[sportscurmudgeon]

What Frank Herzog is saying has nothing to do with a comparison between Gibbs and Spurrier. Frank Herzog is calling out the players as the cause for the poor performance in the last season and a quarter. And he has hit the nail squarely on the head.

I know that lots of people here are blindly in love with players who wear Redskins uniforms - even if it is only in the pre-season and against scrubs from other teams - but it's the players who lose the games and it's the players who make the mistakes. When you watch game films, there is not one coach who has ever blown a pass coverage or dropped a first down pass or fumbled or jumped offside or hit aman out of bounds giving the opponent a first down. All of the people who do that have numbers on their backs; coaches don't.

Sadly, some of Skins' the most publicized players are the ones who make the mistakes and that causes fans a lot of angst because they are conditioned by the "kiss-ass Washington sports media" to believe that these people are heroes of mythic proportion. They're not.

When you assemble a team, you have to look at player "potential" as one aspect of the roster you keep. But if you temporarily FORGET potential and look strictly as performance, this team has a whole lot of really ordinary players who are good enough to prevent losing by three TDs on any given weekend - but not good enough to win more often than they lose. That's harsh. It also happens to be demonstrably correct.

These players who are just good enough to keep their losses close are making Joe Gibbs a less successful coach than he has been in the past - just as they did to Steve Spurrier before that and Marty before that...