For Redskins' Fletcher, a Stubborn Streak

"I want to play the perfect game," he finally said.

Making the Grade

During the season, coaches grade each player on every play in the previous game, taking note of the way the player completed the task he would have been assigned in each situation. Almost never is anyone graded perfectly.

A few years back, a Seattle Seahawks offensive line coach named Tom Lovat gave a perfect score one week to the team's star left tackle, Walter Jones. When he tabulated the results and realized what he had done, Lovat was stunned. In three decades of coaching, he had never seen a player earn a perfect score. It is that rare.

Once, Fletcher came close. It was years ago when he played for the Rams and Lovie Smith, the team's defensive coordinator at the time, handed out the scores. Fletcher received a minus for one play -- an opponent's run when he ran around the back of the play instead of the front. It didn't matter that the ballcarrier was stopped and Fletcher had made the right decision every other play that game; Smith was a tough grader.

"I can see London saying that," Blache said. "I can see him chasing the perfect game. He tries to live the perfect life. He gets so upset when he makes a mistake on something. He is so hard on himself."

The Redskins' coaches see him as so necessary in his two seasons here that Blache can hardly remember the time when he didn't understand the value of a linebacker who is so small that some people mistake him for a cornerback. Blache had watched Fletcher play for the Rams and later the Bills and thought he was a decent player, but never one on the level of Brian Urlacher, whom he had coached in Chicago. It wasn't until Fletcher arrived and fought to get in on every tackle despite being outsized and fought to play in every game despite whatever aches nagged at his legs and back, that he grasped the player's importance.

Even now it is a shock to most football people when they learn Fletcher has more tackles than any player in the NFL this decade. By quite a bit, in fact -- his 1,211 tackles are 44 more than the player with the second most, Dallas's Zach Thomas. Urlacher and Baltimore's Ray Lewis, whom his Redskins play tonight, are almost 200 behind.

"He tends to fly under the radar a lot and I can't tell you exactly why," Blache said. "I don't know if it's a height thing or a hype thing or what."

Now, Blache leans on him the way Gregg Williams, last year's assistant head coach-defense, depended on Fletcher to help translate his theories to the players and pull the team together. With the season falling apart and the team's offense gone cold, they need Fletcher as much as ever.

Blache's defense is designed to rely heavily upon the linebackers. Often they must make the tackles on runs and help out more than ever on short passes. But as the season has worn on, the two linebackers on either side of Fletcher have been beaten up. Rocky McIntosh is practically playing on one leg, while Marcus Washington has been out with an ankle injury, replaced by a second-year player in H.B. Blades, who is still learning the NFL.

And while Blache constantly tells Fletcher he trusts him to make the right calls and to help either McIntosh or Blades whenever they get into trouble, he sometimes has to pull Fletcher away and remind him not to do too much. This is the temptation the player has. He pushes so hard, trying to take on so many things that his own performance occasionally suffers.

"You're not at your best when you are putting the weight of the world on your shoulders," Blache tells him.