The Washington Redskins are a mess right now. Head coach Jim Zorn has a tenuous hold on his job at best and has recently been stripped of his offensive play calling duties. Management installed newly hired 'offensive consultant' Sherman Lewis as the new offensive play caller and the team has set up an awkward arrangement for him to get the plays to the quarterbacks. For that reason, starting QB Jason Campbell has some serious misgivings about the efficacy of the setup.
Lewis has only been out of retirement and with the team for two weeks, and has spent this week trying to ingest a crash course on the Redskins' offensive schemes. While he was learning on the job, head coach Zorn was trying to put the best spin possible on what can only be seen as a de facto demotion and vote of 'no confidence':
"I need to have composure. I need to understand what the reality of the situation is, and I think our players expect me to rise up. We expect them to play under adverse conditions. We expect them to risk it all. ... I'm conscious of what's going on. I'm not naive about what's going on, and yet I have to just hold back on any feelings and make the decisions."
Quarterback Campbell is more concerned about the convoluted system of getting plays from Lewis to him:
"There'll probably be a couple of plays I have in my head just in case if some reason it doesn't get in on time."
Here's how things are supposed to work-Lewis will sit in the coaches' box above the field and read the plays off a sheet. While Lewis has years of experience working in the so called 'West Coast Offense', Zorn left doubt that he really knows what he's doing at this point stressing that Lewis "doesn't know the protections" and "doesn't know the blitz schemes." Nevertheless, he'll be running the offense when the Redskins take on Philadelphia this Monday night.
Once Lewis figures out what to call, that's when it really gets tricky. He'll relay the plays via headset not to Zorn but to offensive coordinator Sherman Smith. Smith will then inform the quarterback what to run. Zorn is left in the role of a passive bystander on offense, though he will listen in to the playcalling on his headset.
Backup quarterback Todd Collins also shared his concern with the new arrangement:
"It is unsettling. I've never gone through this before. I've never had a play caller get changed in the middle of the season."
Lewis didn't exactly evoke a lot of confidence upon his hiring, where he revealed that he'd been calling bingo games at a seniors' center to kill time since his retirement in 2004. Still, Collins gave him a guarded vote of confidence;
"I know he's been studying last year's game against the Eagles and seems to have a pretty good idea how he wants to call the game this week. It's the same plays. He might coach them a little differently or highlight some different areas, but the offense hasn't gone under an overhaul or anything like that."
The Redskins haven't scored more than 17 points in a game this season, so maybe the thinking is that things can't get any worse.
Author Resource:
Ross Everett is a staff handicapper for Sports-1 Sportsbook as well as a freelance writer specializing in MMA, boxing and how to bet on NFL football. He is a well known authority on Internet sports betting , cigars and fencing. He lives in southern Nevada with three Jack Russell Terriers and a pet wallaby.
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