Unqualified Offerings

Let me tell you what I really don’t get about Joe Gibbs 2.0: not just he but everyone else seems to have forgotten how Joe Gibbs 1.0 really succeeded. Everyone says the old Gibbs “all run, all the time” plan “won’t work in today’s NFL.” Doesn’t anyone remember what actually happened in those days? Yeah yeah, “Heavy Jumbo”; Yeah yeah, big running backs; and yeah yeah, the Redskins ran the ball a lot when they had a lead. But who held the record for most points scored in a single season for fifteen years? A Joe Gibbs team. Whose wide receivers, known as the Fun Bunch for crying out loud, had such fun scoring so often that they provoked the NFL into its first rules on end-zone celebration restrictions? Joe Gibbs’ wide receivers. In addition to being the first black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl, what else was Doug Williams notable for in that game? Only becoming the first Super Bowl quarterback to throw four touchdown passes in a single quarter. The last Redskins Super Bowl team, in 1991,

* threw for 3771 yards, fourth best in the league

* averaged 8.4 yards per pass attempt, best in the league that year – this may actually be a record

* had the second-most team passing touchdowns that year (30)

* scored 30+ points eight times and 40+ points four times

* won by an average of 16.4 points.

It’s true that the 1991 team was the most run-heavy in the league (540 rushes vs. 447 passes) but when you averaged 3 yards more per pass play than the worst passing team in the league (San Diego), you could throw less and get as much done. That team was happy to throw to get big leads; then it would run the ball. Not terribly effectively either (3.8 yards per attempt – slightly below the NFL’s durable average of 4 yards a carry). That team’s signature play was the Mark Rypien bomb.
But to hear Coach Gibbs talk today – to hear team observers talk today – you’d think that every game played out like Super Bowl XVII, and a decade of offensive football boiled down to John Riggins’ famous fourth-down run that sealed that game. The Redskins won Super Bowl XVII by pulling a close game out at the end. The Gibbs 1.0 Redskins were good at that. But they didn’t try to make that a habit. They tried to score lots more points than the other team by any means necessary – run, pass, special teams, defense. They went for comfortable margins of victory, as early as possible. If they ended up in a close game, they played it out, but they did not set out to have close games. Gibbs 2.0 seems to imagine that keeping games close was the Gibbs 1.0 strategy, not something that occasionally, inevitably, happened. That’s strange in itself. Even stranger is the number of people not named Joe Gibbs who misremember Gibbs’ first career the same way he does.