He Came to Pass

It’s confession time, and Washington Redskin quarterbacks Danny Wuerffel and Shane Matthews have a whopper of a transgression to tell--one that would get them booted out of any other NFL city.

They don’t study their playbooks.

Barely even glance at them.

So the Redskins go out and spend $5 million a year on Coach Steve Spurrier, signing him to a five-year deal, hoping he can resurrect a proud franchise that has reached the playoffs once since Joe Gibbs left after the 1992 season, and the leading candidates for the No. 1 quarterback job treat his playbook as if it’s an in-flight magazine.

Informed of this, Spurrier gives a little shrug and smiles.

“We don’t even refer to the playbook a lot,” he says. “We teach off the board most of the time. We’ve got [a playbook] with all the stuff in it, but we only ask people to bring it to the night meetings.”

And, seeing as how Wuerffel and Matthews played under Spurrier at Florida, they needed only a brief refresher to get up to speed. The way they see it, Spurrier’s “Fun ‘n’ Gun” offense is so logical, a quarterback who learns the basic building blocks can pick up the rest as he goes.

“The best thing about football is when you’re 5 years old, you drop back and throw the ball, and the guy catches it,” says Wuerffel, the 1996 Heisman Trophy winner who is competing for the starting job with Matthews, Sage Rosenfels and first-round pick Patrick Ramsey. “So whatever you can do to still be able to do that is what makes it fun. And Coach Spurrier’s the best at it.”

Although Spurrier is believed to be leaning toward starting Wuerffel, the coach said last week he might not reveal his No. 1 quarterback until the offense takes the field on opening day.

Most experienced is nine-year veteran Matthews, who spent his first eight seasons in West Coast offenses at Chicago and Carolina. He says the biggest challenge for him isn’t learning Spurrier’s plays--those are seared into his memory--but remembering he’s free to be creative at the line of scrimmage.

“I’ve had to retrain my mind,” he says. “I’ve been in the same offense for eight years, and it’s whatever play’s called, go run it. No matter if they’ve got eight guys in there [on or near the line of scrimmage], if you’ve got to run a play, run it and they expect to block it. It really doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the way coaches are.

“With Coach Spurrier, it’s basically common sense. They’ve got a bunch of dudes in there? Throw it over their heads. If they’ve got a big soft zone, let’s run it.”

Spurrier, the self-described “ball coach” who had 112 victories in 12 seasons at Florida, has devised an offensive system that even sounds uncluttered. In the West Coast offense, Matthews might duck into the huddle and call, “Stem-to-east-right-zing-close-A-Z-fly-scat-322-Y-stick-X-post.”

In Spurrier-speak, a pass play sounds more like, “Right-14-extra.”

His system is sophisticated, players say, and involves dozens of formations. Perhaps more than other offenses, it requires quarterbacks and receivers to know each other’s next step. In fact, when the Redskins break up for individual meetings, Spurrier keeps the quarterbacks and receivers together, something most NFL coaches don’t do.

“The philosophy is, so we’ll all know what we’re talking about,” says Spurrier, a former Florida quarterback who won the Heisman in 1966. “Other teams split it up; I don’t know how they do it that way. We like for the quarterback and receiver to hear the same thing, coming from the same coaches.”

The Redskins, who have been through four coaches and three defensive coordinators since Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, started last season 0-5--before winning five in a row--and ranked last in total offense most of the season.

Spurrier replaces Marty Schottenheimer, who now coaches San Diego, and their styles are vastly different.

Schottenheimer, who had total control of the football operations, put alarms on the front doors of the dorms at Dickinson College, where the Redskins train, enabling coaches to catch players violating curfew. He fined players for tossing the ball to the wrong person after a play on the practice field, and once sprinted over to legendary cornerback Darrell Green--who has almost two decades of experience as an NFL player--and corrected his backpedaling. Schottenheimer, who has coached his teams to the playoffs 11 times in 15 NFL seasons, oversaw every aspect of the offense, defense and special teams.

Spurrier is so fixated on the offense, he barely glances in the direction of the Redskin defense, controlled entirely by defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis. Early in training camp, when asked his opinion of a defensive player, Spurrier said: “I’m over there with the offense. I don’t know who’s out there half the time, not on defense. They rotate. We’re rotating players. What am I supposed to do, [crane my neck and] say, ‘Who’s that out there?’ We don’t care who’s out there.”

Roughly 1,000 times a practice, Spurrier invokes a favorite phrase--”We’re going to pitch it around”--sometimes clapping his hands for emphasis.

Before Spurrier arrived at camp, he had the alarms removed. And, although he too imposes a curfew, no one gets docked for being a few seconds late.

“We have our rules and regulations, but he makes it a nice pleasant atmosphere, where the coaches and players can communicate and spend time together,” defensive tackle Dan Wilkinson says.

Although Spurrier appears to be less tightly wound than Schottenheimer and freely admits he cannot recall ever sleeping at the office, his visor-tossing outbursts are well documented. (He throws the visor into the air, by the way, because slamming it to the ground leaves grass stains.)

“He knows we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to change the plays,” Matthews says. “If you call a bad play, just don’t let it turn into a horrible play. If you have to throw an incompletion, throw it out of bounds, dump it off to the back, just don’t make a dumb mistake.”

Time will tell if the Redskins made the right move in hiring Spurrier, the highest-paid coach in NFL history. The combination of a combustible coach and a meddlesome owner could turn toxic if the Redskins don’t win right away. Snyder has attended most training-camp practices this summer, swooping in aboard a helicopter that lands on an adjacent field.

Frequently accused of running up the score in college, Spurrier heard similar cries in the Aug. 4 exhibition opener when the Redskins rolled over San Francisco, 38-7. He was irked when 49er Coach Steve Mariucci accused him of leaving his starters in the game longer than was warranted.

Regardless, the Redskins set a winning tone on national TV.

“Might have found a couple new plays too,” Spurrier says.

Knowing his quarterbacks as well as he does, the coach won’t bother updating the playbook.