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Torn by the Trials, Zorn Still Finds the Joy
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"This is a bigger deal," Joy Zorn said. When the Redskins had lost in previous weeks, as the season began to slip away, she had wondered how her husband would respond. Each time, Jim Zorn bounded from bed around 5 a.m. Monday and headed to the office, eager to decipher the problems.
This time, she figured, might have been different. But when he awoke in darkness and prepared to rise, Jim Zorn looked at his wife and said, "Consider it all joy."
Joy Zorn knew precisely what he meant. With that, he went to work, to start a new week, to finish out the season.
Shouldering the Blame
The normal flow of the Monday meeting for the Redskins' coaching staff is predictable. Each of the position coaches has watched the tape of the previous day's game, each has graded his players and each is ready to provide an assessment of the performance.
Zorn knew, though, that last Monday had to be different. He had already given the players the day off, a move usually reserved for Mondays after significant wins. He had no desire to sit there, he said, and ask: "Okay, tell me how the D-line did. Okay, how did the O-line do?" He thought of Einstein's definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
"At some point, you got to do something different," he said.
So Zorn walked into a conference room at Redskins Park to face his coaching staff. He smiled, looked at his group -- some of them his hires, some men he inherited -- and said, "Let's pick up the pieces."
"He doesn't have a whole woe-is-me thing going, because no one wants that," said Chris Meidt, an offensive assistant whom Zorn brought on board. "He's being honest. We know he's hurting; we're all hurting. But for him to come in and pretend he's hurting worse is to discredit what everyone else is doing."
That afternoon, though, Zorn gave a performance that shocked some of his assistants. Part of Zorn's Monday routine, along with watching the film alone -- then with his coaches, then with the players, then again in bits and pieces to make sure he saw what he thought he did -- is to face reporters, a 30-minute barrage in which he has, in previous weeks, mused on his play-calling philosophies, joked about injuries to star running back Clinton Portis and assessed the development of quarterback Jason Campbell, his primary project.
This time, though, with the Bengals game film seemingly running through his mind, he heaped blame only upon himself, delivering the money line: "I just feel like the worst coach in America."
His offensive coordinator, Sherman Smith, read that quote, and others that backed up the sentiment, in the Tuesday papers. Thirty years earlier, Smith played running back in the same backfield where Zorn served as the quarterback, with the fledgling Seattle Seahawks. Smith left his job as an assistant with the Tennessee Titans in the offseason for one reason: Zorn. Smith's assessment, even as the season collapsed: This isn't all Jim Zorn's fault. Come on. Furious, he walked into his boss's office.
"Man, I'm a little bit ticked off," Smith said he told Zorn. "I've looked at the film. I think we evaluate ourselves pretty hard, scheme-wise. And what you said, that's just not the case. That's not the whole picture."
