 Joe Gibbs has won Super Bowls with less than stellar talent at key positions. AP |
By Peter King
With one proviso, I believe Joe Gibbs will win his fourth Super Bowl
sometime in the next four years.
That proviso, obviously, is Dan Snyder. Too often in his first five years
of ownership Snyder has made impetuous, star-struck decisions not in the best
interest of building a Super Bowl team. But I know Joe Gibbs a little bit,
and there's no way he would have taken this job if Dan Snyder and Vinny Cerrato
and Pepper Rodgers control the personnel and drafting fate of this team.
Nothing with Snyder is ever written in stone, but I believe Gibbs will control
that. He'll control everything. He'll work as hard as Belichick, as
intelligently as Vermeil, as cooly as Reid, as (deep-down) ruthlessly as Parcells. That's
why, in time, he will adjust to the salary cap and to free agency.
Every time in his coaching career Gibbs needed to adjust, he did. When
the NFL mandated replacement-player football be played when the regular players
went out for three weeks in September 1987, Gibbs built a great strike team,
swept the three strike games and got his team on such a roll that it won the
Super Bowl 42-10 over Denver four months later.
When he knew roster depth and player development was vital to long-term success, Gibbs learned how to get
players with an elbow scab stashed on injured-reserve until they were good
enough to contribute to championship teams.
Gibbs will figure out he needs a strong cap guy and a personnel guy to
scour the bowels of future drafts because the lowest guys on the roster are now
often the most important in this injury-plagued NFL.
Twenty years ago, he knew
bit players were sometimes the most important to championship teams, and look
how the great coaches of today have gone to school on that lesson.
Bottom-rung players (Dan Koppen, Asante Samuel, Larry Izzo) are, collectively, a huge
reason why the Patriots are where they are.
The reason I really like Gibbs to conquer all the little crapola is that
he figured out a long time ago it's not the star system that wins, which is
how Snyder ran this team for five years. It's the rank-and-file system that
wins.
If Mark Rypien and Timmy Smith could be offensive stars on a Super
Bowl winner, then Joe Gibbs already is halfway there. He knows the 48th player on
the roster will, at some point, be as important as the first.
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 It will take more than good coaching for Joe Gibbs to be successful. AP |
By Don Banks
When the news broke that Joe Gibbs was on his way back to Washington, giddy Redskins fans understandably reacted as if the hiring was nothing short of a return to Camelot.
To that, I say slow down, folks. The league has changed a lot.
Granted, Gibbs is one of the shrewdest, brainiest men to ever don a headset. It's tempting to just dismiss his 11-year absence from the NFL by saying, "He'll figure it all out," and let it go at that. Except I recall using roughly the same logic about two years ago, when there were questions about Steve Spurrier in the NFL.
We know Gibbs can win in the NFL. But win a fourth Super Bowl in ol' D.C.? I say the odds are stacked heavily against it. For starters, it's more challenging to coach today in the NFL than it's ever been. In his division alone, Gibbs will be matching wits twice a year with Bill Parcells, Andy Reid and Tom Coughlin. No days at the beach there.
Next year, Gibbs will also face off against Jon Gruden, Brian Billick, Marvin Lewis, Mike Sherman, Bill Cowher and Steve Mariucci, men who are still at the top of their games and won't just surrender to the Gibbs legend. Remember, Dick Vermeil went 9-23 in his first two years back in the league with the Rams.
What would worry me most if I were a Redskin partisan is that the last time I checked, Bobby Beathard wasn't headed to Washington with Gibbs. The Redskins had a great thing going in the 1980s, and the franchise's success was largely built on Gibbs' coaching, Beathard's personnel acumen in the general manager slot and owner Jack Kent Cooke's willingness to open the purse strings.
With Gibbs coaching and Daniel Snyder paying, I guess two out of three ain't bad. But having a quality GM is more vital than ever, because with free agency and the salary cap, the NFL has become a very transient game. There are only three constants in today's NFL: Change, change and more change.
You can't build a team any more that wins three Super Bowls in a 10-year span like Gibbs did in Washington. You try to construct a three- or four-year window, and then take your best shot, knowing that you're going to lose about a third of your team in free agency if you do win it all.
Gibbs will figure out much of the NFL's new math, and he'll win his share. But I don't see a Super Bowl trophy in the near future. It's tough to recreate Camelot.
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