Vinny Cerrato On Jim Zorn: The Transcription
Posted by Matt Terl on October 23, 2009 – 10:21 am
On Wednesdays and Fridays, I appear on Redskins Nation on Comcast SportsNet. I sit next to Larry Michael to answer fan questions or pick games or talk about what’s going on at Redskins Park.
And, occasionally, I sit there and fidget while he goes on a rant. That happened Wednesday, when Michael held forth about members of the media doing nothing but transcribing radio shows and being, I believe his word was, “stenographers.”
The gist of his argument was, I believe, that people on live radio sometimes say things in an awkward fashion but that — unlike writers — they don’t have the opportunity to edit the final product. He really seemed to feel quite strongly about it, and went on somewhat at length, and I fidgeted, and that was that.
So keep all of that in mind as you read the following eleven-hundred word transcript of the first few minutes of Vinny Cerrato’s radio show this morning, the bit where Cerrato declared that Jim Zorn will be the head coach for the rest of the season and hopefully beyond, and his explanation of the playcaller switch.
If you want to listen to the rest of it, I’ve embedded it after the transcript segment (with thanks to ESPN980), but here’s one stenographer’s interpretation of the first part.
FRANK HANRAHAN: “Good morning, Vinny! How are you?”
VINNY CERRATO: “Lemme just start this way, Frank: lemme start by making a few things very perfectly clear. Jim Zorn is the head coach of the Washington Redskins, and will be for the rest of this season, and hopefully into the future.”
FH: “All right, so you just made it clear for the rest of this season, the rest of the future as you can see it, Jim Zorn is your guy. Despite what’s been going on, Vinny–”
VC: “Oh, I’m not done. I’m not done, Frank. All right, there’s been a lot of false rumors, media speculation, unnamed sources out there all the time. I hired Jim along with Dan Snyder. Y’know, and obviously — obviously we’re all very disappointed by the season performance thus far. In fact, Dan constantly talks about how disappointed he is for the fans. And we’ve GOT great fans. We feel the frustration for the fans, and we need the fans big-time Monday night. We wanna entertain them, we wanna make them proud, we wanna make them happy [with] this football team.
“You know, and there’s a lot of media people like you and everyone else out there, Frank, that says, you know, ‘Dan Snyder needs to come out and talk, Dan needs to say this, do that’ … Dan has NEVER spoken to the media during the season for over a decade now. And Dan’s thing is he feels [that] during the season, the stage belongs to the head of football operations, the coaching staff, the players. That’s why he doesn’t talk.
“All right? The frustration is VERY high, everywhere around here. But the relationships internally within this organization quite frankly remain the same.
“You know, Later today Dan and I and Jim have our weekly Friday lunch, like we always do, and like Dan’s done forever with the head coach, to go over the upcoming game. You know, we’ll sit there, we’ll have lunch, we’ll bring in our pizza or Dan’s health food and all this, and chitchat about, you know, ‘All right Jim, tell us about the game, what do you think about Philly, what are we gonna do, how are we gonna do this?’ You know, and that’s what we’ve always done over time.
“And let me talk about one other thing: I wanna talk about or address the thing about … I feel sorry for Jim about one of his friend’s off-the-wall comments the other day.”
FH: “Steve Largent.”
VC: “Maybe his friend thought, y’know, that he was protecting Jim because he thought something was going to happen to his career for whatever, but I think his friend forgets this: that we were a top 5 defense at that time. We had just been to the playoffs. Last year we had four Pro Bowlers on offense. And in Jim’s contract, he controls everything over his staff. And, y’know, the thing about it is, the other thing is that his friend doesn’t mention was that Jim worked with all these coaches for a week prior to becoming the head coach, and he said during the interview, ‘Those are my guys, I WANT those guys, those are the guys I want, I don’t wanna go hire anybody else.’
“And then the comment that [Largent] makes about Sherm Lewis, you know, really upsets me, because … y’know what? You don’t forget all the things that you’ve learned over twenty-some years of experience in the same offense. And those four Super Bowl rings are very pretty on his [fingers], and I don’t think his friend has a one. So the guy has a ton of experience, he’s been in battles, so it upsets me VERY MUCH that he wants to attack what this guy has done in the past. What he’s been doing now compared to what he’s done in the past. You don’t forget how to ride a bike if you hadn’t rode your bike in four years. So that was very, very frustrating, some of those comments, because it’s to me off-the-wall comments.
“And let me just talk about the decision, how I made the decision to take the responsibilities off of Jim’s plate”
FH: “Right, right. Gotta get to that.”
VC: “Yeah. So what happened was, was: game ends. So I’m in the locker room and the owners come up to me and they ask me, ‘How do we score more points?’ And we’re coming off of — against the 32nd-ranked defense — we score two field goals and have seven first downs. So I tell them, I recommended to them that Jim’s plate is too full. He’s the head coach, he’s the offensive coordinator, he’s the quarterbacks coach, let’s take something off the plate to help him. So they said ‘Okay, go talk to him.’
“So then I go into Jim’s office at the stadium there. He’s not there yet, he’s coming from his press conference. And I sit down with him and he comes in, we sit down, we close the door. And, y’know, contrary to what you read everywhere, it was just Jim and I. There’s no cameras, microphones, anything else in there, you know?”
FH: “All right.”
VC: “It’s just like you and I right here.”
FH: “Gotcha.”
VC: “There’s Jim there, there’s me here. Two.”
FH: “Just the two guys.”
VC: “Two people. And I said to him, I said, ‘Jim,’ I said, ‘We’re struggling scoring points,’ and I said, ‘It’s been over 14 weeks now that we’ve struggled on offense, and I think that you have too much on your plate, that a new voice may be good for the offense, to get us going, give us a spark, get us SOMEthing going. Because the defense is playing outstanding, y’know? And let’s get something going, because it’s been over a continuous long time.’
“So he says, ‘All right, let me think about it.’
“Because number one, he’s frustrated from the game, and then I am asking him to give up the playcalling also. It’s just….”
FH: “It’s a blow.”
VC: “So he says, ‘Let me think about it, and I’ll talk to you later.’
“So he calls me back later on and I was on the phone, so he left me a message, y’know, and then I called him right back, and he says ‘I’m in. Let’s talk about who calls plays in the morning, and let’s move on. But I’m in.’ So then we go the next morning, we decided it’d be Sherm Lewis and everything, and that’s kind of where we’re at now. So I think that kind of clears up THAT stuff.”
http://p.castfire.com/ZoOZ0/video/179839/redskins_2009-10-23-091608.flv
Tags: Jim Zorn, JimZorn, radio show, RadioShow, stenographer, transcription, Vinny Cerrato, VinnyCerrato
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