Is Jason Campbell Next Out of Washington?
January 4, 2010 – 11:55 am by Zach Krantz
Well the regular season wasn’t more then 12 hours old and the Washington Redskins make the first kaboom in the off-season firing Head Coach Jim Zorn. This wasn’t out of nowhere, but more of a when will it happen decision by Daniel Snyder. Rumors of him getting fired all season were swirling and he even lost his play calling duties this season to a guy working in a bingo hall earlier in the year. Zorn was a goner. Reasons are aplenty on why this happened (Losing games might have been the worst of them) but his shaky relationship with Jason Campbell didn’t help either. The truth is didn’t help either one that much. Zorn got fired and Campbell is a free agent (unless the season is uncapped which is looking more and more likely) about to test the free agent waters as soon as he can. Washington tried to trade up in the draft to draft Mark Sanchez and also tried to trade for Jay Cutler in the off-season so the writing seems to be on the wall for Jason Campbell.
Campbell did improve under Zorn. Even though he might have had one of the leagues worst offensive lines, he established personal bests with 3,618 yards passing, 20 touchdowns, a 64.5 completion percentage and an 86.4 quarterback rating. These are not the numbers of a bad quarterback, but can he take the Skins where they want to go yearly, the playoffs? Can he become an elite QB in the NFL? The whole Zorn hiring seemed weird, first as offensive coordinator and then quickly promoted to head coach. Snyder was sure Zorn was the hire to make Campbell his Elite NFL QB, maybe its time to go back to square one. Campbell was the 25th pick in the 2005 NFL Draft and has not lived up to Snyder’s standards as a franchise guy.
Jason Campbell joins The Sports Junkies on 106.7 the Fan in Washington DC to talk about Jim Zorn’s firing, the chances of Mike Shanahan as the next Head Coach, and his impending free agency.
Host says if he were Campbell he would tell his agent to get him out of town:
“We haven’t really went that deep yet. My main thing I kept telling him was let me focus on the season, let me get through the season.
One thing we both talked about is this a lot of may come to down things where I may not even have a say so . If you become a restricted free agent then you know it’s pretty much up to the Redskins whether they bring you back or not. A lot of stuff is out of my control and out of my hands so I can’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.”
Asked if they should assume Mike Shanahan is the next Head Coach of the Redskins:
Asked what his thoughts were on Jim Zorn getting fired:
“It’s something that didn’t shock anyone. Because all the guys already felt that was probably going to happen. Based on everything going on and everything being said over the last couple of weeks that wasn’t anything that was shocking. You know we all told each other yesterday this would be the last time we would all be together as this team anyways, you know coaches and players. So we just wanted to try and go out there yesterday and finish on a strong note. We played a good game but we still came up short. We knew that wasn’t going to be a shock, we knew the Redskins were probably going to go in a different direction. It wasn’t anything that caught us off guard.”
“We just kept moving forward. We just kept playing. The situation we knew, they were going to do something. You know we were getting staggered as an offense. People were kind of keying on what we were doing so we didn’t know what kind of change they were going to make. I thought Sherm Lewis was coming in here to be a consultant at the time. You know he was only here two weeks and named offensive coordinator. It kind of caught some guys off guard. At the same time everyone was like let’s not get caught up in the speculation and everything that’s going on. Let’s find a way to make this work. It was the same thing the coaches said, “Let’s make this work. We are still going to run our same offense; we are still going to have the same guys putting together our gameplan. ” My main thing was J, don’t get caught up in what’s going on, my job was to make sure I got the play into the huddle, got it called, got to the line of scrimmage, without getting a delay of game.
Listen to Jason Campbell with The Sports Junkies on 106.7 the Fan in Washington (4:00 into podcast)
Tags: Daniel Snyder, Jason Campbell, Jim Zorn, Mike Shanahan, Sherm Lewis, Washington Redskins
