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Daniel Snyder
and
Vinny Cerrato
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It’s a delicious coincidence that Peter Angelos and Daniel Snyder operate
professional sports franchises in adjacent geographical areas because they share the same
misguided view of how to make a team a winner.
Angelos has poured money into obtaining veteran free agents for his Baltimore Orioles
in the last three years and has succeeded only in putting together teams that have no
chemistry and thus, are less than the sum of their parts. The Orioles have finished below
.500 in each of the last three years.
Snyder poured money into obtaining veteran free agents for his Washington Redskins this
year, pushing the Redskins’ payroll to the highest in the league and creating
salary-cap problems that will dog the team for years. His reward? An underachieving team
that missed the playoffs.
Since no owner, least of all Snyder, is going to blame himself, the fall guy for the
Redskins’ demise was former head coach Norv Turner, who was fired when the team fell
to 7-6. But when the team lost its first two games under interim coach Terry Robiskie
— the first an embarrassing rout by the weak Cowboys — it was obvious the
team’s problems neither started nor ended with the coach.
At the very minimum, a successful NFL franchise must have a general manager who can
make the right personnel decisions, a coach who can get the most out of his players and a
quarterback who can lead the team. The Redskins have none of those, and that all goes back
to Snyder.
The Redskins had a respected general manager, Charley Casserly, whose astute moves set
the ’Skins up to get the second and third picks in the last draft. But Snyder
didn’t like Casserly, so he fired him and hired Vinny Cerrato, who had undermined the
San Francisco 49ers as their player personnel director. The salary cap gets the blame for
most of the 49ers’ problems, but an equal problem was their poor drafting during
Cerrato’s time, highlighted (lowlighted?) by his push for QB Jim Druckenmiller in the
first round of the 1997 draft. The slow-moving and slow-thinking Druckenmiller was
woefully unsuited for the 49ers’ offensive system and was dumped by the team before
the start of the ’99 season.
Cerrato can’t be blamed for what’s happened to the Redskins this season
because the offseason moves were largely orchestrated by Snyder.
Like a kid in a toy store, he went through picking free agents off the shelves, picking
up players with great résumés but not much left in their tanks. As the older players
tired, the Redskins played poorly down the stretch.
Snyder inherited Turner as his coach, and Turner has a reputation as a great offensive
coordinator but a poor motivator. If Snyder had waited until the end of the season and
then removed Turner, it would have been just another coaching change. But the owner’s
visible interference during the season and the in-season firing of Turner will make it
difficult, perhaps even impossible, to hire a coach of any reputation.
And what tells you all you need to know about Snyder’s judgment is that he thinks
Jeff George is a better choice at quarterback than Brad Johnson.
Turner had preferred Johnson, but Snyder told Robiskie to play George, so Johnson will
leave at the end of the season. George is as pure a passer as you’ll ever see. He can
throw every kind of pass, and he has the arm and accuracy to hit a receiver in stride 50
yards downfield. There’s only one thing wrong with George: His teams almost never win
anything. In 11 seasons with five different teams, he’s played on only two playoff
teams — in ’95 with Atlanta and last season with Minnesota. Though George played
well for the Vikings, head coach Dennis Green dumped him after the season and went with
the then-untested Daunte Culpepper.
George doesn’t connect with his teammates, so he can’t be a leader. He
doesn’t even think that should be his role, as he told me explicitly in an interview
when he was quarterbacking the Raiders.
So this is going to be the Redskins’ quarterback? Good luck.
The chief problem, though, continues to be Snyder. As long as he pokes his head into
every aspect of the operation, instead of finding competent people and letting them do the
job, the Redskins will not be winners.
This is a hard point for owners to understand, especially when they first take over.
When the battle between the DeBartolos ended with Denise DeBartolo York in control of the
49ers, her husband, John York, wanted to get heavily involved in the operation. He told me
that he thought head coach Steve Mariucci should work more through his assistant coaches
and do less hands-on coaching. But after a time, York realized he should let Mariucci and
general manager Bill Walsh do their jobs, and the 49ers have been better off for it.
The Cowboys should be so lucky. Since Jimmy Johnson left, owner Jerry Jones has been
heavily involved in the operation. Johnson made the draft decisions when he was there, and
they were brilliant. Since his departure, Jones has hired coaches who know their place,
which is not in making personnel moves. That’s Jones’ department, and it’s
not coincidental that the Cowboys have gone downhill the last few years.
The only NFL owner with the football background to make decisions is Al Davis of the
Raiders. Football is Davis’s life, and he did a great job of building the Raiders
into one of the league’s great franchises. But in the last 15 years, Davis has had
problems adjusting to the changing times, and it was not until he relinquished some of his
control that the Raiders were rejuvenated, under head coach Jon Gruden.
Owners are usually successful businessmen who delegate authority in their other
ventures. But sports is a field in which everybody thinks they’re an expert, and it
takes a wise man to realize he doesn’t have the knowledge to make the right
decisions.
Jerry Jones doesn’t have that wisdom, and Daniel Snyder certainly doesn’t
have it. Until Snyder acquires it, or sells the club, Redskins fans are doomed to
disappointment.
Glenn Dickey is a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and has covered pro
football since 1967. He can be reached via e-mail at dickey@sfgate.com |
