said with admiration. Other coaches try to do it; Gibbs does it. In 1987 he called a scab game during the players strike, "as great a challenge as any group of athletes has ever faced."

A scab game. The Redskins won. They also won the Super Bowl that year when the real players returned.

Gibbs was a great coach then. He's a good coach now. Give him a real general manager and he might be great again, even in his late 60s.

Now we come to the hard part: religion and death.

Gibbs, as everyone who has ever heard him talk for more than 30 seconds knows, is an evangelical Christian. He not only believes that Christianity is The Way, but that he needs to show others that it is The Way.

I find evangelicals in any religion a little bit frightening. This has nothing to do with my being Jewish, for those who are about to go down that road. I find rabbis who say Jews shouldn't marry out of the faith offensive, just as I find ayatollahs who say that anyone who doesn't subscribe to Islam isn't worthy of living to be terrifying. When my daughter was baptized, the priest who performed the baptism made the point that there is far more common ground between Christians and Jews than differences. I happen to agree with that.

What I don't agree with is anyone who tells me or anyone else that his or her way is the only way. I believe that religion should be private. I have no issue with what anyone believes as long as they don't tell me what I should believe. I have relatives who tell me I shouldn't work on Yom Kippur. I tell them how I choose to atone for my many sins is none of their business.

When Glenn Brenner, the wonderful WUSA sportscaster, died in 1997, Gibbs stood up at his funeral and said that Brenner had accepted Jesus Christ as his savior just prior to his death. Many of us who knew Brenner were skeptical about the comment, but even if it was 100 percent true, found it completely offensive that Gibbs chose a moment meant to celebrate Glenn's life to literally use the pulpit to claim that Brenner had "seen the light." If he did, fine, that should have been a private matter.

Gibbs did it again Saturday night. He was hooked up by Comcast Sportsnet to their postgame studio where Pete Taylor, Sean Taylor's father, had been brought in to participate in the postgame show. Why Pete Taylor was there is another question for another day. His presence made for maudlin television -- it wasn't his fault, it was the fault of whoever decided to invite him on the show.