For Many of the Redskins, Game Day Often Ends With a Sleepless Night

By Dan Steinberg | Excerpt From The D.c. Sports Bog
Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Fred Smoot's postgame routine Sunday night was unique for a few reasons. For one thing, unlike many of his teammates, on his way out of FedEx Field following the loss to the Cowboys, Smoot bought 20 boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from children doing a fundraiser. He's not a big sugar eater, though, and didn't end up eating a single doughnut, which leaves him with approximately 240 doughnuts at his Great Falls home.

"Anybody wants a doughnut, just stop through," Smoot said. "Just bring your own cup for coffee."

For another thing, Smoot said after he arrived home shortly around 1 a.m. this morning, he watched a few sports highlights and then went to sleep.

"Just pass out," he explained. "Fade away. Fade to black."

Other Redskins had a less immediate trip to the land of playoff dreams and jumping sheep, or jumping sheep-like towel-waving fans, or whatever.

"I never fall asleep," Chris Cooley said. "It doesn't matter if it's a 1 o'clock game. I get home, and I'm up all night."

Media members are the same way, and stories of 3 or 4 a.m. bedtimes were legion today. I whiled away the hours reading Redskins message boards. The players had other tactics.

· Chris Wilson ate two steak sandwiches around 2 a.m. "You know, I can do that," he said. "I've got the body type. It's not gonna damage me."

· Casey Rabach watched his TiVo programs, including "Xtreme 4X4," "Two Guys Garage" and "Midwest Outdoors." In this week's episode, the "Midwest Outdoors" guys went fishing for walleye in Green Bay.

· Cooley watched an episode of "Entourage," an episode of "Californication," and three episodes of "Smallville," hoping the latter would put him to sleep, since he doesn't particularly like the show. It didn't.

· Rock Cartwright watched the Redskins-Cowboys game, also on TiVo. He does that following every game, trying to explain to his wife what was supposed to happen on certain plays, and what didn't happen. He usually rewinds his own plays three or four times, but found that he didn't have to on his failed attempt to down a punt inside the 1.

"They showed it on TV like nine or 10 times," Cartwright said. "I didn't know if it was going to roll into the end zone, and I was trying to make a play. But it's just part of the game. Maybe that could have stopped those guys from scoring seven points going into the half, maybe we would have won the game, but it's part of the game. Things happen."

· Ryan Plackemeier stayed up until 3 a.m. working on Sunday's Washington Post crossword puzzle.

· Todd Yoder lay in his bed and waited for his brain to stop churning, as did several of his teammates, and didn't fall asleep until 3. "Your brain's so wired up," he said. "I can sit in bed trying to go to sleep, but you just think about stuff." ("Tylenol PM helps," Rabach advised.)

· And Coach Jim Zorn did much the same as Yoder.

"I think you could find me just doing this," he said, breaking off his news conference to stare blankly into space. "And then I can talk, and we can have a little conversation, and then all of the sudden you'll see me doing" this, he said, again staring into space for several seconds. "You get caught just staring at the woodwork, thinking about what went on. That's what I was doing in bed last night, just looking up and staring, focusing up on some of those things that happened. It's hard. It's not, not fun."

Zorn said he got "a couple hours" of sleep, and his players said the same. Some, like Rabach, woke up before dawn to watch cartoons and drink hot cocoa with their kids. Others, like Wilson, said they're accustomed to not sleeping after games.

"That's the nature of the beast," he said. "That's just the minor toughness of this profession."

I asked him what the major toughness was. "Shoot, beating the Cowboys," Wilson said. "That's tough."