Versus Giants, After Further Review

Quite a project you found for yourself

I have had a few days to digest the massive game fourteen home loss Monday night against the New York Giants, and it is not good.

The rot goes from the roots, in the management and in how the highest level business decisions are made. Clearly as we saw earlier in the season when the team was actively trying to tamp down criticism through censorship and by sending out the team's attorney to challenge all takers publicly, in print, on the radio and in the blogs. All that did for the team was make them look petty and spiteful, like the guy that wants to argue that you are the asshole for getting mad when he bails and sticks you with a bar tab.

It continues up into the trunk, how football decisions are made, how the roster was built, after the 2008 season the team itself in its analysis, what must have been the quickest self assessment ever, identified the offensive line as a big problem, it crumbled last year, taking the team down with it. What happened in the offseason? They held serve at left guard, replacing a serviceable Pete Kendall with a serviceable Derrick Dockery and that was it. The 32 year old starting left tackle and 33 year old starting right guard were both lost for the season by Halloween, there were no NFL caliber backups. The right tackle position is like two midgets fighting over a cameo on Ugly Betty, one of them will win it and no one will see it. A liability all season, that line was so heavily abused against the Giants that I was actually embarrassed for them.

Up the tree we go into the limbs, coaching, not to be pedantic, but when spending time cobbling together PVC pipe and trainer's towels is what passes for innovation, we should have known there was a problem. Any notion that Jim Zorn is holding on to prove himself or to prove a point or somehow to be noble or go down with the ship, those are so academic, which in this usage means interesting with questionable real world application, the leftovers are a team with no serious professional leadership. That was evident in Monday night's game, Jim Zorn had the thousand yard stare and no serious coach would have run that field goal trick play once, let alone twice.

Out into the foliage we go, the players, to start the season several players went off the reservation in how they handled themselves with the fans against team performance, in the last week since shadow general manager Vinny Cerrato was ousted and the team was slaughtered Monday night, it would appear all collars are off, Rock Cartwright said he hoped he did not run into Vinny at any point in the future, Jason Campbell said the team was quitting and Albert Haynesworth arrived late to team meetings yesterday on Christmas Day and got himself booted from the facilities for a day.

Maybe DeAngelo Hall was right, maybe new actual general manager Bruce Allen needs to burn it all down and start over.



Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen: Getty Images from here.