In the Washington Post, Jim Fassel apparently blamed the bloggers for his downfall.

I believe Jim Fassel to be a great guy, and I think he probably got treated poorly over the past month, and I would have been fine with him as head coach, but just today the real culprits behind his non-hiring emerged. Their names? Mister Irrelevant, Unsilent Majority, Hogs Haven, and the Curly R. From Fassel’s interview with the John Thompson Show this afternoon:

When I got the New York Giants job I remember telling my family that, ‘You know, you cannot hold the lead in these jobs in major markets.’ Because you’ve got bloggers, and they’re saying, ‘No, this isn’t the right guy, and that ain’t the right guy,’ and you can’t hold the lead, because you are going to take the hit. I mean, when you’re the lead dog, you’re going to take the hit. And I think the longer it went, the longer it went, the longer it went….

Yeah, we know, the longer it went, the more people named “Nate in the PDX” had a chance to gripe about your potential hiring, thus inevitably sabotaging you as a candidate. Fassel spoke highly of Dan Snyder throughout this interview, as he has in other interviews, but bear in mind that he’s basically accusing Mr. Snyder and his cousin, Vinny, of taking their cues from a pair of blogging brothers and a guy who spends all his time looking at Undrcrwn shirts on the Internet and coming up with jokes about private parts, plus RI commenters named PDiddy and dcsween and 4th Floor. I mean, at the very least have the courtesy to blame anonymous message board posters in addition to semi-anonymous bloggers.

More at the Washington Post.

Here’s Gary Myers’s take.

There obviously are no guarantees. He has come up empty in the last five hiring cycles. Coaches with far less impressive resumes in their first jobs have received second chances. Tom Coughlin and Bill Belichick, who met in the Super Bowl 10 days ago, were each fired from their first job without making it to the Super Bowl.

Ten of the 32 current head coaches are on at least their second job, and of those, only Mike Holmgren made it to the Super Bowl in his first job.

Fassel deserves another chance, although it’s clear that if GMs around the league believed he was the answer, somebody would have hired him by now. He interviewed twice with the Redskins in Washington and once at the Super Bowl in Phoenix and it appeared that the only reason Snyder had not made it official was because he wanted to talk to Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo after the Super Bowl.

And when Spagnuolo removed himself from consideration Thursday after 28 hours of interviews, the job surely belonged to Fassel. Then he was blindsided Saturday when Snyder promoted offensive coordinator Jim Zorn, whom he had just hired Jan.26 off Holmgren’s staff in Seattle.

 

More at the Daily News

I don’t understand why Fassel doesn’t have another head coaching job in the NFL. But I do understand a clown with a clown like Dan Snyder calling the shots down in DC, why Jim Zorn and not Fassel is now the head coach.

Paul Schwartz of the Post spoke with Fassel about this.

Maybe Jim Zorn evolves into a wonderful head coach, and in a year or two Redskin owner Dan Snyder is waxing poetic about his choice.

But there is little doubt the Redskins, with Jim Fassel calling the shots, would have been a far more dangerous opponent for the Giants, just as there is no doubt Snyder screwed up the process and did not hire the right man for the job.

“I know Dan Snyder likes me as a coach,” Fassel said yesterday in a phone conversation with The Post. “I’m greatly disappointed, because I thought it was the right fit and I thought I could work well with Dan.”

For the second time, Snyder left Fassel at the coaching altar. Back in 2004, Fassel, immediately after he was fired by the Giants after seven interesting and often successful seasons, nearly got right back on the coaching carousel.

Read all about it in the Post.