Vinny Cerrato: Man in Charge

There's a good discussion of the situation with the Washington Redskins in Jason La Canfora's blog today. He clarifies for his readers, many of whom didn't seem to get this point before (complaining as they have that the Redskins haven't hired a GM to run the show), that when Vinny Cerrato was made the Executive Vice President/Football Operations, he was made the equivalent of a GM, but with a fancier title. La Canfora gives us an NFL executive's inside account of how other teams are viewing the situation. Said the unnamed exec,

Vinny's running it, Vinny is the GM. This is the first time you can really put everything on Vinny, beginning right now. And his first act as chief of operations is to find a new coach and he's hired coordinators first and basically has his staff in place already. That's a completely outside-the-box way of doing business, and we'll find out of it was right or wrong.

It's evident to every football man in the National Football League that the Vinny Cerrato era has begun. Whether it works or not - and a lot of people are wondering if it can work - right now you can honestly say he's in charge. In the past he's always been under the radar, and he could blame Dan or blame a coach, but he can no longer do that. It's his team now.

Not only does La Canfora make this point, but he does a great job of telling us what that means in some detail. Vinny Cerrato's background in San Francisco means that he comes from the Bill Walsh tree of West Coast football. And already, we're seeing that develop on this team with the hiring of offensive coordinator Jim Zorn. Now Zorn's own approach comes from the Mike Holmgren branch of the West Coast offense, but it's the same idea, generally.

There are some real concerns that Jason Campbell won't be able to make the transition to the West Coast offense well. But there were real concerns that he wouldn't be able to make it anyway. The jury's still out. He has a chance.

La Canfora also let us know that the word is that Gregg Williams, former Defensive Coordinator and once the leading candidate to succeed Joe Gibbs as Head Coach, wanted to keep Al Saunders as the Offensive Coach partly to give Jason Campbell some continuity with the program, and that he wanted Saunders to curtail part of his 700 page playbook.

Now my take on that is that if Joe Gibbs, in conversation with Daniel Snyder, has supported the idea of Vinny Cerrato being the man-in-charge, then it makes sense that Cerrato would have wanted to take this team in a new direction offensively, and that may be the most solid reason we'll ever discover for why Gregg Williams did not get the job. (On the other hand, if they wanted Williams, it's hard to see why they couldn't have said--Look, we want you, but if you get the job, we're going to make some changes on offense. Then again, maybe they did say this, and maybe Williams was against it. Who knows?)

I hope that this will put to rest the clamor for a GM to be in charge of the Washington Redskins. But it won't. Vinny Cerrato probably deserves a chance to build this team. But everyone sees him as a 'yes-man' to Snyder, and they think (whether rightly or wrongly) that Snyder gets way too involved in the football decisions. Maybe they're right. But I continue to see Snyder as mainly an excited fan with the big money who likes to be close to the action. I think that Gibbs had almost total control the last four years, and now the reigns have been passed to Cerrato.