Dan Daly: Running the right route?

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There's no instructional book, no "Idiot's Guide to NFL General Managing," that tells you how to build a winning pro football team. George Halas didn't come down from some mountaintop with a pair of stone tablets. Don Shula, as far as I know, hasn't published his diaries.

No, every club concocts its own formula and tries to make it work - some, obviously, more successfully than others. Luck aside, the Super Bowl champ is really the team that had the best plan that year - or did the best job of implementing its plan - the best job of prioritizing, identifying talent, acquiring it, nurturing it. This is how Lombardi Trophies are won.

For years, Dan Snyder's Redskins went off on their own tangent. They simply didn't operate the way other franchises did. At first, Snyder seemed to be collecting football cards rather than players - Deion Sanders, Bruce Smith, etc., etc. After he outgrew that phase, he bucked the consensus by resolutely refusing to build through the draft. One free agent after another came through the doors in Ashburn, with decidedly mixed results (never mind the expense).

But as Dan the Man begins his 10th season as owner, the organization shows signs of becoming more conventional. The Redskins actually had 10 draft picks this year, and all 10 made the 53-man roster.

"The average age of our backups, I'm told, is around 25; last year it was over 28," says Vinny Cerrato, recently promoted to vice president of football operations. "If you're going to pay the starting guys what we do, you have to have younger [and cheaper] guys behind them that you're developing."

Can you believe this is the Redskins talking - the no-patience, never-saw-a-draft-choice-they-couldn't-trade Redskins? That's what a decade with 79 losses and 70 wins will do to you. Snyder and Cerrato, tired of quick fixes that, too often, don't fix anything, have decided to plot a different course. Redskins fans can only hope they're in it for the long haul.

Now that Joe Gibbs is gone, Cerrato says, he has more control over the team's free agent shopping. And how has he exercised this control? By convincing his boss that - brace yourself - sometimes it pays to wait, to wait out the market instead of always diving headfirst into it.

"You don't have to have your roster set in March," he says.

You don't? Who would have guessed after watching the hyperactive Snyder all these offseasons?

"We were criticized after the draft for not getting a defensive end," says Cerrato, "and we ended up with Jason Taylor [for a second-round pick] and Erasmus James [for a conditional seventh-rounder]. There are different ways to get people."