Dear Al Saunders:

Please run the ball this year.

Seriously, Al. In this, the Fourth Season of the Second Coming of Gibbs, you’ve got to run the ball! I realize that you got handed a crazy paycheck last year to be the steward of the offense, and on some level, I imagine that you had to go out there and prove you deserved it. After all, you didn’t want to be thought of the same way we Washingtonians think of Paul Wolfowitz’s girlfriend! So you flipped to the back of your Tolstoyian playbook, and set out to prove you had the innovations of a genius. The schemes, the gimmicks, the weird pass packages. Handing the ball off forty times a game? That for six-figure earners, right?

Well, sometimes it pays to nurse the fundamentals of the game than to break new ground. And if you want a tidy lesson on this, let me direct your attention to the three games you played between December 4 and December 18 of last year: