NFL Thoughts

The circumstances of Jon Jansen's and Derick Frost's employment with the Washington Redskins seem to lie on opposite sides of the credibility spectrum, and let's hope the (assumed) integrity of one move cancels out the (assumed) dishonesty of the other. Otherwise, the Redskins are truly fucked.

In life, any time a group of people require a cooperative effort to do a thing well, two key characteristics will play a significant role in the ultimate success of the venture: honesty and accountability. That's just the kind of empty catch-phrase I could reinforce by pulling one-liners from just about any business manual at any bookstore in town. Hard work, teamwork, dedication, persistence, a great attitude . . . all important. In my adult, working life, I'd like to think I've worked with all types, including some who embodied virtually every positive characteristic one can look for in a teammate, and some who are probably doing time for having murdered and/or extorted many, many people. In truth, some of the sociopaths were among the better folks I've ever worked with, while some of the brilliant, hardworking rock-stars went down in flames. In fact, many went down in flames. In my experience, the degree to which these people worked in a culture of integrity and internal accountability, and the credibility of their leadership and the strength of accountability among colleagues determined their success on the job. I hate to sound like some bullshit Project Management manual, but there it is.

I have the sense that a professional sports team, in many ways, is very much like an ambitious corporate office staffed mostly with incredibly talented prima donnas. The goals are extremely high and the pressure even higher, while the individuals who combine to form the workforce are extraordinarily prideful. Satisfaction of ego ranks highly among their quality-of-employment needs. On the plus side, most of these guys are used to having red-faced old men screaming in their faces for hours on end, berating their talents and effort while expecting single-minded focus and enthusiasm for the task. The ability to work under such circumstances is incredibly rare; in my life as an employee and (sometime) boss, I've come to understand that the average employee will have a very hard time handling even a patient correction, much less a full on barrage of insults. The extent that these guys are able, willing, and even eager to work under such circumstances is propped up by their expectation that conforming to the demands of their task-masters and supplementing their prodigious talents with back-breaking effort will earn them a job. They're not looking for a pass, they don't necessarily even need or expect praise. They want a job. Getting the job means they're skills are appreciated and necessary to the common goal. I've done the whole organized football thing. I may not be able to speak on behalf of NFL players everywhere, but having played organized, competitive football (with pads and everything!), I know ultimately all I ever wanted was to be on the field, and my teammates and I would gladly work ourselves well past the point of exhaustion when we believed that such a thing was the clear, unobstructed path to playing time. Ultimately, that's what drives a player to practice; practice is where we show we can do the job so we'll have the chance to go and do it. Really, it's the same super-simple equation that drives good employees everywhere: if I work hard and fly straight, I will be rewarded with money and/or respect and/or hours and/or advancement. Hell, you might even call it the American Dream. In the case of professional football players, where competition even between teammates is the nature of the business, the equation is slightly more complex: if I work hard, fly straight, and produce when it matters, I will be rewarded with playing time, at the expense of my teammate. Ah well.

But you can see where accountability is crucial to that equation. More so than most other professions, there's a significant and critical trust between the boss and the worker. As a general rule, the more effort and sacrifice required by the worker, the more vital that trust. What happens when the worker no longer believes that effort and production are the ingredients for satisfying the boss? Accountability in a boss/worker relationship is based almost exclusively on the role of one upholding the structure of those simple principles for the other. The relationship is based on that simple understanding, and the integrity of that understanding is what clears the expectations for both parties; the worker must work hard and be productive, while the boss must reward those who do work hard and are productive, while dealing fairly with those who don't and aren't. When the lines are drawn so clearly between a worker and a boss, the appropriate symbiosis is achieved and everyone gets along. Eventually, it becomes a culture and it self-sustains. I'm sure there are companies like that, just as I'm sure those successful professional sports franchises are more or less that way.

Now, let's look at the case of Jon Jansen. Since this guy was drafted, I've been a big fan. Not only does he have a reputation as one of the hardest working players on the Redskins, he's also been a very good, consistent player and a genuinely likable guy who speaks candidly to the media and has engendered the good-will of Redskins fans. For the first part of his career, Jansen was the healthiest, most dependable guy on the team, even sustaining an Ironman streak of consecutive games played for a few seasons. However, since 2004, Jansen has had significant trouble staying healthy, and the effect of his succession of injuries has been a decline in his pass-protection abilities. To be sure, Jansen is still a hell of a teammate, a solid locker-room presence, and a hard-worker. On most teams, he'd just go on being an average to below-average starting right tackle, he'd be a good mentor to younger players and someday have his jersey number retired. I'd be fine with that. But also on the Redskins is a young guy named Stephon Heyer. Heyer is also a hard-worker and another extremely likable guy. Heyer won a roster spot last year as depth on the offensive line, and because of injuries he spent a lot of time on the field, performing admirably on a make-shift front five. Because Jansen is a cornerstone of the offense and a strong veteran leader, it was assumed, rightly, that he would go back to being the starting right tackle when healthy. Well, entering 2008 Jansen was healthy, and he had his job back. That's an excepted reality of professional football, and it carries with it a certain amount of right-minded integrity: a guy puts in his lumps over the years and proves himself, and the accrued benefit of all those accumulated hours of hard-work and production is the loyalty of coaches and management. In short, veterans don't lose their jobs to injury. Fine. Trouble is, Jansen hasn't performed well at all this preseason. He's still a hard-worker, he's still a good technician, but he's slow in pass-protection, he lumbers, and he can't stay healthy. Heyer is the better athlete and he's performing better. In Jim Zorn's system, rock solid pass-protection is fundamental. It's a pass-happy system. So, in the face of Jansen's years of quality service and to the shock of many Redskins fans, Zorn has replaced Jansen at right tackle with Heyer.

Was it the right move? Clearly, one standard is trumping another honored standard in this circumstance. One standard says that a competition between two hard-working professionals is decided in the end by the the gauge of productivity; the other standard says that a tenured, productive, veteran player doesn't lose his job because of injury. In my opinion this was a no-brainer and Coach Zorn did the exact right thing. Ultimately, Zorn will be judged by the performance of his team, and he therefore needs the best 11 guys on the field, while the other players on the team depend upon one another in order to do their own jobs and have success. But most importantly, in order for Redskins coaches to continue to demand practice-field work-ethic and gameday performance from these guys, they have to be able to back up their demands with the rock-solid promise that playing time, pay, and employment decisions are made based exclusively on the evaluation of work and production. Jansen is a great guy and a valued teammate, and there certainly are right and wrong ways to handle his personal disappointment at having lost his starting job, but there can be no question among players as to how these decisions are made. An example was not made of Jansen, yet an example has been set and a standard upheld. The clear message to players: Loyalty and longevity are important, but if you want a chance to play on gameday, the one clear path of success is by working your ass off and producing on gameday. I prefer to think Jon Jansen didn't lose his job so much as Heyer won it by applying what he'd learned in practice to his performance on the field. His teammates will know that their coaches are serious about helping them succeed and have backed up that seriousness by ensuring that the best players are on the field to help them.

Now, Derek Frost. I'll admit I don't know too much about this guy or even how he ended up on the Redskins. It seems like the entirety of the time between Joe Gibbs coaching the Redskins and Joe Gibbs re-coaching the Redskins was marred by some of the worst, most inconsistent special teams in the NFL. I seem to recall the Skins almost always having inconsistent, noodle-legged kickers and dumpy punters. I'm not sure Suisham and Frost were the cure. I can vaguely recall a time or two when I lamented Frost's inability to boom a deep-ball with good hang-time to buy good field position for the defense, but to be honest, other than those vague memories, I can't tell you shit about his specific performance even last season. At any rate, the Skins can't have been too enthused about this guy, long-term, or they wouldn't have used a sixth round pick on the best punter in college football, Durant Brooks. Maybe the pick was a waste, I don't know. Put it this way: if the Redskins thought they had a great punter on their hands, they wouldn't have drafted Brooks. On the other hand, they didn't cut Derek Frost when they picked Brooks. For the life of me, I'll never understand that move. Teams never draft punters or kickers. Why do it? Most guys bounce around the league and come available every couple of years anyway, right? To say nothing of the fact that the difference between the 8th best punter in football and, say, the 20th best punter in football is only a yard or two, usually owing at least in part to the success of the gunners on his punt unit. Punters don't sell tickets, they don't do endorsements, and the average fan doesn't know shit about evaluating a guy's performance. Teams don't draft punters, and when they do, it's because they think they've got a special guy. So if you're drafting a punter, two things are obviously true, right? 1. You're not crazy about the guy you've got, such that you'll spend a draft pick on something virtually nobody else would; and 2. You've found the diamond-in-the-rough, a truly special punter that's going to change your team. Because both of those are true, why in the world would you bring two punters into camp? I don't get it, and I never will. You simply can't make this make sense to me, ever. Aside from all that, camp is about competition. For guys to be ready to compete full-speed when live bullets are flying, they need a healthy dose of competition in camp. It gets the competitive juices flowing, as they say, and conjures the spirit of unity and perseverence and all that feel-good-now-go-tear-someone's-arms-off crap. When you have two guys actually openly competing for one job, presumably it's because you want to find out who is the better of the two and then keep/use that guy. Derek Frost has three years of accumulated hard-work for the Redskins, at least some of which has been decent enough. He's a veteran. He's been healthy. If he's good enough to compete for the job, why in the hell did you draft . . . wait, we covered that. Now, I did not witness this competition in camp. I don't know a damn thing about Durant Brooks, I couldn't tell you which leg he kicks with, what number he wears, or even what his primary language is (I could guess . . . Polish? Damn!) I'm a simple doofus when it comes to kicking or punting the ball: I know what I see and I can read a simple statistic. Derek Frost averaged more yards per punt in the preseason and he had a fantastic, enthusiastic performance against the Panthers. He boomed the ball consistently and then hustled his ass down the field to make a play. He was psyched, and he got some love from teammates who probably still don't know his first name. Before I go on too much longer, let me first establish that I'm specifically not advocating for Derek Frost's job. Again, I don't know what happened or how it happened. I just know what I saw, and I'd say I saw enough to assume it would at least be a very, very difficult decision, with perhaps Frost having the edge.

So the Redskins ended up cutting Derek Frost, probably not coincidentally in the same off-season in which they kept every member of their 10-man draft class. I was surprised. Almost immediately after the cut-down, Frost spoke out to the media about being cut for dishonest reasons, saying the move was motivated by money and by the need to salvage what might otherwise be considered a very disappointing draft class. I don't know about the money part, but I found the second part of that statement especially interesting. To be honest, it has been a disappointing draft class. Malcolm Kelly has reinforced the concerns of many NFL teams headed into the draft by sustaining multiple injuries this pre-season that will likely cost him at least half of his rookie year. Devin Thomas hasn't been healthy either, and hasn't been productive on the field. I'm optimistic about Fred Davis, and word is he's putting in serious work in his down-time to be more productive. Chad Rinehart was a nice find. But there are guys like Justin Tryon who made virtually no positive impact this preseason, and it seems like the Redskins haven't come away with a single impact player for this season. Now, there's a discussion to be had about the wisdom of going out of your way to keep every member of a disappointing draft class in the interest of boosting one's resume, but we'll hold that aside for now. As a person who couldn't tell you too much about kicking or punting a football aside from maybe how not to do it, there's at least enough to Frost's claims for me to consider the possibility that he's right. Definitely more troubling is the likelihood that most guys on any given NFL team evaluate punting and kicking along the same lines: how far did it go, what do the stats say? It will be very hard for the Redskins to make a convincing argument that Brooks was better than Frost when Frost has better stats, had a more memorable performance, and is the veteran player with actual NFL experience playing with the Washington Redskins. That's a big problem. What happens if players on the team start to wonder what the actual motivation behind this move was? What if doubt starts to creep in about the credibility of the people responsible for upholding the standard that production and hard-work determine who sees the field and collects a paycheck? Do they suddenly look around the roster and see, I don't know, a second year player on a cheap rookie contract taking away the starting right tackle spot from a tried-and-true veteran, a trusted teammate and leader who happens to be in the latter stages of a lucrative contract? Doesn't doubt start to encroach on that all-important trust between player and coach, worker and boss? I hate to think of that. I've definitely worked in offices and played on teams where the integrity of that trust had evaporated, and it's not pretty. In fact, my brother and I stopped playing organized football behind that exact scenario.

In this case, the same set of standards emerge: hard-work and production being one standard and the job security earned by accumulated blood, sweat, and tears being the other. The understanding that a veteran has earned loyalty through service is cast into doubt, and with very little justification. I'm not suggesting Derek Frost wasn't out-performed in one way or another by Durant Brooks; maybe the coaches are looking at his upside, or maybe he showed them something in practice that encouraged this move. At any rate, it's at least a very risky move for a rookie head coach. The time to cut ties with Derek Frost was months ago, when the organization apparently determined he wasn't the guy. By allowing this thing to play out in camp and the preseason, and then going with the young guy despite the stats and history, the Redskins have left themselves vulnerable to the suggestion that this decision was motivated by the ego and job-security of a member of the front office and by the need to save a buck. At worst, this tells the players there are priorities being put ahead of their success and the shared goal of winning football games, or perhaps that dedicated service, consistent hard work, and relative on-field success will not ultimately decide your fate on the roster. If success is not the ultimate goal and performance does not earn a paycheck, why work hard? In the workplace, I have witnessed the poisonous effects of this malignant calculus, to the ultimate demise of virtually everyone involved. I have the sense that NFL franchises that operate without a strong commitment to accountability and honesty (the Bengals come to mind) suffer through the kind of prolonged periods of dysfunction that can sour a fan-base utterly. Obviously, I'm not ready to predict such a thing for the Redskins, but I do hope that the foundation is being laid for a culture that reinforces the sensibilities of the Jansen/Heyer move and not the Frost move. The vulnerability to the Credibility Infection starts with something as bone-headed as rigging a veteran player for failure by first (perhaps inadvertently) admitting he's not the guy and then including him in a competition for a job you don't want him to have. Cut him months ago and the issue never comes up. Plus, you get another precious camp spot for a warm body at linebacker, which sure would have helped when D'Angelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart were gashing your fuckin' ass for a zillion rushing yards. Seriously, why dump the roster spot on a guy who can't seriously win the job when you need practice depth at impact positions. Sheesh.

Alright, that's enough of that. I'm not ready to blink on any of my Week 1 predictions, but that may yet change. Wednesday afternoon is the tentative cut-off on revisions for that.

Peace!