The Redskins Blog

Jason Taylor: A Fiery Class Act

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Former Redskins defensive end Jason Taylor is back with the Dolphins now, in his 15th season.  He is also the cover star of this week’s Dolphins Playbook magazine.

It’s nice to see that the man who once made headlines for his post-career career is totally focused on football, back with the team where he started.  After all, he was once a runner up on Dancing With The Stars:

There was almost a feeling that he might cut his football career short to pursue other opportunities, namely a movie career.  Taylor had appeared in commercials, as well as joining Elmo on Sesame Street.

Where he taught the world about the word “toss”: Read more »

Beck Takes Talents Back To South Beach

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The inescapable storyline of this week’s game is that John Beck is returning to face the Dolphins, a team that once thought he was their quarterback of the future.  Now with his third team, Beck is looking for his first win as a pro, in the city where it all began four years ago.

“That was my first year in the NFL and you don’t really know what to expect as a rookie in the NFL — what your situation is like, what the team is like,” Beck told the Miami media yesterday.  ”You don’t know what it’s like around the rest of the league. You just know that situation.”

And that situation wasn’t pretty.  The 2007 Dolphins were expected to be a competitive, albeit rebuilding regime under head coach Cam Cameron.  But when starting quarterback Trent Green went down with a scary concussion, it was down to Cleo Lemon and Beck to finish the season. Read more »

Jason Taylor, Robe Model

Jason Taylor’s many talents are common knowledge by now. Aside from being in the top twenty all-time in sacks, and aside from his experience on Dancing With The Stars, he’s also a Neutrogena spokesman, a magazine cover guy, a bit player in Jackass 2, and a calendar model.

In addition to those many talents — and, it should be noted, in addition to his charity work — he has also found the time to model the much-admired SportRobe.

Sure, it’s a strange number 99, not the Redskins 55 for which he’s so well known, but that’s very definitely an official Jason Taylor SportRobe. (Also, I hate the Dolphins’ aqua and orange color scheme as much today as I did 26 years ago during Super Bowl XVII.) I wonder if Taylor used these as cover-ups between shoots for that calendar.

If you’re interested, someone called “Redskins Fan Eric” models the Art Monk SportRobe after the jump.

Read more »

Monday, December 29: Jason Taylor Symmetry And Showtunes

A little over five months ago, I was one of three guys from the Redskins who went to pick Jason Taylor up at the airport. This was a scintillating experience that earned me an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with his luggage, a story that I’ve told before. That was my second day on this job, and the trip to the airport was the first really unusual thing I was able to do away from Redskins Park itself.

Seeing Taylor mobbed by media in front of the facility as he was leaving today to head to his offseason plans felt like a bookend to that earlier anecdote, which had ended with me sitting in my car with Taylor’s luggage, watching him push through the media throng to get inside.

Today, Taylor’s answers about his future were predictably vague. “I don’t know. I really couldn’t answer you,” he told the media. “I haven’t talked to Vinny or Dan or Coach Zorn about it. Again, the season ended twelve hours ago, and there’s questions that need to be answered at this point. I know everybody wants answers from not only myself but all the people on this team and what we’re going to do in the draft and all that crap. But nobody has answers yet; there’s a lot of time between now and then.”

Questions about dancing were kept to an absolutely minimum — none of them that I can overhear — but Taylor did manage to work some Andrew Lloyd Weber into the answer to a question about his injury, which seemed close enough. “I felt pretty good back when I got off the plane in July, and I feel pretty good now. It was a tough year, but I’m not the first person to go through this, so don’t cry for me, Argentina.”

After the jump, then, is the video of him getting off that plane and feeling pretty good, a video taken on a day long enough ago that the site I originally hosted the video on has disappeared completely. And here’s a lively cover of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, if you want to play it in the background while you watch.

Read more »