Is Jim Zorn Brian Billick 2.0?
Remember the last coach we had in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area whose nickname could’ve been Mr. Eccentric? Yeah, that dude up in B-More who coached and interacted with the media like he was smarter than everyone else in the room, and everyone breathing throughout Planet Earth at the time.
Yep, that was Brian Billick’s claim to fame. And the thing that endeared him to some and made him despised by many, is that he was happy to feed into the aura. He wanted it to grow and thrive like a soundbyte-eating organism that deserved existence on sports talk radio, columns and blogs. The wins and losses ebbed and flowed like expectations, but his arrogance never strayed far from the shores of Lake Douchebag.
But Jim Zorn is a different kind of animal. He keeps his eccentricity guarded in the safe havens of the practice field, executive bike riding sessions, and within trembling lecterns. And though these safe havens are often intruded upon by the likes of inquisitive bloggers and reporters, it’s not his greatest pleasure to reveal who he is personally outside of what he is within the Redskins organization.
He can laugh at his quirks and arrogance, and he knows when not to let them soil his approach as a game planner. He knows what his players can and cannot do, and doesn’t will them into situations where he, and they, can look bad. He doesn’t marginalize the local media, even though a winning record twirled up with a bumbling front office and fair-weather fan base could certainly give him the license.
Where Billick was all hot air, Zorn has been all Hip Hip Hooray.
And that’s what’s needed when you are coaching in a football hotbed like Washington. A coach that doesn’t make it too heavy that fans can only identify with wins and losses, but not too light where too many losses can be attributed to a lack of focus and drive. That’s what Brian Billick tried to do with the Ravens, and his ego wound up tripping him up in the end.
Perhaps he would’ve been well-suited with one of Zorn’s dodgeball drills.
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