The first two weeks, you could kind of tell this team wasn’t really showing what it might or might not be. That seems to be normal for the NFL of the year 2010. They are angling to add two more regular season games, supposedly to make them count and not just more meaningless exhibition games, but it seems to me the first couple weeks of the year are throwaways nowadays with the NFL.Anyways, going into this game, I did not feel very good, to be honest. It seemed like the exact type of game the Redskins of the Dan Snyder era would lose. I mean, if the Redskins were a legitimate bad ass football team, this is the type of game you roll in, knock a motherfucker out, lay your dick across his forehead, take a picture of it, and have it on the world wide webkins by midnight. Of course, the Redskins are not a bad ass team. If they were gonna win it, they were gonna bumble and stumble their way into a second W in September.
They came out and did not look good at all. At all. It was a painful game to watch, first off because they played so terribly, but secondly because you knew how it was gonna end from the very beginning when they spotted the Rams a 14-point lead. And then they fulfilled that fear that had been holding my positive/negative feelings stable after they sort of backed their way into beating Dallas, and then showed some firepower on offense but also lack of will power on defense against Houston last weekend. The defense got punked at home last week, and were again punked this week. It was an ugly and bestial punking, where basically the Rams decided that even a third string halfback was gonna plow his way through the Redskins defensive front.
And when you have shown to be a pliant defense, plus after the brief flurry of offensive decentness, you got exposed at the end of the Rams game as susceptible to pressure through a hodgepodge offensive line, which in turns causes Donovan McNabb to be Donovan McNabb, well, with the next three weeks involving a trip to Philly then back to Jack Kent Cooke Stadium to host the Packers and the Colts, October is not looking too promising a time to be a Redskins fan.
Nonetheless, here are the positives/negatives metasciences scale for this game. I dropped it from 5-up/2-down two notches to 3-up/4-down, and honestly, it was kinda hard to really enthusiastically write positive things about three separate people from tonight’s game. But I did it…
THIRD DEGREE POSITIVE: LB Lorenzo Alexander. Caused the fumble on the kickoff return that helped the Skins think they were back in this in the first half, and just generally is a special teams monster plus can actually cover on defense at the outside LB positions. He does everything that is asked of him, and frankly, with some of the defensive primadonnas on this team, it’s something they could use a whole lot fucking more of.
SECOND DEGREE POSITIVE: DE Phillip Daniels. Homie had kinda been buried amidst all the Haynesworth drama, but he had a couple of monster plays in the Rams game. Honestly, I don’t even know some of these defensive dudes, like the Carriker guy and Phillip Buchanon. Not that I don’t know them as NFL players, but they are new to this team and do not have a Redskins identity. You cannot be distrustful of this enough as a Redskins fan during the Dan Snyder era. It’s good to see Daniels, a dude who’s been here for a long ass minute and actually almost gave up the game but came back for one more year, getting some shine. And those arms! Good lord, he looks like a prison nightmare.
FIRST DEGREE POSITIVE: RB Ryan Torain. Nice to see somebody who wasn’t prominent five years ago in the backfield. I do not look down upon Clinton Portis at all, and he actually looked good today. But Torain looked good too, and he’s got far less tread on his tires, and that’s the fucking point of having more than one RB in the modern NFL year of 2010. I’m not exactly sure why the Redskins have not noticed that trend.
STAY MEDIUM DEGREE: LB Brian Orakpo. Dude is a monster, and gets held galore during your average game. But he’s got to take the jump to that otha level of the game, as Bushwick Bill would say, and be able to bust through a hold and paralyze a skill position player in a different colored jersey. He’ll get there, but damn, it can’t happen fast enough, as 8-year-old Sam Bradford was left to just stand around sometimes until he could make himself look like a ten-year pro. I want somebody to start fucking sacking somebody.
FIRST DEGREE NEGATIVE: CB Carlos Rogers. You know what? I am sick of some fucking Carlos Rogers. The butterfingers, the always tending to be around the play when someone just made a 15-yard gain on 3rd and 13, and just generally not being anything near the top 10 draft pick he was. He could probably be a competent nickelback or maybe still a second corner on a team, but when he was brought in to D.C., he was supposed to be more than just a role player. (Side note: the on-field return and common sensibility of S Kareem Moore definitely helped his secondary brethren look stupider. I guess if I'm lucky, before I die, the Redskins will actually, you know, draft a whole secondary's worth of guys like Moore.)
SECOND DEGREE NEGATIVE: DT Albert Haynesworth. For a guy who is supposedly dominant, and doesn’t even play the entire game, he sure gets blown off the line a lot of times. He is constantly pushed out of position, and the refs just straight up let him go offsides a couple times against the Rams, almost like, “Hey, go do something, make a highlight for this game!” And he still didn’t do shit.
THIRD DEGREE NEGATIVE: CB DeAngelo Hall. If you talk mad shit after last week’s game about how you are a shutdown corner and want to be covering the best receiver any other team has to offer, you should probably not fall onto your ass during a must-need 3rd down shutdown play in the 4th quarter on a simple quick WR screen and watch the dude run past you for a 30 yard gain. Fuck you DeAngelo Hall.
FOURTH DEGREE NEGATIVE: T Stephon Heyer. When this dude came into the league as an undrafted free agent out of Maryland back whenever he did that, and filled a reserve role on the standard piecemeal Redskins offensive line, that was cool. It made you feel good. Guys like that fight for a spot on the team and get a shot to live the NFL dream. But usually, after four years, you have a good idea of where they stand. They either claw their way into a solid spot on the O-line, or they move on. Heyer, for as good a dude as he seems to be, should move on. He’s not gonna be a quality starter, much less a dominant player, and we should probably be spending time developing young dudes with more upside. I mean, we’re already into this season, so it’s a mute point now, because we are what we are. But still, you don’t not roll out a guy like Stephon Heyer as your left tackle when the wonderkid Trent Williams is too gimpy after two games to go in this one. Also, I reserve the right to rescind all this ranting on Heyer is somehow Dexter Manley, who Heyer looks like a little bit now that he shaved off his dreads, took the kid under his wing and used cocaine and white whores to turn him into a super-tackle, full of wacky quotes and puppet sidekicks.
In closing, we are fucked. If we are 3-5 at midseason, we should be happy because that means something or someone has shown signs of improvement. I do not know how you can patch together a better psychological outlook for this team before next week’s game at Philly. They’ll probably have McNabb’s head on a stake by the end of the game in the 700 level, and be raping Redskins cheerleaders before sunset.
Season-to-date totals: LB London Fletcher (+9), LB Brian Orakpo (+8), S Laron Landry (+5), TE Chris Cooley (+5), WR Anthony Armstrong (+4), RB Clinton Portis (+4), LB Lorenzo Alexander (+3), K Graham Gano (+3), GM Bruce Allen (+3), DE Phillip Daniels (+2), WR Santana Moss (+2), head coach Mike Shanahan (+1), QB Donovan McNabb (+1), RB Ryan Torain (+1), T Trent Williams (even), fan Raven Mack (-1), WR Malcolm Kelly (-1), P Josh Bidwell (-2), owner Dan Snyder (-2), CB DeAngelo Hall (-3), DT Albert Haynesworth (-3), CB Carlos Rogers (-3), T Stephon Heyer (-4).
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