While Others Go High or Low, Redskins 'Stay Medium'

Steve Spurrier gave us "not too good." Joe Gibbs gave us "hard fought" and "fighting our guts out." Jim Zorn is giving us "medium."

"That's one of his wiiiild words," Jason Campbell noted. " Keep Medium. I've never heard 'Keep Medium;' I've always heard 'Stay level' and 'Stay low-key' about things, but his word is 'medium.' "

Have Redskins players embraced this word? Will the maroon and black be the most medium team in the league? Will the front office have to start bashing radio and TV guys, so they're not in the odd position of trashing a medium? Let's go to the audiotape, all unprompted, all from Sunday's locker room.

"The best thing about Jason is he makes a huge throw and he never gets excited, if he makes a bad throw he never gets down on himself," center Casey Rabach said. "He just stays medium, and that's something coach preaches to him day in and day out."

"We just need to continue to get better," tight end Chris Cooley said. "We kind of have to stay medium here, not get too high on what we're doing, and just get back to work."

"We are getting better as an offense every week, and we continue to get better," running back Ladell Betts said. "But we have to stay medium there. We can't get too high on what we're doing right now."

"Everyone was down on us after the first game, and we understand now we're a team that people are gonna talk about," Campbell himself said. "At the same time, we have to keep a level head, we have to stay medium about this, because when you start winning games, teams start to focus on you more, they start to understand."

These guys stay on message better than a Sarah Palin infomercial. I wondered, using Google, could you find any other NFL players who have ever used the bizarre "stay medium?" Well, one, anyhow.

"It's really important to stay medium," Seattle Seahawks QB Matt Hasselbeck said several years ago. "You don't want to buy into the good stuff and not get down about the bad stuff."

Hasselbeck, huh? Zorn's most famous pupil? So this is now a two-city phrase? Well done, Zorn Star, well done.

In other quirky head coach news, Zorn has apparently been channeling either former Redskins coach George Allen or his Cub Scout pack leader, choosing to lead his victorious men in a "hip, hip, hooray" locker room cheer following Sunday's win.

"That's what he does," Santana Moss told my colleague, Paul Tenorio, concerning this postgame cheer. "Not weird at all. Everybody has their own little thing, and that's his thing, and I'm down for it. If you're hip, hip, hooraying, you've got something to hip, hip, hooray about. So I'm down for it."

I swear, he'll have these guys building Pinewood Derby cars before the season is over. Yesterday, Zorn offered an extended explanation of the three cheers motif, which hearkened back to Chuck Knox's arrival in Seattle.

"I thought, you know, 'This is very old school, really old school,' " he said. "Like, hip, hip, hooray? But it kind of fired me up. And when I was a player, I thought when we were doing this, 'What's wrong with old school?' Yeah, let's go. HIP, HIP, HOORAY! . . . It's kind of a special cheer for special games, anyway, in my mind."

And his players?

"As long as we hip, hip, hooraying," Anthony Montgomery said, "I'm all right."

Huzzah to that.