There are three sports I enjoy watching even when I don't necessarily care who wins or loses: NBA basketball, European soccer, and NFL football. So for me, this summer was pretty nightmarish. Watching European soccer from the US is a chore (and the games are only on once a week), and, until this morning, both the NFL and the NBA were locked out. Which would have made this Fall miserable. Luckily, as of this morning, the NFL is no longer locked out. Which means it's time to start thinking about my favorite team, the Redskins.
Now, being a Redskins fan is hard. Since I've been old enough to really follow the Skins (in elementary school), the team's best performances have been a pair of 10-6 seasons. There have been three playoff appearances and two playoff wins in the last 15 years (really longer, but I can't really claim to have been a diehard Skins fan as a 4 year old). In other words, unless you're a Browns, Bengals, or Lions fan, my team's sucked more than yours, and sucked longer.
The only real upside (or really, you can call it a downside. Actually, it's definitely just a downside) to being a Skins fan is the offseason. As bad as the Skins are at playing football, the front office is even better at fantasy football. Every year, the NFL has a few big-name free agents on the market. And every year, the Skins sign all of them. And the most impressive part is that, as good as they are before joining the Skins, they get worse when they get here. It's like there's a bad case of Ebola at Redskins Park that causes all players to decline once they get to Washington. Just since Dan Snyder took over the team in 1999, we've brought in Bruce Smith (who proceeded to forget how to sack the quarterback), Mark Carrier (who was good at getting fined, but not much else), Jeff George (who sucked before we got him and, shockingly, still sucked after we got him; also, we chased away the only good quarterback we had in my years as a fan, Brad Johnson, in favor of George), Deion Sanders (who was 184 years old at the time), Albert Haynesworth (who ate everything in sight), and Donovan McNabb (who magically forgot how to play football somewhere on the trip down from Philly. And that's just off the top of my head. In there, we also had a stretch where Snyder paid ex-University of Florida coach Steve Spurrier $5 million a year to take over. Plenty of us were scratching our heads when Spurrier brought a bunch of his old Florida players to Washington and declared that he was going to recreate his UF success. Some people actually even believed him when we tore up the preseason. Then the regular season started, and Spurrier's legendary Florida brigade of Danny Wuerffel (Wawful to Skins fans), Sugar Shane Matthews, Jacquez Green and Reidel Anthony, who had sucked before they got to Washington, sucked again. Spurrier's offense tanked, his press conferences were legendary for him mumbling something about pitching and catching and not knowing the names of half of his team, he won 12 games in 2 seasons, and then got himself sacked.
This offseason, the buzz is that we're going to be doing the same thing. Rumor has it, the Skins will be going after ex-Packer Cullen Jenkins, ex-Raider Nnamdi Asomugha, ex-Jet and Steeler Santonio Holmes, and then possibly ex-Viking Sydney Rice and ex-Jet and Brown Braylon Edwards. That haul would be roughly par for the course-- a bunch of pieces who don't fit, and nothing addressing the team's real concerns.
So here's how I see the season going forward. On offense, we stunk last season, and we'll probably stink again. Shanahan is actually a good coach, and we've got some good pieces. Ryan Torrain fits what Shanahan wants to do with the running game, Chris Cooley is a very good tight end, Santana Moss is still productive in his thirties, and Anthony Armstrong is actually pretty good (as a third receiver). But we're still going to stink on offense for two reasons. First, as anyone who's ever played football knows, if your line stinks, your offense will too. And our O-line stinks. Trent Williams is a nice piece for the future, and if we bring back Jammal Brown, he can be serviceable at right tackle. But at this point, Kory Lichtensteiger, Casey Rabach, and Will Montgomery stink, and Artis Hicks is a backup. We've got 6 serviceable linemen and, at best, one who's above average. That means running the ball wouldn't be easy even if we had a passing game. But that brings me to the other problem. It's not exactly a secret that by far the single most important position in football is quarterback. And it's also not exactly a secret that we've got the worst quarterbacks in the league. Donovan McNabb is out the door (and wasn't good last season), but he would be Joe Montana and Dan Marino put together compared to the dynamic duo of Rex Grossman and John Beck that we've got going into the season. Now, Sexy Rexy is a guy who you can win games with if you have the league's best defense and you let him throw 5 times a game. We don't have the league's best defense. Nor do we have Randy Moss in his prime at wideout, so odds are Sexy Rexy's deep balls are going to get picked on the regular this fall. And as bad as he is, he's a hall of famer compared to John Beck. Beck is legendary for sucking. He turns 30 in a few weeks and has been below major NFL stars like Cleo Lemon and Josh McCown. The Ravens traded him to us for Doug Dutch, a cornerback who couldn't get on the field. Word to the wise: if a QB is traded for a guy who can't get on the field as a dime corner, he REALLY sucks. So, now that we've established that the offense will suck, let's go to the defense.
The most talented player on the defense by far is Albert Haynesworth. Unfortunately, Haynesworth would rather kiss his sister than play for the Skins. But, given that all he's done since getting to DC is hang out at McDonald's, pound cheeseburgers, and not play football, I'm writing him off and assuming he won't be in DC. That means that our starting three-man front is going to be some combination of Ma'ake Kemoeatu (who's coming off a knee injury) and Anthony Bryant (who's coming off I-can't-play-football-itis) at the nose and some combination of Adam Carriker, Phillip Daniels, Vonnie Holliday and Jarvis Jenkins at the ends. A decade ago, Daniels and Holliday were real NFL players. Now they're real fossils. Carriker is a draft bust who I guess was serviceable last year. And Jenkins is a rookie. That makes our line, collectively, a disaster. Luckily, since the NFL is a passing league, teams won't realize that this line wouldn't be able to stop the run if Walter Payton was carrying the ball. And I don't means 1985 Walter Payton, I mean Walter Payton's corpse. At linebacker, we're slightly better. Brian Orakpo's been a good pro on the outside, and Ryan Kerrigan was a pretty safe pick at the other outside spot. If either of them gets hurt, our top backup is Lorenzo Alexander, but we're not awful there. Inside, on the other hand, we may have issues. London Fletcher is indestructible. Unfortunately, he was also in my grandpa's World War II platoon. He's magically avoided getting really, really bad to this point, but we've been playing with fire long enough that it may be coming. And what we've got next to him isn't great either. Rocky McIntosh is OK, but he's really not a natural fit at inside backer, so he'll probably leave as a free agent. That leaves... probably Perry Riley partnering Fletcher. Needless to say, I'm not impressed. In the secondary, we've got some pieces. OJ Atogwe and LaRon Landry are actually a very good safety tandem (Landry, after being a bust for his first few seasons, was actually a beast before he got hurt last year), but DeAngelo Hall isn't a real #1 corner (he's not bad, and he picks off a lot of passes, but that's mostly because opposing QBs aren't scared to pick on him), Kevin Barnes is a nickel corner at best, and Phillip Buchanon is a free agent and also best as a nickel corner (or a dime corner in a good secondary). Atogwe may keep us from giving up long touchdown passes, but we'll be vulnerable underneath. And that's if opposing teams don't realize running all over us shouldn't be hard either. Which is probably what they'll do if 1) we sign Nnamdi Asomugha and 2) he magically decides not to suck after getting here.
My biggest source of hope for this coming season is... the season after. See, with the magical tandem of Sexy Rexy/John Beck at QB, we pretty much have no choice but to be really terrible. And the next NFL draft will likely feature Andrew Luck. Luck is the quarterback at Stanford who pretty much everyone knows would have been the first overall pick over Cam Newton had he come out this year, and who is, for my money, the best QB prospect to come out since Peyton Manning. If we get Luck, we may actually make the playoffs more than twice in the next 10 years. So, for half of the league, the quest to the Super Bowl begins in September. For us, Skins fans, the quest to the Luck Bowl begins that same weekend. So, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I'm going to park myself at the Pourhouse on 109th and Amsterdam and hope the Skins get pounded by the Giants on our way to a 2-14 season (with two wins over Dallas, of course) and the privilege of drafting Andrew Luck.
LET'S GO!!!
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