King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Joe Gibbs goes out on top, again. Plus: Gossage makes the Hall of Fame, Raines emphatically doesn't.

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Jan. 9, 2008 | It's sad to see Joe Gibbs hang 'em up, but there's one nice thing about the legendary Washington coach's surprising retirement announcement Tuesday: For once, we can believe someone who says he's leaving his job to spend more time with his family.

Gibbs, 67, told a news conference at Washington's practice facility that he'd spoken late into the night with team owner Dan Snyder, who'd tried to persuade him to stay. Gibbs had one year remaining on his five-year contract.

"My family situation being what it is right now, I told him I couldn't make the kind of commitment I needed to make," Gibbs said. "I felt like they needed me."

Gibbs has a 2-year-old grandson with leukemia, and, as Thomas Boswell writes in the Washington Post, he's said that the November shooting death of 24-year-old Sean Taylor has made him rethink priorities.

It's safe to say Gibbs won't be campaigning for the hot NFL coaching vacancy in 2009.

In his four years at the helm this second time around, Gibbs brought a wandering franchise back to respectability. During his first tenure, from 1981 to '92, Washington went to the playoffs eight times and the Super Bowl four times, winning three. In the next 11 years, before he returned, the team went to the playoffs once and had only one other winning season.

Under Gibbs, Washington went to the playoffs two of the last three years. Despite that, I was among many who thought the game had passed him by. He often looked and acted befuddled on the sideline, and he made mistakes that the 1980s Joe Gibbs just wouldn't have made.

Washington ended the season on an emotional four-game winning streak that earned it a playoff spot. But that win streak might have been five, encompassing all of the games following Taylor's death, if Gibbs hadn't blundered at the end of the Buffalo game in Week 13. He illegally called two straight timeouts to try to ice Bills kicker Rian Lindell, turning his difficult 51-yard game-winning field-goal attempt into a near-chip-shot 36-yarder, which Lindell made.

Still, Gibbs may have done his finest work in those last four weeks, guiding a team through an experience few teams in any sport have had to deal with, the violent death of a young star player two-thirds of the way through the season. Washington was a middling club playing behind a career backup quarterback, and it won four in a row, all of them must-win games against at-least solid opponents. Players and assistant coaches were unanimous in crediting Gibbs' leadership.

Washington's run ended with a 35-14 loss to the Seattle Seahawks Saturday in the first round of the playoffs.

Hall of Famers are always a tough act to follow. Gibbs, already enshrined in Canton, will be that twice over.

Next page: Goose Gossage headed to the Hall of Fame while the deserving Tim Raines gets ignored