Five Signature Moments from Washington Football History
And no, not all of them involve Hogs, Smurfs, Riggo or you-know-who getting his you-know-what broken on Monday Night Football.
Washington pro football history, summarized:
1937: Franchise arrives from Boston. Instantly wins NFL Championship.
1938-45: General awesomeness.
1946-68: Incessant misery at the hands of a dirtbag owner.
1969-81: Pretty good but really weird.
1982-91:
1992-2023: Incessant misery at the hands (eventually) of a dirtbag owner.
This edition of Signature Moments could have consisted of five events from the 1980s and few would complain. I chose instead to mix things up a bit to cover more of the breadth of this team’s very unusual history.
5. Billy Kilmer and Charley Taylor Burn the Cowboys
Date: December 31st, 1972.
You may want to crank the sound for the sweet, sweet NFL Films music in this segment:
There'd been World War II and Korea, and we couldn't get out of Vietnam. There'd been Give 'em hell Harry and I like Ike, Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon's the one. There'd been Sinatra before Elvis, and Bogart before Marilyn. It had been a while, from 1945 to this last day of 1972, since the Washington Redskins had won any kind of football championship. Sammy Baugh was an old man on a ranch in Texas the morning of Dec. 31, 1972, when Billy Kilmer bought a newspaper.
It was, Kilmer remembers, 6 in the morning. "I was so keyed up I couldn't get much sleep the night before," he said. "So I got a paper. Tom Landry made a statement I'll never forget. He said the Cowboys would win because Roger Staubach was a better athlete than me. That ticked me off. It fueled in me, and it kept building up until game time."
In '72, the Redskins beat Dallas, 26-3. Kilmer completed 14 of 18 passes for 194 yards and two touchdowns. His best receiver, Charley Taylor, caught seven of them for 146 yards and both touchdowns. They worked on [Charlie] Waters, the Dallas cornerback, and burned his backup when Waters broke an arm on a punt return.
It was 10-3 in the third quarter when Waters was injured. Because all-pro Mel Renfro was the other corner, everyone attacked Waters. What Kilmer couldn't figure out, he says, is why Dallas didn't change defenses to give Waters help against Taylor.
With Waters out, third-year corner Mark Washington came in.
"First play, I told Charley, 'Just fly by him,' " Kilmer said. "I launched it. I thought I overthrew Charley, but he made a great catch. I threw it as far as I could, 55 yards in the air." – Dave Kindred, Washington Post, January 20th, 1983
George Allen’s Over the Hill Gang makes little sense from a modern football perspective. Allen allowed the Kilmer-Sonny Jurgensen quarterback competition to extend for years, lubricated by generous quantities of booze. Allen traded every draft pick he ever possessed, some of them twice, eagerly loading his roster with aging veterans. Allen was an irascible self-promoter who hobnobbed with presidents but preferred a mucky style of football that enjoyed a 1970s resurgence. His roster-building methods were behind the times and unsustainable, yet his well-seasoned teams were perfect for the era just after the merger, when the bottom half of the NFL was populated by franchises run on a shoestring by clueless entrepreneurs.
And, as Kindred noted, the Over the Hill Gang was as good as it got in Washington, in any sport, for about half a century. Especially when they beat the Cowboys at their haughtiest.
4. Anvil Andy and Slingin’ Sammy Hammer the Bears
Date: December 13th, 1942.
It is difficult to point to any sport except professional football for the greatest upset of 1942. That came in the championship play-off at Griffith Stadium in the capital last Sunday, when the Washington Redskins subdued the Chicago Bears, 14-6. Triumphant in eighteen straight National Football League games, to say nothing of exhibitions, the Bears were rated the best team in the country. However, the Redskins beat them soundly and in so doing prevented the Chicagoans from establishing a new league mark of nineteen consecutive triumphs.
The revenge motive was strongly on Washington's side. Deeply imbedded in the Redskins' minds was the 73-0 thrashing inflicted upon them by the Bears on the same gridiron two years ago. With Slingin' Sammy Baugh, Anvil Andy Farkas, Wilbur Moore and Company clicking, the Redskins made every one forget the 1940 disaster. – Louis Effrat, New York Times, December 20th, 1942.