“Sean lives with me every single day, and I feel very strongly about that,” Williams said. “I took a lot of knocks defending him early on, and I’m so proud and happy for people now to see what I saw for so long, behind the scenes. That was a great young man, and I still have a difficult time dealing with this. Sometimes I choke up and tear up thinking about him.
“I really feel he’s with me every day. That’s a unique relationship we had, probably one I’ll never have again with any other player. Our personalities matched so much. He was all football, every single second. I’ve never been around someone that intense and that inspired about being the best as he was. He wanted to prove it every single second of the day. I miss him. I miss him a lot, and the experience we went through last year at the Redskins made us closer, all of us there, as a football team, but more importantly as an organization.”
…
“I didn’t fully realize until several months after his passing just how close Sean was to my two sons,” Williams said. “The youngest is still in high school [Chase Williams is a star linebacker entering his junior year at Loudoun County High School] and wears No. 21. I never thought about why, then I asked him one day, and he said, ‘Dad, you always said that Sean was the best player you’ve ever coached, so I wanted to wear that number, too.’
“My oldest boy [Blake, an entry-level coach in Jacksonville] did two years of internships with the coaches in the secondary in Washington and developed such a close bond with Sean. I never knew it, but they talked two, three times a week during the season. And when he finished his undergraduate work at Princeton, and wrote a 152-page thesis, I took a look in the acknowledgments, and there’s a page dedicated to his and Sean’s relationship, and I’m reading it with tears running down my face realizing how close they were.”
Williams worked to earn Taylor’s trust and was one of his biggest boosters in the organization. Even at times when Taylor refused to return Gibbs’s calls, he regularly reached out to Williams, team sources said. Williams urged Taylor to make positive changes in his life, putting family first after his arrest in Florida in 2005.
“There have been a lot of people to come out of the woodwork who act like they knew him, but they didn’t,” Williams said. “They didn’t know him, and that’s okay. They can say they knew him, but what really matters is I want people to understand and rejoice that he was a tremendous young man who made a lot of changes to better the people around him and better himself, and I’m not sure a lot of other people would have worked as hard at making those changes as he did.”
It’s a fascinating story and many Redskins defensive players obviously continue to regard Williams with great admiration and affection. I’ve always liked Williams and this story does nothing to diminish my respect for him.
You certainly won’t see DE Jason Taylor on Thursday night [knee], but you could still see him on September 4, opening night in the Meadowlands against division rivals New York Giants. Taylor has a streak of 130 straight games going and he doesn’t want to break it. I’m skeptical. For now, Taylor is just grateful that he got lucky and was only injured slightly. A season-ending injury looked very possible as he lay writhing in agony on the field last Saturday night.
Finally some good news about FS Laron Landry — the key to the entire secondary. Landry practiced with his teammates yesterday and while he definitely won’t play on Thursday, he feels optimistic about going against the Giants on 9/4. Let’s hope so because with WR Plaxico Burress running around out there, you want a big gun like Landry on your side.
The Redskins released WR Burl Toler yesterday. Looks like WR Billy McMullen has made his case to stick around as the 6th wideout on the team.
TE Jason Goode is still bothered by turf toe, so the Redskins put the former Maryland Terrapin on the waived/injured list and re-signed linebacker Danny Verdun-Wheeler, who finished last year on the practice squad and had been cut earlier this month.
Rich Tandler weighs in on the Redskins punting situation:
There are those who think that Washington Redskins punter Derrick Frost saved his job on Saturday night by punting for a nice average in the Skins’ dismal defeat at the hands of the Carolina Panthers. It appeared to them that he got a leg up, so to speak, on rookie Durant Brooks by averaging 51.3 yards on his eight punts.
Not so fast.
To be sure, Frosty boomed his kicks. They traveled 50, 65, 46, 46, 49, 50, 40, 56, and 58 yards. With a performance like that, you have to give the job to the veteran, don’t you?
Something tells me that Danny Smith wasn’t as impressed with Frost’s performance as the casual TV viewer might have been. As far as Frost’s kicks went in one direction, the Panthers negated much of the yardage with returns in the other direction.
Jason Carter, to be specific, ran back seven of Frost’s eight punts. His runbacks covered 4, 18, 10, 5, 8, 18, and 30 yards. One punt, the 56-yarder, went into the end zone for a touchback. The Panthers started inside the 20 zero times after Frost’s punts.
That all adds up to a very pedestrian net of 37.1 yards a kick. That’s not awful, just mediocre. It’s not the kind of performance that forces a team to jettison a draft pick and go with the veteran.
That said, it’s not like Brooks has been lighting it up in the net yardage category either. He averaged 33.5 against the Colts and 33.8 against the Jets. That’s at the bottom end of mediocre. It’s not the kind of performance that will force a team to whack a veteran to keep a player just because he’s a sixth-round draft pick.
The battle for the roster spot remains very close. I still have Brooks as a very slight favorite but it would not surprise me in the least if Frost remained the team’s punter.
Finally, The Sports Network has a preview of the 2008 Redskins and a prediction of how they will do. Here’s a taste:
The Redskins are confident they’ve found the right man for the job in Zorn, and Campbell’s strong preseason showing under center bodes well for the team’s prospects for both the present and future. Washington’s biggest problem may be the division it plays in.
I think I know where this is heading…
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