By Rich Campbell
The Free Lance-Star
ASHBURN—Jim Zorn will be the Washington Redskins’ head coach for the rest of the season, according to executive vice president of football operations Vinny Cerrato, who made the announcement on his radio show on ESPN980-AM this morning.
“Let me start by making a few things very perfectly clear: Jim Zorn is the head coach of the Washington Redskins, and will be for the rest of this season, and hopefully into the future,” Cerrato said.
The announcement ended weeks of silence from the front office amid intense speculation about Zorn’s job security, which had increased steadily since the Redskins (2-4) barely beat the woeful St. Louis Rams in Week 2.
Cerrato also expressed his frustration with the Redskins’ lack of production on offense, chastised media speculation about Zorn’s job security, explained team owner Daniel Snyder’s silence about Zorn and the team’s play and disparaged the comments made by Steve Largent, Zorn’s best friend, about the Redskins’ front office during the week.
“There’s been a lot of false rumors, media speculation, unnamed sources out there all the time,” Cerrato said. “I hired Jim, along with Dan Snyder. And obviously—obviously—we’re all very disappointed by the season performance thus far. In fact, Dan constantly talks about how disappointed he is for the fans. And we've got great fans. We feel the frustration for the fans, and we need the fans big-time Monday night [against Philadelphia]. We want to entertain them. We want to make them proud.”
Zorn was not immediately available to comment. The Redskins are 10-12 during his tenure and only 4-10 dating from the second half of last season.
“The team is tight, the relationships are tight, and we're just trying to prepare to win a game Monday night and excite the fans and get the fans back excited about this football team,” Cerrato said.
The team’s decision to strip Zorn of his cherished play-calling duties after last Sunday’s loss to the Kansas City Chiefs magnified the uncertainty about whether he would last the entire season.
Though Cerrato met with Zorn to implement that change, he stayed mum until today.
“This is what I explained to Jim and some of the offensive coaches: it hasn't been one or two games,” he said. “You look at when we started the season we were struggling a little bit on offense, and on defense we were struggling with getting off the field on third down. That lasted three games. Since that point, we've been one of the best in the league at getting off the field on third downs, so we fixed that. All right, we're still having the point problem, and to score two field goals against the 32nd-ranked defense is not progress.”
Speculation about Zorn’s job also has been fueled by Snyder’s history of impatience with coaches. Of the four head coaches that preceded Zorn under Snyder, only Hall-of-Famer Joe Gibbs has lasted more than two seasons.
“There's a lot of media people like you and everybody else out there that says Dan Snyder needs to come out and talk Dan needs to say this, do that,” Cerrato said. “Dan has never spoken to the media during the season for over a decade now. And Dan's thing is, he feels that during the season, the stage belongs to the head of football operations, the coaching staff, the players. That's why he doesn't talk, all right?”
Cerrato also took exception to Largent’s comments, in which the Hall of Fame receiver called the Redskins’ decision to hand play-calling duties to Sherm Lewis “a joke.” Lewis had been retired for 4 ½ years before he joined the Redskins on Oct. 6.
Largent also said that the Redskins produced a copy of Zorn’s contract and cited it when insisting that Zorn relinquish play-calling duties. He also lambasted the front office for not allowing Zorn to pick all of his assistant coaches after being hired in 2008.
“Maybe his friend thought that he was protecting Jim because he thought something was going to happen to his career for whatever [reason], but I think his friend forgets this: that we were a top 5 defense [when Zorn was hired],” said Cerrato, who didn’t mention Largent by name. “We had just been to the playoffs. Last year we had four Pro Bowlers on offense. And in Jim's contract, he controls everything over his staff. And the thing about it is, the other thing is that his friend doesn't mention was that Jim worked with all these coaches for a week prior to becoming the head coach, and he said during the interview, 'Those are my guys, I want those guys, those are the guys I want, I don't want to go hire anybody else.'”
And regarding Lewis, Cerrato said: “You don't forget all the things that you've learned over 20-some years of experience in the same offense. And those four Super Bowl rings are very pretty on his [fingers], and I don't think [Largent] has a one. So the guy has a ton of experience, he's been in battles, so it upsets me very much that [Largent] wants to attack what this guy has done in the past. What he's been doing now compared to what he's done in the past. You don't forget how to ride a bike if you hadn't rode your bike in four years. So that was very, very frustrating, some of those comments, because it's to me off-the-wall comments.”