A fundamental approach

Soon after Jim Zorn returned to his office Monday afternoon, messages from friends and e-mails from colleagues started to trickle in.

With his Washington Redskins in a 1-5 slide that has all but ended their playoff hopes, Zorn said, “I just feel like the worst coach in America to have to lose the way we’re losing,” and pointed to himself as part of the problem with a team that started 6-2 but had fallen to 7-7 heading into Sunday’s game against Philadelphia.

“I had a lot of people going, ’Keep your head up, coach.’ Well, my head wasn’t down,” Zorn said. “It was just hard to not feel terrible about the [losing]. It feels just sickening, and that’s what I was trying to express when I was at the podium. I had to assure them, ’Hey, I’m OK.’ … I didn’t say I was the worst coach in America. That’s somebody else.”

With two days of evaluating everything from his playcalling to the way practices are conducted behind him, Zorn appeared energized during a post-practice interview session that lasted nearly 30 minutes.

He first addressed what the staffwide soul-searching produced and whether it can help the Redskins finish the year on a positive note.

Zorn and the coaching staff’s conclusion: Maybe slowing down to concentrate on finite details will increase performance.

“Some of the things we came up with were very simple because we don’t have time to revamp anything, nor should we because we really are going in the right direction,” he said. “What we decided was to take a little bit of time during each one of these plays [in practice] to make sure our guys are doing the right thing. It’s a matter of paying attention to details in a training camp way versus a midseason way.”

At midseason, the Redskins were chugging toward the playoffs and while occasionally penalty-prone, didn’t turn the ball over, played solid defense and made just enough big plays to win.

Since then, injuries have decimated Clinton Portis’ production (one 100-yard game), the Redskins are minus-3 in turnovers and the defense hasn’t gotten fourth-quarter stops to give the offense a last chance to rally.

The 20-13 loss to lowly Cincinnati last week finally forced Zorn to act even though he probably made a rookie mistake by waiting until after the 14th game. Against the Bengals, the Redskins fell behind 17-0 and committed careless penalties like illegal formation, an encroachment on third-and-short, an unsportsmanlike conduct by Santana Moss after a touchdown and four special teams infractions.

On Monday, Zorn took the advice of his wife, Joy (“She’s always supportive of the Z Man,” he said. “She’s always loving me up.”), and made a list of everything he needed to talk about with his staff. The items included everything from how to address errors with coaches to which injured players they should be concerned about.

“It’s been hard for me my whole life to make lists,” he said. “As you make lists, you can talk things through and see them on paper, and they’re a lot easier to handle. You can breathe and reset and look at what you have to accomplish instead of trying to remember it all. I was trying to make sense of having five losses out of six games. That’s hard to make sense of.”

With the players back in the building Wednesday morning, Zorn said he spent 30 seconds addressing his “worst coach” comment and then moved on.

“Sometimes you have to take a step back to evaluate,” linebacker London Fletcher said. “He’s the same coach as when we were 6-2. He’s obviously frustrated with the way some things have gone.”

As for the accuracy of Zorn’s comments, Fletcher shrugged and said, “I’ve been around too long to get caught up in what somebody says on Monday.”

Quarterback Jason Campbell said hearing Zorn explain he was taking stock should prod the players to do the same.

“Anytime anybody says they’re going to sit back and examine themselves, that means they’re looking at the big picture and what they’re doing well or what they can do better,” Campbell said. “Players have to examine ourselves, too. What can we do better? Are we playing hard enough?”

Zorn has never publicly questioned whether the Redskins are playing hard, just their execution, which chafed some veterans. Left guard Pete Kendall wasn’t among them.

“But it does come down to execution,” Kendall said. “Coaching is part of it, but playing is a part of it as well, and we need to correct the playing part of it. It’s not productive for anybody to say, ’I confess. He did it.’ I never got the sense that Jim was trying to do that before, and it’s not what he said to us in private.”

If the Redskins’ performance improves against Philadelphia and San Francisco, Zorn said it won’t be because he took time for self and team assessment.

“If we can put it all together and win, it won’t be ’I’m a genius.’ It will be because the players played well, we minimized our errors and we played a whole football game,” he said. “There were some good things talked about. We’ll try to do what we can to turn the corner [from] these last six games.”