Danny this is what your dumb ass GM thinks of "HIS AND YOUR" 0-Line. Cerrato is a total hack job. Talk about a Mental Case, ole Vinny doesn't have to go by one mirror to miss one!
Cerrato Discusses the Offensive Line
I happened to be listening to ESPN 980's pre-game show on my way to FedEx Field Sunday morning, and Vinny Cerrato came on for a pre-game interview with Larry Michael. Now, we all know that the focal point of fan distress over this team's personnel has overwhelmingly focused on the offensive line, and Michael was unusually pointed when questioning Cerrato about his handiwork.
"Vinny you catch a lot [of heat] over the weeks in terms of the roster, where this team is," Michael began. "But take a look at the offensive line, this has your stamp on it today. You've got Mike Williams, a project that YOU picked up as the guy making the decisions on the team, he's the right tackle. Stephon Heyer is to the left. Will Montgomery, another Vinny Cerrato guy. Derrick Dockery, you brought him in this year. So this offensive line today has your stamp on it, doesn't it?"
"Yeah," Cerrato agreed, his voice literally cracking. "Well, it did with Chris Samuels in it, too. I mean, the same, you know, last week, Mike Williams was playing right guard, and Heyer was playing right tackle, and Samuels was playing left tackle, so that did too. So, you know, I don't see what that really matters, Larry."
[Trust me, it does. - ed.]
"Are these guys, however, better suited for these positions today, with Mike out there and Stephon at the left side?" Michael followed up.
"I think Stephon is more natural at left tackle, and Mike's always been a right tackle, but he didn't play bad at right guard," Cerrato answered. "So you know, I think that, yeah, I think they'll play well today."
This made no sense to me at 11:30 in the morning, and it makes no sense to me now, but there's really nothing left to say any more. Rarely are the media jackals this completely right. I've never played a down of real football in my life, and yet in August, I--like everyone else--was saying that this offensive line was one or two injuries away from disaster.
Against the 32nd ranked NFL defense--a team that had been allowing 27.6 points and 402.8 yards a game, we saw what disaster looked like. It looked like a cold, wet, smashed hot dog bun that's been run over by a Hummer, stomped on by a marching band, doused with lighter fluid and then smeared onto the side of a porta-potty.
Incidentally, the offensive line also came up earlier during the pre-game show.
"Sonny, the offensive line, we saw it coming in the preseason," Kevin Sheehan said to Sonny Jurgensen. "We talked about it in the preseason, that if it didn't stay healthy it was gonna be in trouble. How much trouble are they in right now?"
"They're in trouble," Jurgensen said. "They didn't address it. They did NOT address the problem during the offseason, and they had to. I was talking to a general manager earlier in the year, and he said, 'The one thing that we went into the season wanting, we wanted TWO offensive lines. We wanted to make sure we had enough linemen, if people went down, you could plug in and be able to continue to play.' "
Imagine that. A few more nuggets from Cerrato's appearance.
On the second-year receivers: "I think you'd like more production. But I think that they're making progress. And what they need is, they need to gain confidence. And if you catch balls early in the game, I think you gain confidence. And when you have confidence, I think then it just carries over. You have a carryover factor. So I think if they can get going early, just like any receiver, they get going early, I think then they become a huge factor in the game."
[Those guys combined for 1 catch for 12 yards, and 1 carry for 2 yards. For the season, they've combined for 144 receiving yards, two yards more than Eagles rookie Jeremy Maclin had last week. Guess Maclin has more confidence.]
On the offense: "The key is to score points....We've got to score more points."
[Against some of the NFL's worst teams, the Skins scored 40 points in their first three games, and 39 points in their next three games. The Saints have scored at least 45 points three separate times in their first five games. The Patriots scored 45 points in one half on Sunday.]
On Chris Samuels: "I think he's, uh, you know, doing fine, you know. It's just a mental thing, that, you know, he's got to feel better mentally, you know, I think. And, you know, it just takes a little bit of a time."
[A stinger for a guy with a history of spine problems is a mental thing? Really? Well, whatever.]