The Redskin Report

Before the season began, if you had held a gun to my head and asked me to project how well the Redskins would do this year, I would have guessed that the conventional wisdom (7.5 wins, roughly) was about right.  I thought there was a reasonable chance that we could go as well as 11-5 under exceptional circumstances, or as poor as 5-11, but 8-8 was my best guess. 

And then we played the Giants to start the season.  After the game, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, with calls for the head of Vinnie Cerrato, Jason Campbell, Dan Snyder, Devin Thomas, Malcolm Kelly, and just about every other player on the team.  During all the gnashing, I was telling people “Forget the first half, look at the SECOND half…  if you ignore the fact that we had no two minute drill, we shut down the G-Men, were able to move the ball more reasonably, and started looking like a better team.”  This week, after back to back wins against the Saints and Cards (a combined 3-1 outside of the two Redskins games), I want to say the opposite (somewhat) by saying that we still have 13 games to play.  This week, we’ll be facing a bad situation in having to go visit a Dallas Cowboys team that will either be hopping mad from a loss to the Packers, or still playing for an undefeated season, and trying to keep pace with the Giants.  Not good.  The schedule makers haven’t done us any favors in these first five weeks, but things get better later, so let’s speculate.

After week 5, we are guaranteed to be no worse than 2-3, 0-3 in the NFC East.  We will have exactly four games, in that case, were we can reasonably expect to be an underdog, the three NFC East games and the Pittsburgh game.  All four of those will be HOME games.  It would be reasonable to suppose that we would go 2-2 in those four games (home field does count for something).  If you include the fact that over the course of the season, we should be a better team than at the beginning of the season, due to learning the offense, rookie development, and the general fact that the Redskins historically have played better later in the season the last few years.  If you allow the Redskins to stumble once out of the “lower” games, you end up with a 10-6 record.  The problem is 10-6 may get you into the playoffs from any division except the NFC BEast, with potentially four of the top 5 teams in the NFC being in that division.  However, I’ll close this with an old joke that hopefully makes the point about the Redskins. 

Two men were hiking through the woods when they stepped into a clearing.  Accross the clearing was the biggest, meanest looking grizzly bear they had ever seen.  They looked at the bear, and the bear looked at them.  After a moment, the bear started moving towards the two men.  One man bent down, took off his hiking boots, and put on a pair of sneakers.  The other man, in disbelief, looked up as the bear began to run towards the men, and said “You can’t possibly think that you’re going to outrun that bear!”

The other man finished tying the laces and said “You’re right, I can’t outrun the bear, but I only need to outrun you.”

The Redskins only need to finish better than one of the NFC East teams to almost certainly be a playoff team… and in the playoffs, this team might be able to do well.  But we’ve got to win first.  Next up, the Cowboys…. HTTR!