Dan Daly: Intangibles make return

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By Dan Daly

The Redskins' 2008 highlight film has two working titles at the moment - or rather, it would if I were the director. The first is “Jason Campbell Takes a Knee,” and the second is “The Return of Intangibles.”

Let's discuss the latter for a moment because it's been one of the major themes of the season so far. “Intangibles” is kind of a nebulous word - it's so darn, well, intangible - but you know what I'm talking about. It's That Certain Something that separates one team from another, something that doesn't necessarily show up in the statistics. Once upon a time, it might have been called “esprit de corps.” Later on, the operative term was “chemistry.” That gave way to “intangibles,” which sounds smarter but basically means the same thing.

During the glory years, the Redskins oozed intangibles. You'd look at George Allen's Over the Hill Gang, going to the playoffs season after season, and you'd say, “How do those geezers do it?” You'd look at Joe Gibbs championship clubs in the '80s and '90s, and you'd be struck by how the whole seemed to be greater than the sum of its parts. (The First Gibbs Era, after all, produced three Lombardi Trophies but only three Hall of Fame players - one fewer than the '70s Cardinals, who didn't win a single playoff game.)

In the years that followed, though, the Redskins lost this precious quality and became just like everybody else. They made mistakes at crucial times - boneheaded mistakes, sometimes. (See Gus Frerotte, Head Butt.) They let games slip away that they couldn't afford to let slip away. (Too numerous to mention.) They came up incredibly small in matchups with the league's elite (See New England 52, Washington 7.) And they didn't always appear to enjoy one another's company. (See Michael Westbrook, Sucker Punch.)

When Dan Snyder took over the team in 1999, he turned it into a monument to individuality (Deion, Bruce, LaVar) and excess (too many big contracts, too many big egos, not nearly enough wins). But now, emerging from all this trial and error, we have the Zornskins: Jim Zorn's collection of Gibbs hand-me-downs, who are exhibiting far more intangibles than they ever did under Coach Joe.

Five games into the schedule, the Redskins are 4-1, including back-to-back road victories over the Cowboys and Eagles. The Philly win, in particular, was a watershed, because it showed the Redskins are capable of playing at the highest level two weeks in a row. That's what you have to do to advance in the playoffs ... and what they haven't done since the '91 Super Bowl season.

Remember the trip to Buffalo in '96? That was more typical of how the Redskins have responded to these situations in recent years. They had won seven straight when they took the field that Sunday - their longest winning streak in the last 16 seasons - and the Bills were still formidable (though no longer going to the Super Bowl). The game figured to be a good measuring stick for the Redskins, a way of finding out whether their 7-1 record was to be taken seriously.

Boy, did they ever get their helmets handed to them. Jim Kelly completed 19 of 23 passes, somebody named Darick Holmes rushed for 122 yards (and Thurman Thomas for another 107) and the Bills ran away with a 38-13 victory. The Redskins were never the same club after that.

Gibbs returned in 2004 and did a partial rebuilding job, but even he couldn't completely change the culture. The Redskins still committed too many penalties, still lost games they shouldn't have, still seemed to perform below their payroll.

Zorn, however, seems to have found the formula - more mysterious than the recipe for Coke - that escaped Coach Joe the second time around. Part of it might be his willingness to include players in the playcalling process - and to seek input from them during the game. As has been much reported, it was Clinton Portis who called the fourth down play late in the Eagles game that enabled the Redskins to run out the clock. And Chris Cooley said afterward that he went to Zorn in the second quarter, when Jason Campbell was having trouble getting the ball to Santana Moss, and told him, “I can probably beat the linebacker every time.” Soon enough, he was catching a bunch of passes over the middle.

As Casey Rabach put it, “[Zorn] is a former player, and he realizes players see things on the field, feel things on the field, that coaches maybe don't. Input from the line of attack can really make a big difference in games, and he's open to that.”

Moss, meanwhile, didn't gripe about his inactivity; he just dedicated himself the rest of the afternoon to blocking for Portis. Santana is almost miscast as a receiver. I mean, he doesn't have the high-strung emotional makeup so many wideouts do. I have no doubt he's been bewildered on occasion by the Redskins' play selection - in particular, by the inability of Gibbs, Al Saunders and the rest of the Most Expensive Coaching Staff in NFL History to devise ways to get him open. But being a good scout, he has never publicly expressed these feelings.

Portis has been a little more vocal - and with good reason, perhaps. Why, he's wondered, did Gibbs and his staff take a sword and try to turn it into a sledgehammer? Why did they take a Joe Washington-type back and try to transform him into John Riggins? But Clinton made the adjustment, and now - as a reward, you could say - he has a coach whose offense plays to his strengths more. Almost a third of the way through the season, he's averaging 4.5 yards a carry, well short of the 5.5 he averaged in Denver but better than the 4.1 he averaged under Coach Joe. (And don't be surprised if his average goes up. Three of the Redskins' toughest games are already out of the way.)

With leaders like Moss and Portis - and with a coach who still thinks like a player sometimes - the Redskins have recaptured their old persona. On Sunday, they won without Shawn Springs, their best cover corner; Jason Taylor, their best pass rusher; and Marcus Washington, the only linebacker on the roster who has been to the Pro Bowl. They won because they believed they could. They won because they've become a team of intangibles again.