Redskin Wagon Put on Blocks

Good thing I didn’t take that jalopy out of the garage last week, huh?

We’d be sitting in a snowbank somewhere outside of Olean, N.Y., now waiting for a tow.

I guess Jim Kelly isn’t through yet. (Speaking of which, here’s a verbatim phone message I received Sunday night: “If Kelly’s a rag-armed old geezer, what does that make you?” Um, the Archbishop of Canterbury?)

Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, Bruce Smith--those are the guys who beat the Redskins. Do you have any idea how old they are in dog years? (Not to mention Marv Levy. Levy has been around so long he remembers telling Rockne, “Knute, sweetheart, whaddya out of your mind with this forward pass thing?”) Those guys are so old, their pre-game meal is Metamucil.

Now maybe those guys are done. Maybe this was their last gasp, and after winning all those games over all those years they got by on muscle memory. But it was awfully convincing. Kelly picked the Redskins apart like a Thanksgiving turkey. Thomas ran like he did back in the days when he remembered his helmet. If either of them had ever done that in a Super Bowl, the world would still be making Denver jokes.

You know when I thought the Redskins were in trouble? When I turned on the TV and saw Levy in one of those big parkas--then they showed a shot of the officials huddled at midfield, and I could see their breath! Welcome to Buffalo in the cold. I’ve seen these games for years in November, December and January. It’s a Sam Peckinpaugh movie. Everybody dies.

I wonder if the cold affected the Redskins’ tackling. I’m sorry, did I say “tackling”? Of course I meant “lunging.” Something certainly seemed to be awry there. Take the Bills’ fourth touchdown, when Kelly went in from the 4-yard line on a quarterback sneak. You don’t usually gain four yards on a sneak. At this stage in his career, Kelly is about as quick as Placido Domingo; Kelly hasn’t gone that far forward in 10 years. And what was the Redskins’ problem tackling Darick Holmes? You want to stand clear of Larry Holmes, fine. But Darick Holmes? The guy was blowing through the Redskins like they were Kleenex. There was one play he carried 37 Redskin defenders on his back. I thought I saw Dave Butz on there.

I don’t think you’ve got to be Vince Lombardi to recognize that when you can’t run and you can’t pass and you can’t tackle, you’re in trouble--unless you’re playing the St. Louis Rams. (By the way, if you have Rich Brooks’ phone number, tell him the realtors can drop by at his convenience.) Buffalo had this game locked up by the end of the third period. After that, the only significant question facing Redskins fans was: Should we order in sesame shrimp or kung pao chicken?

It’s comforting to think, as some do, that this game was no big deal. But losing by 25 points isn’t something you throw off easily; Mondale lost to Reagan by only 18 points.

Great teams don’t get smoked like fish. All you folks who agitated for The Bandwagon must have thought this was potentially a Super Bowl team. So let’s look at the past three Redskin Super Bowl teams: 1983, 1987 and 1991. All together they lost eight regular season games by a total of 18 points. In 1982, another Super Bowl season, the Redskins lost a game to the Cowboys by 14 points. But 25? No way. Maybe this was just a blip on the radar screen. But it has to give you a queasy feeling as the Redskins make plans to maneuver through the Scylla and Charybdis of their season: Eagles away, 49ers home and Dallas away, over 12 days. (Ty Detmer might not be tall enough to get on all the rides at Disneyland, but he seems to know how to get the ball to Ricky Watters and Irving Fryar.)

And so we are keeping The Bandwagon on the lift for a while.