Football is the sport that lends its metaphors to politics. It's no accident that Nixon suggested plays to the Redskins coach of his era, and no surprise that they were bad ideas too. By contrast, golf (Updike) and baseball (Roth) -- as noted by my son Nathaniel in his excellent senior thesis -- inform literature, sociology and history. And so not surprisingly the travails of the failed Washington team, the Deadskins of a 5-11 season, are a lesson in a particularly Washingtonian form of failure: the inability of the public (or, in a big sense, political) leader to assess his own failings in an objective manner and take decisive action.

Coach Joe Gibbs is, in Washington at least, more than a person.

He is a public figure of enormous reputation. He is the up-from-poverty, self-made coach who assembled teams in the 80's that won three Super Bowls without ever generating players who were bigger than the teams they were on. He did that by combining religious faith, business discipline, and fanatical attention to detail -- plus in those, his salad days, he brought to the game true disruptive creativity in formations, play-calling, and personnel deployment. He had the biggest line, the crushing blocking scheme, the relentness focus on running, the possession receivers, the flexible and pursuit-oriented defense -- all before other teams did these things.

The maladroit owner, gifted with an ability to make money but lacking any sense of how to manage a football team, lured Coach Gibbs out of retirement and gave him part ownership, a broadly defined CEO role, an unlimited checkbook for hiring staff, and the role of public face for the team. The result has been calamitously bad. In three years of Gibbs II, the team has a losing record, but even worse its future looks bleaker than its recent past. It has few draft choices left, having squandered many in ill-advised deals over the last few years. It is small, old, slowing, talent-poor, and, what is worse, living a lie: Gibbs insists that the team fights hard and that he is proud of its core group, but there really is no core group and in fact the team showed this year that it succeeds only in finding a new way to lose every week.

Nothing was more illustrative of the team's failures than the last offensive drive of the season. The young quarterback, Jason Campbell, had a hot hand. He had the ball with more than two minutes to go, timeouts available, and then from an unknown source came the command to try very difficult passes, eschew the successful running game, and try too hard too soon for a knockout TD pass. So he threw four incompletions in a row. The receivers (tiny and poorly selected by the coaches) and the passes (errant and poorly selected) were far apart. Game and season over. The coaching was stupid; the execution dismal; the fundamental strategy ill-advised; the personnel deficient.

Perhaps Campbell will be a highly successful quarterback in the future; maybe, a star. But there's little likelihood of that with the current coaching staff. No one is truly responsible. Everything is done by committee. There is no bright young genius. There are too many over-the-hill hangers-on. Players can't possibly know who they should follow with the blind obedience that the game requires. At the top Coach Gibbs asserts he's responsible, but this is more a public relations effort than a reflection of reality. He doesn't pick the players, devise the game plans, call the plays, or actually coach the players. He is like the President of the United States, if the President were not to study the issues, debate the choices, and make the decisions. He is a morale officer in a sport where nothing succeeds like success. He is like a general fighting a war without a deep understanding of the enemy or the tactics or the capability of his troops. He seems to pick players based on their character, which is unwise enough, but then he misjudges their character. He doesn't get the most of each according to their ability; he rejects, shuns, fails to communicate with, declines to use, or alienates at least one or two players every couple of months. (See,e.g., Arrington, Pierce, Smoot, Brunell, Cooley, Lloyd, MacIntosh) In every case, there's an excuse, but the common theme is that players are paid a lot not to play much or at all. It's like having an Administration that recruits badly to key jobs, leaves many office holders in the dark, and doesn't empower good people to become great.

Presumably all the Redskins think Gibbs is famous and great; but you can't find one who acts as if Gibbs is actually doing a fine job as head coach. (Can you think of a prominent person in the current Administration who praises the President in anything more than a rote, robotic manner?) In fact Coach Gibbs fills the job without doing it. There is one move he should make: he should pick his successor, and leave the field. Presidents do not have this luxury. Coach Gibbs does.

The new head coach should not necessarily be the recently failed defensive coach or the terrible play-calling offensive coach. It would be best by far to bring someone young, innovative, and hugely energetic -- someone like Gibbs in the 80's. It's not important that any of the old coaches stay. It's not important that the current failed methods be maintained. But Coach Gibbs is insisting that stability is the key to the future. Nothing should be kept stable when it is as broken as this team.

The Washington Post is afraid to challenge Coach Gibbs, as it is afraid of the current President. It insists that the coach should hire a general manager; as it thinks a new Defense Secretary is a solution to the problem of Iraq. But the coach is the problem and the solution lies in fixing the head coaching, not some other job. Of course just as the President could use a much better staff -- with a great Secretary of State and a fresh, objective national security adviser -- so of course the Redskins would be better off with a general manager. Not to have one at all, their situation, is sheer madness. But without a new head coach the team can't be expected to move in the right direction. And not until January 2009 can the United States find the wise way forward.