Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (7 page)

As Lindell was about to attempt a 51-yard field goal, Gibbs called time-out. Freezing the kicker at the last possible moment had become the trendy thing to do in the NFL. There was a
new rule in the NFL allowing coaches to call time-outs from the sidelines. Denver’s Mike Shanahan began the freezing the kicker movement earlier in the season. Lindell went through with the kick anyway, and it was good. Good move by Gibbs. The points came off the board. There is also a rule in the NFL that you are prohibited from calling consecutive time-outs. Gibbs didn’t know the rule and called time-out again to ice Lindell just before Lindell would have attempted the kick a second time. Gibbs thought the official on the sideline had given him the okay. The flag went up, and Gibbs’s heart sunk. He had blown it. The unsportsmanlike conduct penalty cost 15 crucial yards, moving the ball to the 18-yard line. Lindell then drilled a 36-yard field goal to win the game.

“I will never forget it,” Gibbs said.

He was sixty-seven years old. His age had nothing to do with him blanking out on the rule. Less than one week earlier, one of his best players had been murdered. He won’t use that as the reason. He says he wasn’t distracted. “I just think it was a terrible mistake,” he said. “There was no excuse for it. I did it. I don’t think you make an excuse for something like that.”

It had been the worst week in Redskins history. It wasn’t supposed to end with the iconic coach, the glue of the Redskins, losing the game. “When I first saw the commotion, I was hoping it had been a procedural penalty on Buffalo,” left guard Pete Kendall said after the game. “After that, after it was explained, my first thought was I felt for whoever called that. To find out that it was Coach Gibbs, after the week that he’s been through, my heart just breaks for him.”

In the end, it did come down to Gibbs making a mistake. But it would have been tough for the Redskins to beat any team that day, even a team as poor as the Bills, who finished 7–9 that season. The Redskins were still in pain. Gibbs knew by looking at his players before the game that “they were wanting to, but just couldn’t. It just wound up being a huge disappointment for all of us.”

And the players knew by looking at his face that he was tired and worn out. Gibbs had been through a lot in the last week. The team had been through a lot. Now there were whispers that his blunder against the Bills was proof that he never should have returned to the sidelines. Had the game passed him by? It was the same criticism Tom Landry faced at the end of his twenty-nine-year run as the Cowboys’ coach. This is a results-oriented business, and when the team is not having success, it’s the coach who gets the blame. This was new for Gibbs. In his first life with the Redskins, he was considered an innovative coach. When he walked away two months after the 1992 season, he left at the top of his game. He wanted more time with his family—that’s what they all say—and had driven himself so hard that leaving when he did was the right thing to do. He had taken the Redskins to the playoffs eight times and won three Super Bowls in twelve years. He said his decision had nothing to do with his health, his racing team, or the Redskins. It was simply family-related. His son Coy was playing at Stanford, and Gibbs had seen him play only twice. He felt guilty.

Gibbs did reveal that late in the 1992 season he had been unable to sleep and had developed a nervous twitch, which ultimately was blamed on exhaustion. His decision to leave shocked the Redskins simply because so much time had passed since the end of the season. But after a family vacation in Vail, Colorado, his mind was made up. It was time to go.

“Every year, we get away and talk about it,” Gibbs said at the farewell news conference in 1993. “We always reach the same conclusion. This year, it was different. The boys didn’t encourage me one way or another, but they understood when I told them what I was thinking. I think Pat’s happier than anyone. This isn’t an easy lifestyle for a coach’s wife. The coach is the guy who stands up and hears everyone tell him how great he is. The wife is the one waiting at home alone while the coach is spending every night at the office.”

When he returned to the Redskins, Gibbs promised his wife
he would stop sleeping in the office. It was a promise he could not keep. Gibbs knew only one way to do it and was not making any concessions to his age. Besides, Pat was spending a lot of her time surrounded by family back home in Charlotte, so Gibbs knew he wasn’t leaving her alone in Virginia.

After the loss to the Bills, the record was 5–7 and the Redskins players had every reason to pack their bags and wait for the end of the season. And now they were facing another challenging week—emotionally and physically. The day after the loss, Snyder flew the entire team and members of the organization on a 747 to Miami for Taylor’s funeral. “I wanted everybody to pay respect to a fallen hero of the Redskins,” Snyder said. “We hopefully did a respectable job of paying respect to Sean’s family. I think I was very responsible for making sure we did everything first class with dignity and pride.”

He is sitting in his large office at Redskins Park talking about Taylor and how he still thinks about him all the time. He points to his desk. “It’s a picture of me and Sean Taylor,” he says.

In addition to the Redskins family, more than twenty players from around the NFL attended the three-hour service. And on Thursday that week, the Redskins were playing at home against the Bears. Two games in five days with a funeral in between for a fallen teammate. How much can be asked of one team, of one group of young men dealing with the death of a friend?

“It was a big challenge for the whole coaching staff and the players,” Gibbs said. “By that Thursday night, they really wanted to honor Sean. It drove them. I can remember the guys were jacked.”

Just as Gibbs knew by looking in the eyes of his players before the Buffalo game that they were not ready to play, he knew before the Chicago game that they were ready to do everything they could to win one for Taylor and end the four-game losing streak. If the season seemed lost at the time, it didn’t mean they had to lose this game.

“It was probably one of the greatest games I’ve ever had a team play for me,” Gibbs said.

The Redskins refused to lose. Gibbs remembers cornerback Fred Smoot coming off the field but refusing to stay in the locker room. “He’s throwing up blood on the sideline,” he said. Smoot had a severe stomach illness, but he returned to the game. Quarterback Jason Campbell went out with a dislocated kneecap late in the second quarter that cost him the rest of the season. But journeyman Todd Collins came into the game against the Bears “and plays one of the best games I’ve ever seen somebody play coming off the bench,” Gibbs said.

Collins was fifteen of twenty for 224 yards and two touchdowns in the 24–16 victory. Even with the win, the Redskins were only 6–7 with no indication they were ready to go on a winning streak that could qualify them for the playoffs.

That changed the next week when they went up to the Meadowlands to play the New York Giants, who also were fighting to make the playoffs. The Giants’ coach, Tom Coughlin, had barely escaped being fired after the 2006 season. New York was 9–4 after victories over the Bears and the Eagles the previous two weeks. This was not going to be an easy game for the Redskins. The best thing about playing Thursday games, as the Redskins had against the Bears, is that if you win, you have ten days to catch your breath and get reenergized coming off a victory. It’s a very long ten days if you lose.

The Sunday night game against the Giants was when the Redskins started to believe again. They beat New York 22–10 on one of those nights when Giants Stadium was a wind tunnel. Eli Manning was able to complete just eighteen of fifty-three passes. Collins managed to complete only eight of twenty-five. It was an ugly game, but it enabled the Redskins to get back to .500. They no longer were an emotionally beaten-down team. Instead, they were inspired by the memory of Sean Taylor.

“The whole organization handled it exactly the right way,”
said Kendall, who was in his first year with the Redskins. “Guys were really torn up on a personal level with what happened to Sean. I remember Joe and Dan had their finger on the pulse of the team. There was a time to work and a time to do the right thing in terms of honoring Sean’s memory and family. The team was able to respond right after the Buffalo game.”

The Redskins then beat the Vikings, a contender for one of the two wild-card spots. That put the Skins at 8–7. The final game of the year was at home against the hated Cowboys. One of the most popular items for sale outside old RFK Stadium for those intense Dallas-Washington games was a button that simply stated: “Fuck Dallas.” The same sentiment, in a more civilized tone, was printed on T-shirts: “I Root for Two Teams: The Redskins and Anybody Playing Dallas.”

Nothing else really needed to be said about how the Redskins and their fans felt about America’s Team. Before this crucial game against the Cowboys that would determine whether the Redskins made the playoffs, former Washington defensive end Dexter Manley, who had knocked Cowboys quarterback Danny White out of the 1982 NFC championship game, which led to the Redskins’ first Super Bowl victory, took the microphone at midfield at FedEx Field and led the fans in a chant of “We Want Dallas.” The Redskins were fired up and outgained the Cowboys 105–14 in the first quarter.

The Redskins caught a break because Dallas already had clinched the NFC’s number one seed. That allowed Wade Phillips to rest four banged-up starters, including wide receiver Terrell Owens, who had an ankle injury. T.O. had caught the four touchdown passes against the Redskins earlier in the season. Phillips played quarterback Tony Romo through the first series of the third quarter. He left with Dallas trailing 13–3. The Redskins scored on their next possession to make it 20–3. Former Redskins quarterback Brad Johnson relieved Romo, and Washington went on to win 27–6. Dallas was held to 1 yard rushing. Collins played
well again, and since taking over for Campbell, he had completed 67 of 105 passes for 888 yards with five touchdowns and no interceptions. If you take away that windy night at Giants Stadium, he was fifty-nine for eighty, an impressive 74 percent.

In the four games since Taylor’s funeral, the Redskins were 4–0, and they went into the playoffs as the hottest team in the NFC. “To come back and win four games; if Joe and Dan hadn’t handled that situation the way they did, it was unlikely we would have been able to do that,” Kendall said. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen and keep a stiff upper lip. They were able to get the team to strike the right balance between mourning Sean’s loss and honoring Sean’s memory.”

The Redskins were in the process of writing an incredible story in the wild-card game in Seattle. They trailed 13–0 before Collins threw a 7-yard touchdown pass to Antwaan Randle El on the first play of the fourth quarter. The Redskins intercepted Matt Hasselbeck on the next possession, setting up Collins’s 30-yard touchdown pass to Moss to give Washington a 14–13 lead less than three minutes into the fourth quarter.

But then things fell apart. It was as if the anguish of the events since that Sunday night after Thanksgiving in Miami had finally become too much to bear. Hasselbeck put the Seahawks on top 19–14 on a 20-yard pass to Dino Hackett with 6:06 left in the game. Seattle was successful on the two-point conversion to put the lead at 21–14. The Redskins showed they still might have a little gas left in the tank when Rock Cartwright returned the kickoff to the Seattle 44. But on first down, Collins went deep down the right sideline for Moss and was intercepted by Marcus Trufant, who returned the interception 78 yards for a touchdown to give Seattle a 28–14 lead. Collins would throw another interception for a touchdown with twenty-seven seconds remaining. The final score was 35–14. That was deceptive. The Redskins had a fourth-quarter lead, but part of the problem in the four years
since Gibbs returned was the inability of Williams’s defense to protect fourth quarter leads.

It was the last game of Gibbs’s career. He had one year left on his contract but decided the time was right to retire again. Two days after the loss to the Seahawks, Gibbs resigned. Snyder had stayed up with him until 2:30 a.m. the night before he made his decision public trying to persuade him to return for the 2008 season.

“You can never replace Joe Gibbs,” Snyder said.

It was the one-year anniversary of his grandson Taylor, then just two years old, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He was being treated back home in North Carolina with spinal taps, pills, and shots, according to the
Charlotte Observer
, which reported that Taylor was in remission by the fifteenth day of the treatments, but to prevent a relapse, the treatments continued until Taylor, the son of J. D. Gibbs and his wife, Melissa, was five years old. Gibbs called his seven grandchildren his “grandbabies” and didn’t want them growing up without him. He felt guilty that he wasn’t around enough for his boys. Coy already had decided coaching was not for him and returned to the NASCAR team before the 2007 season. Pat was back in North Carolina. After the loss in Seattle, Gibbs returned home to talk to his family in Charlotte to help make his decision.

“I felt like they needed me,” he said.

The final month of the season allowed Gibbs to leave with his legacy intact. “I hate to leave something unfinished. I made an original commitment of five years. I felt bad about that,” he said. “Pro sports has been my life.”

He is a good man but left the game with a heavy heart.

“You kind of live in a little bit of fear of late night phone calls,” he said.