The Day After

[Glenn X]

I was so certain that the Redskins would win last night. Not by a lot, mind you. A touchdown. A field goal. Something like that. But ending up on the wrong end of a 30-point shellacking? No friggin’ way did I see that coming.

Unlike some of the more astute students of the game to be found on this board, I’m not an Xs & Os expert and no one would mistake me for a dilettante NFL scout or GM. However, it was painfully obvious to me that we were losing the war in the trenches last night on both sides of the ball, which I figured would spell doom for us unless somehow rectified during the game. Eagles defenders were pushing around our interior offensive linemen as if they were newly-minted shopping carts at a grocery store, while our defensive front was unable to generate virtually any penetration into the Eagle backfield.

At one point, I actually started counting out loud to myself after the snap of the ball to see how long Matthews had to throw before Eagle defenders made their way into his “personal space.” “One thousand one. One thousand two.” Typically, by the time I got to “One thousand three,” if the ball wasn’t already thrown, Shane was in some serious trouble. Conversely, McNabb had much more time to work with. There were a couple of times during the game where I was up to “One thousand seven,” the ball was still in McNabb’s hands, and yet any sort of defensive pressure on him was nowhere to be found.

“If things continue like this, the Eagles won’t have to score much more than a field goal to win this damn game,” I said to myself about halfway through the second quarter. Of course, in the end, the margin of victory for Philly turned out to be a tad greater than that.

As I dejectedly drifted off to sleep last night, I realized something. In this new-fangled age of parity in the NFL, the line between great success and abject failure has become razor thin. Not a towering realization on my part, you say? Indeed. However, what else is clear to me is that, unlike in yesterday’s NFL, winning and winning big is not so much about building a team that’s significantly better than your opponents anymore. Rather, winning and winning big today depends a great deal upon somehow keeping a mediocre-to-good roster of players together while your better opponents hemorrhage a gifted athlete or two to free agency, thus rendering your formerly better opponents slightly less good than you. And that’s when you have your window of opportunity. That’s when you can make your move.

So while the Redskins front office should certainly continue to look to improve this team next offseason and the offseason after that, a good deal of how our future will play out will depend upon what the front offices of our opponents do or don’t do. Any potential success that the Redskins enjoy in the near future will be partially out of the team’s hands, determined by how hamstrung by the salary cap or how hesitant to make potentially positive changes that our opponents are.

We can whine all we want about how soft the interior of our offensive line and how lacking our defensive line is, but it won’t change the fact that this is the hand we’ve been dealt this year. And while that hand may not be enough to land us in a playoff jackpot this season, there’s no telling just how good that hand could look, coupled with some key free agent defection(s) from, say, the Eagles and other NFC contenders, a year or two from now. As the last three years have proven in the NFL, winning the Super Bowl is no longer about being a great team from top to bottom; it’s about being less suspect than pretty much everyone else.

To be clear, I’m not being homeristic here, predicting with absolute certainty that this year or the next we’ll surely turn out to be the nouveau Rams or Ravens or Patriots, making a title run just one year removed from being just another crappy non-playoff team. However, what I am suggesting is that year-to-year -- even week-to-week -- in this league, the difference between being the thrasher or the thrashee in a 30-point laugher is not so demonstrably significant now.

In other words, chin up, fellow Redskin fans. Better days are ahead, either next week or next year or the year after that. And fans of the other 31 teams in the league can reasonably expect to look forward in much the same way.

Well, except for those of the Cardinals and Bengals, anyway.

[Die Hard]

Right after the game... Sonny said the magical words that eased my pain. "The only good thing that came out of the game is it only counts for one loss".

But I think teams like the Steelers, Pats and Eagles have shown other teams how to play the Skins when Weurffel is in. Blitz, blitz and blitz some more. Danny will force his throws or take the sack. And with Matthews history of injuries... it's a bit discouraging.

As far as the formula for success... I truly believe it's stability. Organizations which maintain their coaching staff year in and year out have a very good foundation. It gives organizations time to implement and teach the system for a few years. Then if you keep your nucleus... you only have to change a few parts here and there.

However, when teams overhaul coaching staffs, it's going to take time for EVERY player to learn the intracies of the playbooks and the coaches to evaluate the entire roster.

Which ultimately comes down to hiring the right coach in the 1st place. I think the Skins have done that. Finally.

[Burgold]

The good thing that came out of this game was accountability, I guess. LaVar saying, that he's going to refocus on his tackling and that he found his play unacceptable. Coaches saying they need to reassess how they approach the game (Spurrier saying he should run Davis more and yell a bit-get more involved in the D). I still think we are building something, this last game just makes me think we're in an earlier stage of construction than I thought. Stability will help as will giving the coaching staff a year to see what NFL competition is all about. Next season, I suspecta Spurrier will have ranked his player and say, based on the NFL and the NFL elite, this is what we need. This year, he couldn't do that except on an on film basis. It is also good to take your bruises. Very few rookies, qbs or coaches come out blowing apart the NFL. I look forward to seeing the intensity we play with next week. That will be most interesting to me

[UK Skins]

I thought that was an excellent post. I'm not an Xs and Os man either and rather stupidly setting my VCR for the wrong channel I didn't even get to see the game (!!) but everything I have read bears out your assessments.

Bear in mind also that Pittsburgh and the Rams have lost both games so far. Maybe parity has finally arrived.

[Zen-like Todd]

I thought that was an excellent post. I'm not an Xs and Os man either and rather stupidly setting my VCR for the wrong channel I didn't even get to see the game (!!) but everything I have read bears out your assessments.

Apparently a higher power intervened on your behalf.