The Twilight Zone

[firstdown]

Originally Posted by BrudLee

And to reiterate - Joe Gibbs is a coach that not only experience has taught me to respect, but - until yesterday's press conference - I would have treated his word as something carved in stone.

Eleven passes after his season began, the same man who had this press conference on August 8th saying "...We're expecting Patrick to start. That's what we're geared towards. That's what we planned. That's what I said last year. You're hoping he's going to step up and get better and better as we go..." didn't give his quarterback much of a chance to get going. Now the team that is "geared towards" a strong-armed 26 year old right hander will start a 36 year old left hander who by most objective standards has lost a little off his fastball.

My point is not that the season is lost. Joe Gibbs is a Hall of Fame coach who will do what it takes to win ball games. And it would be amazingly presumptuous of me to say that I know how to win in this league and he doesn't. I would like to know which of his eight completions out of fourteen attempts for seventy yards (boy, those numbers seem familiar...) led him to essentially scrap his announced plans for a revitalized offense - but that's just my personal curiousity.

Well the best part of his stats from last year his only game over 300 yards passing was against Dallas. Maybe that was the only stat Gibbs was given when making his decision. The reason Brunell does not throw alot of interceptions is its hard to catch a ball bouncing across the field.

[sportscurmudgeon]

I don't think this is the Twilight Zone at all. I think all of this is relatively clear.

Given a free choice, I believe that Joe Gibbs wants - and wanted last year - to play Mark Brunell at QB over Patrick Ramsey. But Brunell was awful last year and Ramsey did well enough at the end of the season to earn Gibbs' - grudgingly offered - word that Ramsey would be the starting QB this year. But I don't think Joe Gibbs was happy about having to have made that promise and I think he always in his mind had Patrick Ramsey on a VERY short leash.

He never said he would give Ramsey the same time to prove himself unworthy of the starting job as he did for Brunell last year. And since he would have rather had Brunell in there in the first place, why is anyone surprised that the hook came out quickly.

I believe that in September 2005, Mark Brunell is equally competent to lead this team to victory as is Patrick Ramsey. Assuming neither gets hurt during the year, that will probably be my assessment in January 2005. What Ramsey brings to the team is the fact that he MIGHT develop into a better QB and be the leader here for 5 or 7 years into the future. That's not gonna happen with Brunell.

Joe Gibbs did not make some kind of "deal with the devil" here and he does not "speak with forked tongue." He is more concerned with winning games now than he is with positioning the roster to win some as yet unscheduled games in 2008. You don't have to like that or agree with that, but I really think that's about all there is to this brouhaha.