What have the Washington Redskins learned in week one? With any luck they learned that for an offensive coordinator to come to town with a 700-page playbook requires as much folly as it does ingenuity. Football’s great thinkers are doing entirely too much of it; namely thinking.

Like lawyers, football coaches have found job security in creating confusion that those outside the profession can’t decipher. They have gone from good old X’s and O’s to some sort of Zen reality where they attempt to marshal the forces of good and evil on third and six. As usual, owners are hesitant to demand simplicity for fear of being made fun of by those privy to the inside joke.  After all, who is going to question the guy who needs a rickshaw to drag around his countless offensive schemes? 

For the knowledgeable football fan there are three basic plays: run, pass and kick. For Al Saunders, new Assistant Head Coach for Offense of the Washington Redskins, devising a way to generate 700 pages of variations of those basic elements is absurdity on a mythic scale. Exactly what are these offensive geniuses thinking? Who do they think is trying to remember all this stuff? Stephen Hawking? Let’s be real here. Any playbook with 700 pages must have an awful lot of pictures in it. 

All preseason the Washington faithful were told they were seeing only 2 percent of the aggregate wisdom contained in the Sacred Documents. The other 98 percent they were assured would bring world peace, close the hole in the ozone layer and result in prolific scoring not seen since the glory days of the Fun Bunch and the Smurfs. If Monday night’s play calling against the Minnesota Vikings is any indication, I’ll be having tea with Osama before Mark Brunell completes a touchdown pass. 

With 700 pages of trickery, why did the Redskins call the wide receiver screen to Santana Moss three times? Did the magic playbook call for one time catching the ball with his left hand, the next with his right and the third an intentional drop to confuse the defenders? When you have first and ten at the 12-yard line and four world-class wide receivers, for the love of Mike, at least try one pass into the end zone before relapsing to the futile rush up the middle and customary field goal. 

Tom Cruise, roller coasters and the awe inspiring 700 pages might bamboozle owner Dan Snyder, but not the Redskins fans. Washington needs to get back to thinking about hard-nosed football instead of patting themselves on the back for creating a chimera playbook no one can grasp and isn’t any more clever than the old “student body right” on third and three.