LANDOVER, Md. -- He doesn't have a cutesy, self-invented nickname, like The Ol' Ball Coach, won't toss a visor or play chart in disgust, and is more than content to toil in anonymity as one of the NFL's best, if unknown, assistant coaches.

Heck, even his name, Jim Johnson, was made famous in the NFL by that guy with the petrified hair-do who used to coach the Dallas Cowboys. Fact is, the closest Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Johnson might come to having something in common with Washington Redskins resident genius Steve Spurrier is that he's old, 61, and a hell of a coach.

	Stephen Davis and the Redskins could do nothing right.

Yeah, he might be as brilliant on the defensive side as Spurrier is with all his offensive doodlings, but Johnson isn't the kind of guy who wants people to know it. He spent much of Monday night, in the Eagles' 37-7 lambasting of the Redskins, with arms folded across his chest, occasionally gesticulating to his charges, a man secure in his game plan.

"I think that, in his heart, he took this as a challenge," said Eagles free safety Brian Dawkins, referring to Johnson's preparation for his first matchup with the fertile mind of Spurrier. "He would never make it a deal where it was him against Spurrier or anything like that. But I know this: He had an answer for everything they did."

Indeed, while it was Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb who provided the visitors with huge a advantage -- throwing for 292 yards and two touchdowns and rushing for 36 yards and a score -- the game from the outset belonged to the Eagles defensive unit.

Essentially, the defense pitched a shutout, with Washington's lone score coming on a 90-yard punt return by Jacquez Green in the second quarter. The Redskins were held to 11 first downs, 179 yards, just 3.4 yards per snap and three-of-12 on third-down conversions.

Of the Redskins' 16 completions, half of them netted eight yards or less, and the long gain was 21 yards. It's safe to say Spurrier never faced coverages like this in the SEC.

Then again, by Johnson's standards, the Philadelphia schemes were fairly benign. But even rudimentary turned rude for Washington wide receivers who lacked the physical ability to shake the coverage of one of the NFL's premier secondary units. For all the hype, the Washington receivers really aren't very quick, and lack vertical speed. That was even obvious last week when the Redskins defeated the Arizona Cardinals.

A telling tale in that victory was that Redskins quarterback Shane Matthews very rarely threw to wide open receivers. Watch the video and you see that the Washington pass catchers created very little separation and that most of their big receptions came when they outjumped or outmuscled defenders for the ball. Very few people take the ball away from Eagles defensive backs.

The Philadelphia secondary had five passes defensed and two interceptions, but that just began to tell the story. Given plenty of flexibility because the front four provided sufficient pressure to preclude Johnson from digging too deep into his seemingly endless bag of exotic "sellout" blitzes, the Eagles cornerbacks and safeties were able to play aggressively. If the percentage of blitzes was down, the ratio of zone coverages was spiked, and the Eagles responded by turning the "Fun and Gun" offense into the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

"We felt really good about the matchups," said Johnson, especially vanilla in his early calls. "We always want to be aggressive, and we were, but we also wanted to play sound. And we did that, too, which was important coming off the fourth quarter of last week's game."

Stunned by its collapse in the season opener against Tennessee, the Eagles defense entered raucous FedEx Field seeking redemption. But the unit also wanted to silence some of the talk emanating from its division rivals. It did not take long to recognize both goals would be accomplished. Eliminating the deep zones, the Eagles forced Matthews to dump the ball to his backs, and all five of his first attempts and 10 of his first 14 throws were directed to running backs.

It played right into the hands of Johnson, who saw the tendency on the part of Matthews and Danny Wuerffel to check down to the backs when the deep ball possibilities were expunged. For the game, Washington wide receivers had an aggregate six catches for 77 yards. The Redskins averaged an anemic 7.4 yards per catch and their quarterbacks averaged 2.6 yards per pass play.

Concerned that Spurrier might turn to the running game early, and that too many blitzes might create a crease for a big play, Johnson held back, relying on individual matchups. A defensive accustomed to such exotic maneuvers as having both cornerbacks blitz at the same time, as Johnson did against the Rams in the 2001 season opener, played it pretty straight. "We just felt like we could handle them without doing the crazy things that (Johnson) likes to run at people," cornerback Bobby Taylor said.

The standard stuff was more than enough.

"It seemed like they had eight defensive backs out there sometimes," Redskins wide receiver Chris Doering said. "They were pretty suffocating."

Nearly as suffocating as the pepper spray that permeated along the Eagles sideline midway through the fourth quarter. Police breaking up a fight in the stands were forced to use the pepper spray to quell the incident and, when it wafted to the Philadelphia sideline, coach Andy Reid led his team out to the middle of the field.

Two of the Eagles players, linebacker Ike Reese and defensive end Michael Sinclair, had to be treated for inhaling the pepper spray. Eagles personnel was aided by Washington trainer Dean Kleinschmidt, who assessed the situation quickly and told players to apply cold towels over their faces. With the memory of the Sept. 11 tragedy still fresh in players' minds, no one knew what was happening at first.

"Now that was a little bit different (occurrence) in a game," Reid said, laughing. "Ike Reese caught a whiff of the stuff, started barfing, and then we all kind of scrambled out onto the field."

Play resumed after a delay of about five minutes but the game had long been decided by that point. Fact is, it might have been decided during the week of preparation, with Johnson reviewing at least five videotapes of the Spurrier offense as he ran it at the University of Florida. He also coached against the Redskins sideline boss in the USFL, when Johnson was the coordinator for the Jacksonville franchise and Spurrier head coach at Tampa Bay, so he had some feel for the basic offensive blueprint.

"They had a good feel for what we do," Spurrier acknowledged, "but we didn't do what we do very well tonight. They played great defense and we helped them by playing (poorly) on offense."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior writer for ESPN.com.