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It ended the only way it could have, didn't it? With Steve Spurrier not knowing whether he was coming or going.
The debacle that was the Spurrier era in Washington came to an altogether fitting conclusion Tuesday when the would-be Redskins savior showed he didn't even know how to resign from the NFL after spending two years proving he didn't how to coach in it.
The madcap on-again, off-again farce that was Spurrier's exit strategy in Washington had all the requisite underpinnings of his brief tenure there: No plan, no purpose, and lousy bottom-line execution. I mean, we've always know Spurrier likes to delegate. But even his resignation? To an agent he hired just 24 hours earlier?
From the day he arrived in D.C. in January 2002, Spurrier never really seemed to be a fit in the NFL. On Tuesday, he finally admitted to the obvious, that the learning curve was just too steep and his own ambivalence for the job too substantial.
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If you've been paying attention to the Redskins soap opera the past two years,
there should be nothing shocking about Spurrier calling it a day at the close
of a second desultory season. Leaving $15 million on the table is a surprise,
but quitting? That's almost felt like a question of when, not if, for the longest
time now.
Spurrier and the NFL were a bad marriage, and bad marriages are usually short and less than sweet. He came into the partnership with the wrong expectations and came away from it with disappointing results. Albeit $10 million richer for the miserable experience.
"I just think as far as the passion it took to coach in the NFL, there were a lot of things lacking in that area,'' said one Redskins observer, who saw Spurrier's operation up close this season. "I don't think he ever realized how difficult the level of preparation was in the NFL, and how hard it is to win a game in this league.
"There's nobody in the league, coaches and personnel people, that didn't know Spurrier was in way over his head and didn't really want to do it. Everybody's known that for a while now. It's been obvious. He just didn't realize everything that it would take to win in the NFL.''
Spurrier's M.O. at Florida was to delegate everything but the offensive game plan to his assistants, and keep his eyes almost exclusively on his team's quarterback position. Naively, he thought the same type of approach would work when he first arrived in Washington. Later, when he tried to re-work his methods and be more of a head coach to the entire team, folks found out he really didn't know how.
In some ways, watching Spurrier work these past two years has been like watching the man behind the green curtain be revealed in super-slow mo. Turns out there was no great and powerful Oz. Just a guy trying to work the levers as best he could and keep up appearances. Spurrier was lost as an NFL head coach, and on Tuesday he decided better to get lost than continue the charade.
"People around the league knew even last year, that when [former Redskins defensive coordinator] Marvin Lewis was there, it was Marvin who kept the team together,'' said the Redskins observer, himself a veteran of the NFL game. "Marvin was the glue. They won seven games last year because Marvin was there. They didn't have that this year.
"Without Marvin there last year, there would have been nobody there to tell [Spurrier] how to script the practices and how to talk to the team and address the team. Marvin had to help Spurrier with all of that sort of thing, because he didn't know how to do it. Spurrier didn't even want anybody like Marvin around this year, because he knew that Marvin knew he was in over his head.''
When Spurrier's tenure with the Redskins is completely dissected, one of the main recurrent themes will also be his team's loose sense of discipline and lack of direction.
Coming into the NFL, Spurrier didn't know that a head coach's primary job is not X's and O's, but rather big-picture CEO responsibilities like communicating with his players and the media, keeping everyone focused on the task at hand, and guiding the franchise through the inevitable ups and downs of the long NFL season. Setting a tone is what NFL head coaches spend most of their time and energy on, but Spurrier never wanted that part of the job and never took to it.
"He still wanted to do what worked for him in college,'' said a league source. "He wanted to go out and practice for an hour and a half and put the game plan on a piece of paper and go. But in the NFL you've got to be involved with everything that goes on with your team, and you've got to be something of a disciplinarian figure. You've got to have control of that team.
"I don't think the ball coach did that. You can get away with that in college, but not the NFL. In this league, you have to know the names of your defensive players and your special teams guys. I think he saw his plan wasn't going to work and everything was hodge-podge and grab bag. I think he just got frustrated and said, 'See you later. This isn't for me.' "
For all his lofty accomplishments at Florida, Spurrier entered the NFL with a limited bag of tricks. He is not a great leader of men in the fashion of a Bill Parcells, who commands respect and gets results by pushing his players' buttons and making them fear him. And he is not a great motivator, ala Dick Vermeil, who gets the best from his team because they don't want to let him down. And after watching Spurrier struggle through these last two seasons in D.C., we certainly know that he is not a great evaluator of talent, or even wants much of a role in that all-important department.
What did that leave for him to fall back on? Spurrier's calling card was supposed to be his superior offensive game plans, the ones he used to dazzle the SEC with all those years in Gainesville. Guess what? Washington wasn't Gainesville, and NFL teams are way too even in terms of talent for Spurrier's play-calling to be the singular deciding factor between success and failure.
When you have little going for you other than your offensive genius, and the league negates that factor rather quickly -- say, after Washington's five preseason games in 2002 -- you're about as out of your element as you can be. Which is exactly how Spurrier has looked these past two years. Like a guy who has the sneaking suspicion he's at the wrong party.
Spurrier can at last relax.
For him, the party's over in Washington and most likely the NFL. He tried it,
did it his way, and lost. In the end, even the act of walking away didn't look
very natural or particularly graceful.