When linebacker Ejiro Ederaine was released by the Washington Redskins in their first round of cuts, it seemed natural for Ederaine to throw away the materials and move on with his life.
Little did Ederaine know, one fan would end up finding defensive workbooks with Ederaine’s name on it. The former Redskin also probably didn’t know that said fan would call into a Washington D.C. radio show and tell everyone on-air that he had access to Washington’s defensive playbook.
The fan, who is only known as Josh from Ashburn, called into “The Sports Junkies” on 106.7 the Fan in D.C. on Thursday and gave the audience the full details of his acquisition of the playbook.
Josh was in Ashburn cleaning out his truck near a dumpster. He looks over, notices a clear trash bag with “a burgundy-and-gold-colored something in it.” He pulls the trash bag out, finds a backpack, opens the backpack and discovers the books pictured above. Along with the books, he found other Redskins gear, including a pair of team shorts.
He says he contacted the team on Wednesday and revealed what he’d found, and the team nonchalantly stated security would get in touch with him later. However, Josh says the woman he spoke with from the team confirmed the location where he found the books was indeed near the hotel the Redskins rookies stay.
As of about 8:30 a.m. Thursday, the Redskins security had not gotten in touch with Josh. As for what the books supposedly contain, here’s Josh:
“I can tell you guys, it actually has two different — so it has what you do in a hot route, what his assignment would have been, what the guy next to him’s assignment would have been, it has breakdowns and handwritten things of the new calls, like the defense changed the call or whatever. He scratched it out and put the new verbiage for it. I mean it’s got everything.”
With the team having such little concern over this issue, it’s likely that what Josh found wasn’t exactly what he thinks it is. This is the NFL, where just about every coach is trying to be more paranoid than the other.
One Washington beat reporter said that the team’s playbooks are on iPads, and thus, these aren’t the official playbooks of the Redskins defense.
Even if they are official, it’s unlikely that Josh would even know what’s going on. The vernacular teams use is very code-like, and it changes from team-to-team. It’s also likely that the team has changed a lot of its language since these workbooks were released. But, hey, I guess we should all do a double-take next time we clean out our cars and make sure there aren’t any NFL playbooks in there.