After yesterday's press conference, had a chance to talk with Joe Gibbs a little about his involvement with trying to get Dale Earnhardt Jr. to join Joe Gibbs Racing.
Earnhardt is leaving Dale Earnhardt Inc., at the end of this NASCAR season and was courted by several teams before signing with the Hendrick Motorsports powerhouse.
Gibbs said on Monday he was involved in the recruitment process.
"It was an unusual situation because he's a premier guy," Coach Joe said. "That doesn't happen very often. He was a true free agent.
"I thought Rick [Hendrick] and those guys had the inside track because of the all years Rick spent around the family when [Dale Jr.] was growing up."
Joe Gibbs Racing currently has three cars - No. 20 (Tony Stewart), No. 11 (Denny Hamlin) and No. 18 (J.J. Yeley). Gibbs said expanding to a four-car team - the maximum allowed by NASCAR - was considered. That could still happen if JGR lands Kyle Busch, who was bounced from Hendrick when Earnhardt came aboard.
Gibbs said his team's comments that they weren't interested in Earnhardt because he would bring Budweiser as a sponsor "were taken out of context from me because I'm not against anything. For us, it didn't really fit. We've never had an alcohol and tobacco sponsor and that wasn't going to fit with us."
Reading between the lines, JGR was interested in Earnhardt but not in Budweiser.
Some other morning notes before today's 4 p.m. practice:
* Safety LaRon Landry officially signed his contract and will practice today.
* It will be interesting to see how many guys the Redskins work at left tackle today with Chris Samuels out for a month and if they make a roster move to add an offensive lineman.
* And those of you interested about how we do our jobs, this little story. When Samuels went down yesterday, the view of the media was blocked by a wall of offensive players so nobody really saw how it happened. I wanted to find out: 1. Who was engaged with Samuels? 2. Who got blocked into Samuels? 3. And was it the outside, inside or directly behind his knee? After talking to eight players and two assistant coaches, I was able to glean one additional sentence (later confirmed by Samuels), that he was blocking Demetric Evans, it was a pass play and Joe Salave'a fell into Samuels.
