There is No Magic Here Today, Just..........

[bulldog]

solid football across the board. The Redskins played a physical game and in the end got the turnovers to turn over the Panthers at home. Was this a pretty game? No, far from it. From my vantage point in the stands the 3 points by the half had caused a cascade of boos and calls for Al Saunders to go back to the Chiefs.

But the defense played the game to a draw and prevented Carolina, outside of one drive in the second half, from getting into any real rhythm on offense or getting Steve Smith untracked.

Sean Taylor and Carlos Rogers are important pieces to the future of this football team and calls for trading them or cutting them at the end of the season were preposterous. At 23 and 24 years of age, neither player has been in the NFL long enough to be looked to for veteran leadership and with the injury to Springs and the failure of Archuleta to fit in to the scheme that was being used, both younger players found themselves in uncharted territory, trying to uphold the backfield with their own limited experience.

With Springs back and first Troy Vincent and now Vernon Fox starting at the other spots a measure of stability has been regained. This is a corner this defense had to turn and one that Gibbs had to ensure was turned, because you don't invest top 10 draft choices in two players and then allow their play and confidence to slide as far as it had.

On offense this club is still too conservative. Sometimes the O still looks as if it is being choreographed for Mark Brunell's arm, depending upon the screens to Betts, dinks to Cooley for 2-3 yards and the wide receivers screens and reverses.

Against a good defense like Carolina's it would not have made sense to throw the ball too much and the focus on the run was a welcome relief from past weeks.

But, again, on 3rd and 8 I still want to see the coordinator show confidence in the quarterback to diagram a play to get 10-12 yards, rather than continue to depend on a screen or draw to the back.

A win, though, is a win. And a welcome sight, given the state of fans I ran into today who looked at teams like New Orleans at 7-4 and Dallas at 7-4 and wondered what went wrong here in 2006.

In the end Gibbs should have gone to Campbell earlier in the season, not because he was going to win games by himself, but because it would remove the self-imposed limitations we had placed on our ability to call 50% of the plays in any standard NFL playbook.

If the threat of running a slant, post or deep out is not even there for consideration, how successful is any offense going to be?

The shame here is that Campbell doesn't get to play the remainder of the season with a healthy Portis and Moss. Moss played today but has not been close to 100% for a couple of weeks.

Sure makes you wonder what this team could have done to turn the tide in two winnable games against the Vikings and Titans.

Those are the losses right now that separate a poor Redskins season from one where the team is still alive at 6-5 and battling for a wildcard.