Call the Washington Redskins offensive line “dirtbags” a year ago and you might have gotten a smack in the mouth. Call them that this season and you’re likely to get a high five.
What do you get the unit that has little but a past it would rather forget?
You start with an identity.
At least that’s what offensive line coach Joe Bugel figured. Bugel, who made ham D.C.’s most popular entree when he nicknamed the Redskins’ line of the early 1980s “the Hogs,” came up with the latest moniker, too.
“We’re going to be real down and dirty in those trenches this year,” Bugel said. “That name is something we can have fun with.”
There’s been very little of that for Redskins offensive linemen the past few seasons. Last season, the unit allowed 43 sacks, a figure tackle Chris Samuels asks someone to repeat because he doesn’t believe his ears the first time.
In 2002, the offensive line didn’t produce well enough for the team to sport a 1,000-yard rusher. The year before that, Marty Schottenheimer’s first and only Redskins team started 0-5.
None of those is memories Redskins offensive linemen like reliving.
You can’t ask guard Randy Thomas about last year’s playoffs or Super Bowl. He didn’t watch them. He couldn’t watch them. It was too painful.
You can ask tackle Jon Jansen about last season, though the word that pops out of his mouth most often is “embarrassing.”
“I do not think there was a person who wasn’t embarrassed at the product we put on the field last year,” Jansen said. “Especially the offensive line. To have people talk that way about us and not be able to do much about it, it was extremely embarrassing.”
The normally mild-mannered Samuels stomped around Redskins Park this offseason in a perpetually foul mood, a chip on his shoulder the size of a boulder. Now, he’s the happiest dirtbag in town.
“That name is definitely something we can hang onto; we love it,” he said. “I think it’s our identity. We’re a dirty group of guys up front. We’re going to be running the ball and trying to punish guys up front, throw them in the dirt. We’re going to be in that mud grinding, every single play.”
Bugel didn’t shy away from the unit’s shortcomings when he met with them individually after taking the job.
Samuels, who made the Pro Bowl two years ago mostly on reputation, fell way off last season. Part of it was injuries to his ankle and shoulder. Part of it was Steve Spurrier’s pass-happy offensive system that negated much of what Samuels did best. Part of it was that Samuels lost some confidence.
“He told me he would work with me as hard as he could to get me back to the level I once was,” he said. “But a lot of it was also up to me. I had developed some bad habits that coach said I had to break if I was going to get back to the way I used to play.”
Samuels responded by coming to camp weighing less than 300 pounds for the first time in his career. The weight loss only enhances his trademark quick feet, and he has been stout in practice.
“He’s starting to learn what it takes to be a great tackle,” Bugel said.
While second-year pro Derrick Dockery seems set at left guard and either Lenny Friedman or Cory Raymer should prove to be an adequate center, it’s Thomas, Jansen and Samuels who will be relied on to lead the offense.
Jansen and Thomas are 27, Samuels 26, all entering what should be their prime.
“To be able to have a coach put us in the position to be successful and to have a scheme that really emphasizes the success of the offensive line, what more could you ask for?” Jansen said. “We could be extremely good. Last year, we saw the opposite, no doubt about it.”
They can’t wait for the season to start to find out which it’s going to be. Coach Joe Gibbs’ run-first approach plays to their strengths, they say, and represents the first time in their careers they have been placed in a leadership role.
“When you go through those tough times like last year and you stick together as a team, when something new comes along, it’s like, 'Wow, we just got a new life,’ ” Thomas said. “New year. New coach. New system. I feel like a rookie again, and I haven’t felt like that since my rookie year.”
The always effervescent Bugel crows that he’s rarely seen an offensive line that has worked as diligently in the offseason, that has bought into a plan so completely, that is so anxious to begin shoving around a defense.
Jansen isn’t as impressed.
“Right now, with the guys who were here last year if they asked us to jump off a bridge we’d probably do it to win games,” he said.
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