Sonny Jurgensen Jousts With Jim Zorn

Sonny Jurgensen

Plenty of fans and analysts have questioned the 3rd-and-5 play call midway through the third quarter, when Jim Zorn dialed up a halfback option to Clinton Portis, whose pass fell incomplete in the end zone. The Redskins then settled for their third field goal. Legendary Redskins quarterback and radio analyst Sonny Jurgensen was among those who questioned the call, but he did so while talking with Zorn during the postgame show. (Audio courtesy of ESPN 980/Redskins Radio Network. Watch the video here.)

“Third down, I’m the quarterback, and you call the halfback throwing the ball for me, I’m calling timeout or calling an audible,” Jurgensen said. “I’m not letting the halfback throw it. That’s what you pay me for.”

“Well then, I would have to take you out of the game,” Zorn countered. “As soon as you called timeout, I’d say what’s wrong with my play, because….”

“It didn’t work!” Jurgensen interrupted.

There was a long pause.

“No, but I called it to work. Alright?” Zorn said. “We called it to work. It didn’t work. There were a lot of plays out there that didn’t work. And I’d take you out of the game. Sorry, Sonny.”

Zorn was also asked about that play during his Monday press conference.

“It was a play we had in our gameplan, it wasn’t a grab bag,” Zorn said. “And we thought if we showed run…because we had been running edge runs with Clinton on the goal line. And I thought, ‘All right, here it is.’ And Clinton has thrown touchdown passes before. Well what happened was, when we came off the line of scrimmage, we came off backing up, and when the [Rams] saw that, they just played it right down the line. The safety felt that this was gonna be a pass….And so we had to kick a field goal.”

Zorn was then asked if he was still happy with his play-calling in the red zone; “Yeah, I am,” he said. “I mean, if I could see it now, if I could see every play that was gonna fail before it failed, I’m with you. I wouldn’t call it. But I felt very confident, because we work on it. We have to execute it, and I use that word sometimes, but we work on it. It’s not a grab bag situation. Now I’m gonna go back and study it more, and I’m gonna be hard on myself as well, which is what I do. And we’ll see what happened.”

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