Vacchiano: Gibbs' legacy still intact

There was a moment a few weeks back when Joe Gibbs did the unthinkable and cost his team a game with a mistake so bizarre, so avoidable that even his harshest critics were stunned. He called back-to-back timeouts — a no-no — and the ensuing penalty led to a game-winning field goal and a Redskins loss.
 
Within moments, fans, experts, anyone with a platform was yelling that this was the damning evidence that the game had passed Gibbs by. He was 67 years old, an icon from another era whom, they said, didn’t belong in today’s NFL.
 
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
 
Under the category of “Be careful what you wish for,” Gibbs retired Tuesday, finally putting an end to a distinguished, Hall of Fame career.
 
“He’s going to go down as one of the best coaches in NFL history,” said former Giants quarterback Phil Simms, now a CBS analyst. “And it’s well deserved.”
 
It certainly is.
 
Gibbs built the Redskins into one of the powerhouse teams and franchises of the 1980s, in an era when good teams had staying power and they were overflowing in the NFC and especially the NFC East. He managed to win three Super Bowl titles in his first 12 years as the ‘Skins coach. It’s hardly a coincidence that they haven’t even been to one since.
 
He was 140-65 back then, before he decided to focus his life on his family and his efforts on building a NASCAR team. But he was lured back into the NFL in 2004 by a desperate Daniel Snyder, the Redskins’ spend-happy owner who was overseeing a floundering franchise and was looking for a window to the past.
 
Gibbs took a five-year, $27.5 million contract, but he only went 31-36 in the next four years. He’s had three losing seasons in his entire career. Two of them came in the last four years.
 
“The first time around he was part of an organization in a time in the NFL where if you did it right you could dominate,” Simms said. “And they did it. This time around, so many things have changed in the league. And they did get into the playoffs in two of the last three years.”
 
In fact, Gibbs got the Redskins into the playoffs in two of the last three years despite having quarterback issues and extremely flawed rosters. And anyone that thinks he couldn’t handle today’s NFL didn’t see what he did this season.
 
The Redskins finished 9-7, but had to rally down the stretch to do it, beating the Giants, Vikings and Cowboys – two playoff teams and one that was at one time the hottest team in the NFC. He had to do it with Todd Collins, a 37-year-old backup quarterback who hadn’t started a game in 10 seasons before he was thrust into action this December.
 
And he had to do it with an emotionally broken team in the wake of the tragic shooting death of safety Sean Taylor.
 
“It’s hard to coach a team any better than Joe Gibbs coached his football team in the aftermath of what happened to Sean Taylor,” said CBS’ Dan Dierdorf. “So his legacy is intact.”
 
It was so intact, in fact, that Snyder wanted no part of Gibbs’ resignation. “This is something that no one wanted to see happen,” Snyder said. “But all of us respect it and understand it.”
 
Then he added something that didn’t need to be said: “You can never replace Joe Gibbs.”
 
That is something the Redskins learned back in the 1990s when they tried to replace Gibbs the first time around. It turned out that the only man who could replace Joe Gibbs was Joe Gibbs himself. And even he couldn’t live up to the standard he set earlier in his career.
 
So now the critics will have their way in Washington — life without Gibbs. They’ll get a younger coach, someone theoretically more in touch with “today’s NFL,” whatever that’s supposed to be.
 
Maybe the Redskins will even be successful in their second post-Gibbs era.
 
But they’ll also never be the same.

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