[Oakland Red]

It seems like everything is judged pretty much based on what happened last Sunday by a lot of people. Things go bad, you have to trash the quarterback. Or if he has some cache built up, trash the coaches, or the player acquistion strategy. Unless you win, then it's all cool. A roller coaster is fun once in awhile, but it's tough to live on one.

Teams can be at different stages in my view - stages in their readiness to make a Super Bowl run. The Redskins have a lot of the ingredients ready and almost baked to make a Super Bowl run. So the focus has not been on the draft but on adding the veterans we need to finish the puzzle.

The confusion I think exists about all this is conflating the years Snyder was running the team without Gibbs with the years since Gibbs has arrived. These are two different eras in my view. Snyder of course wanted to get all the flashy names like Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith and LaVar Arrington. He wanted to release players without the head coach knowing, so that the head coach would find out from players in team meetings that someone was cut. He wanted to come into the locker room after games, close the door and give the head coach a humiliating tongue lashing.

All those terrible years are gone, and Gibbs arrived, and he has been making the best of the situation, bringing order, developing the team that he inherited, taking the best of who was already here, and figuring on the best strategy to go from that point.

To my mind, we have been getting better overall every year since he arrived. Things are moving along well in the big picture. Mistakes have been made, and right now releasing Walt Harris could be one of the biggest ones. It seems like this year is not the year for us to make the Super Bowl run, but hopefully we will get the engines running very well before the season is out.

And the fact is that even in this much maligned season, we have already had some special moments, particularly against the Jaguars.

"Patience is the only strength that a man needs."