A fucking emotional rollercoaster.

Stop this fucking ride, I wanna get off.

Jesus Christ, this season. It's been difficult, you guys. Every time I'd start to think I had a handle on what was going on, and what my emotional reaction to it would be, the Redskins would turn around and upend me completely. And not just by being terrible and sucking away my will to live, as has been their M.O. for many years now. No, they do it just as often by imbuing me with hope I am always terrified will be false. It's been going on ever since week 1. I actually came into this year with what I thought was a pretty healthy attitude. "We'll be better with RG3," I said, "but it'd be crazy to expect miracles in his rookie year. I'm guessing we'll go somewhere between 7-9 and 9-7, and miss the playoffs." And I was fine with that.

I was fine with us losing to the Saints in week 1. At that point, nobody realized that they were basically a lumbering headless Frankenstein monster without Sean Payton, and I was still expecting at least the 2010 Saints, if not the 2008 Super Bowl champ Saints, when we went to New Orleans for a road opener. I watched the game purely to see what kind of moves the new quarterback had, not because I expected a win or anything. Then by halftime we were up by multiple touchdowns and I suddenly found myself invested in the game all over again. Remember the fucking madness that broke out over that week 1 win? Remember "Griffin-ing"? That was some ridiculous bullshit. And the whole time I was thinking, "It's just one game guys, let's not get too excited!"

Sure enough, close losses to the Rams in week 2 and the Bengals in week 3 brought us back down to earth in a big way. We looked good out there, but not quite good enough to win those games--and there were some huge weak points on the defense. After week 1's build-me-up-buttercup scenario, I was flailing about for an understanding of who the Redskins were in 2012, and how the hell I felt about them. I thought I'd figured it out by week 5, after a close win over the Bucs and a close loss to the Falcons (that probably only happened because of the loss of RG3 for the last quarter of that game)--the Redskins weren't bad, but they weren't great either. If they could win the games they seemed clearly capable of winning, though, we should finish the year with a fair-to-middling record and something to build on in 2013.

That attitude lasted through the glorious win over the Vikings in week 6 and the close but extremely predictable loss to the Giants in week 7. Then came the two-week nightmare of midseason, in which a game that should have, if anything, been a close loss to the Steelers turned into getting blown the fuck out in disgraceful fashion to a team dressed like the local prison's exhibition team in 1934. Then the game against the Panthers, which we should have won by any reasonable metric, went just as horribly. Going into the bye I thought "Clearly RG3 and Alfred Morris are not enough. Same old Redskins. We need to figure out who else needs to get replaced so we can be an actual decent team next year." When everyone was mad at Mike Shanahan for talking about evaluating talent for the rest of the year in his post-game press conference after the Panthers loss, I just rolled my eyes. It seemed to me like Shanahan was just acknowledging the gruesome reality of the situation.

And I could have been fine with that! Really, I could have. I could have accepted watching the Redskins win 3 or 4 of their last 7 games and limp their way to a 7-9 record with the idea in mind that we were gonna use the draft to try and build a better team and improve in 2013. God knows I've felt that way by midseason many times in the past--there's a comfort in that depressing familiarity. There's a comfort in knowing you no longer have to expect anything awesome out of your favorite team, that you can kind of check out emotionally and not think about it anymore.

But then we came back from the bye week and blew away both the Eagles and the Cowboys within a 6-day timeframe, and suddenly I was having conversations with friends of mine about the Skins playoff chances. That's when I realized they had tiebreakers over some of the wildcard teams and the entire NFC East--so if they could win out, they could win the division, and even if they lost a game, they could still take a wildcard spot as long as they won against the Giants and Cowboys. So I started to care again--a bit. And then after the Giants defeat, I cared a bit more. Once Kirk Cousins came off the bench to force overtime, rookie Richard Crawford nailed a really great punt return in his first game as an active player, and we managed to beat the Ravens, who were almost certainly playoff bound at that point regardless, I started to think we could really do it.

I told myself even then, though, that beyond beating the Cowboys and winning the division, I refused to care. I tried not to even care about the game against the Cowboys, really--after all, even a loss in that game would put the Redskins at the best possible scenario from my pre-season predictions for them. I didn't want to get too worked up about attaining double-digit wins and a playoff berth when that was never even something I saw in the cards until about a month ago. And yet, it's the Cowboys, and they came out looking shitty, with Romo throwing picks, and I thought, "Dude, we could really DO this!" And bam--I was sucked back into caring again.

But listen to me now--I am done with the rollercoaster of the 2012 season! A football columnist I read regularly described the Redskins as "playing with house money" before the Cowboys game, and even if it wasn't true then, it's definitely true now. We won the division. We made the playoffs. Everything from here is gravy. So it comes full circle, really--I'm going into this game thinking that we're probably gonna lose, and pretty much being OK with that, just like I was at the beginning of the year with the Saints game. Now watch the Redskins take a significant early lead and get me wrapped right back up into the drama once again. Hey, there are worse things that could happen.

Noisiest stadium in the NFL, or so I'm told.

What's up with the Seattle Seahawks, though? This is the third post-y2k trip to the playoffs for the Washington Redskins--the other two were under Joe Gibbs. The first time, we played the Seattle Seahawks in the wildcard round, and they beat us. The second time, we played and beat the Tampa Bay Bucs in the wild card round, then played the Seattle Seahawks in the divisional round, and they beat us. Now we're stuck playing the Seahawks in the wild card round again. I'd love to say third time's the charm, but honestly, it's hard to feel good about our chances--even if we don't have to play them in Qwest Field (which apparently became CenturyLink Field last year due to some corporate merger or something, like I'm supposed to be able to keep track of that. Sponsored stadium names are an abomination.)

The Seahawks have that rep of being significantly worse on the road, the same rep that's dogged the Ravens for years (and is probably trotted out more often than I'd like as an explanation for our week 14 defeat of said Ravens). It makes sense, considering that their stadium was specially designed to filter the raging howls of the flannel-coated, rained-on denizens of the Pacific Northwest, all hopped up on coffee, lager, and early Melvins albums, down onto the field, to distract opposing quarterbacks just as the constant Seattle drizzle starts to short out their headsets so they can't hear the play calls. That's a pretty serious handicap, and to have to play without it probably does impede their chances to win, at least slightly. We have to also hope that Danny Boy Snyder hasn't put too many of the tickets up on StubHub and/or that the Seahawks fanbase doesn't travel too well, or else we might end up with another nightmare scenario like that 2008 Monday night game where the Steelers came to town and there were terrible towels all over the stadium the second the houselights came up. If I turn on the TV tomorrow and see hundreds of people spinning flannel shirts in the air in the stands, I'm gonna be so pissed.

Besides, even without the fanbase concern, the Seahawks seem to me to represent a legitimate threat to kick our asses. Football Outsiders says that they're playing like the best team in the league right now, and after seeing them put up ungodly numbers not only on two terrible teams (the Cardinals and the Bills) but then beat the fuck out of the 49ers, who are also playoff-bound and who in fact are getting a bye week despite that atrocious loss, I believe it. The Seahawks are stacked in areas (secondary, specifically) that we do not have strength in. They run much the same offense with Russell Wilson that we run with RG3, and they've got Marshawn "Beast Mode" Lynch as their #1 back. So they're equally matched in areas where we have strengths, and better than us in our weak spots and problem areas. That's scary--or it would be if I really had a lot invested in us winning this game, which I do NOT god damn it--but I do still have hope.

That Russell Wilson kid is a rookie who is shorter than RG3 and is apparently vulnerable to outside blitzes, which Jim Haslett loves. If DeAngelo Hall feels like putting on another performance for the nation's TV cameras, he could do a damn sight worse than to pick up a few sacks on Russell Wilson in this game. Of course, Sidney Rice and Golden Tate are more than capable of burning us deep, so I'm hoping the return of cornerback Cedric Griffin to the squad after a drug suspension helps us shore up the deep cover problems we've had pretty much all year. Anything that gets dumped off to safety help over the top is doomed now that Brandon Merriweather is on IR, so we need the cover corners to stick to their men like glue. Can they do it? Well, I don't know... if you've been watching the games like I have this year, you've seen plenty of incidents in which they could not. But there've been a few clutch plays made by the secondary that turned entire games around. We'll need the defense to play the game of their lives if we want to continue to a second playoff round.

The defense is gonna be harder to deal with, and I will say right now that I think Pierre Garcon and Leonard Hankerson are going to largely be eliminated from the game by Seattle's excellent cornerbacks, Richard Sherman and Brandon Browner, unless they start lining up in the slot or do something to get away from typical formations that place them man-to-man against Seattle's corners. Across the middle, Seattle has great safeties in Kam Chancellor and Earl Thomas, who may very well take away slot and crossing-pattern passes as well. I think the main factor to winning on the offensive side of the ball has got to be Alfred Morris and the O-line. They've done a great job blocking for the guy all year, and Morris has shown that he has a lot of strength and aggression that makes him a good back above and beyond the blocking schemes he's behind--his yards-after-contact are at damn near 800 (thanks HogsHaven), which makes them just under 50% of his entire year's production. If he can take the first hit without getting stopped and kick it through to the second level, he'll gash Seattle all day, which will open up the opportunities to run play-action passes and hit slant and crossing patterns across the field.

I dunno though, y'all, it's hard to predict what, if any, of this will come to pass. I've watched the team execute the strategies I'm talking about in the last couple of paragraphs on multiple occasions this year, and they've done it very well and looked like a million bucks sometimes. Fact is, though, the Seahawks are tough as nails. In that game back in week 3 that was erroneously awarded to them by chickenshit replacement refs that didn't understand the rules, there was nonetheless a reason that they were close enough at the end of the game that a completed Hail Mary pass could still win it--the Seahawks defense was fucking up Aaron Rodgers' game all day. They sacked him 8 times in the first half. In the FIRST HALF! If the Redskins go out there and play to the best of their ability, maybe nothing remotely resembling that will happen. But that's a pointed reminder of just how wrong things can go, even for playoff-caliber teams, when you're facing a powerful defense playing lights-out.

So you know what? I'm not gonna worry about it. I will take this game as it comes. I'll enjoy the good moments, try not to let the bad moments get me down too much, and hope that at the end of the day, the number next to the Redskins' name on the scoreboard is higher than the number next to the Seahawks' name. If it's not, though, I won't cry. I'll just get ready for next year. Because regardless of how many emotional mood swings this team put me through in 2012, overall, the Redskins are headed onward and upward.

Breaking: Kirk Cousins Will Start Tomorrow.

It's up to you now, dude.

OK, so after my earlier multi-paragraph rant about how we, the fans, want RG3 in the game because we want to fucking win, I've now gotten word that Kirk Cousins is starting tomorrow. I'm staying calm for the moment, because I have decided for the sake of my own sanity to believe that this is happening due to RG3 not being healthy enough to play. To consider the alternatives just might break my fragile mind, so we're not going there. Instead, I'm trying to keep a positive attitude. A friend of mine is a huge Wisconsin Badgers fan and he says Kirk Cousins gave him fits when he was quarterbacking for Michigan State. I haven't felt like Cousins showed RG3-level talent on the field in his appearances thus far this year, but he's pulled off some good plays and over the course of an entire game he just might develop a solid rhythm that will get us through the game tomorrow.

But really, this entire situation boils everything down to the other members of the team proving whether or not we really can hang. If we'd lost the games to the Giants or the Ravens with RG3 on the field, and got knocked out of the playoff race that way, I could accept that as a sign that this is just a young squad that doesn't have it together all the way. However, if we lose to the Browns, even if we do so with Kirk Cousins in his first career start, I see it as a sign that the pieces are not all in place, and that Bruce Allen and the Shanahans still have work to do before we truly have a playoff-caliber team. Which, duh, is OBVIOUSLY THE CASE, so maybe we deserve to lose tomorrow. And yet, as I said earlier today, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." So fuck the bullshit. Fuck worrying about who our starting quarterback is. I believe in my heart that we can win this game. No more panicking, no more naysaying, no more goddamn Redskins Disease. Let's do it.

Redskins Disease Is Also A Thing.

Patient zero.

Well, here we are again, Redskins fans--I'm back after an absence of over a month, reassuring you that the circumstances which kept me away from the blog were isolated in nature and that I'll get back to my two-updates-a-week schedule that I only ever maintained for a couple of weeks back when I first started out here. Am I full of shit? Probably. My job is really difficult and pays very little money. The truth is that I'm too busy hustling most of the time to think about unpaid side gigs that I do for the love. Yesterday morning was spent harvesting unloved back issues from my comic book collection to sell at the store across town that always buys whatever I bring in (and always for the same amount--$25--no matter how much I stuff I actually sell at any given time. What's up with that?), and I barely had time to complete my actual paid duties. But it's Saturday, I've got no deadlines today, and I've been thinking about what to say about the Redskins and their current situation for at least two weeks now. So rather than spend this valuable weekend time catching up on my bloated RSS feed, I'm here to talk to you all about the Redskins at this completely uncertain point in the history of our 2012 season and, really, our entire franchise.

In order to really get into all the Redskins-related feelings I've had since our trouncing at the hands of the wretched Carolina Panthers, I'm going to have to deal in some concepts that are common on this blog, but certainly were not originated by me. Failure demons, [insert team name here] disease, raving psychotic breaks--you know the story. Neil deserves the credit for coming up with this stuff, but what he has really done with his outstanding work on Armchair Linebacker over the past several years is put a name to the sort of free-floating ideas that are present in the psychological history of any sports team that is not a perennial winner. People who like the New York Yankees or the LA Lakers may not know any of these concepts firsthand, but the vast majority of all sports teams spend significant epochs of their history, inbetween their occasional dominant runs, as cellar-dwellers. There are few teams of which that is more true than the Lions and the Redskins. Neil and other Lions fans may argue that our 5 Super Bowl appearances to their zero makes us less aware of what it's like, and they may be right, but the truth is that the Redskins have been garbage for multiple decade-plus eras of their existence. Don't just think of the time since Gibbs v 1.0 retired--look back, before Vince Lombardi and then George Allen Sr. came to town in the late 60s/early 70s. Sammy Baugh left after the 1952 season, and really, even his last few years with the team weren't too great. Between 1946 and 1971, the Redskins had four winning seasons and no playoff appearances. That's over the span of 26 years. That's an even longer and more terrible run than we've had since the departure of Gibbs v 1.0. We know about being a shitty team here in Redskins nation.

So yeah, I definitely fell victim to a vicious attack of acute Redskins disease after the Panthers loss. Mike Shanahan gave a press conference in which he said something about "I guess we'll spend the rest of the year evaluating talent," and I was feeling a much less sober version of the same thing. I'm sure I would have (and did) put it as "Same ol' Redskins." I started wondering how it could be that, with multiple promising young rookies performing at the peak of their abilities--RG3, Alfred Morris, but also Kai Forbath, who has been a godsend for a team with kicking woes that date back even longer than our quarterback troubles--we still looked like garbage out there on the field by midseason. The loss to the Steelers was worse than it seemed like it should have been, and was marked by specific errors from our receiving corps, but there was no one issue that had caused our ignominious defeat at the hands of the Panthers. Everybody looked terrible out there. RG3 and Morris were trying, and Forbath kicked everything we asked him to kick, but we couldn't put a drive together to save our lives. I found myself repeating the words of Dr. Thompson--"How long, oh lord, how long?" How much longer must we suffer with a team that finds a way to turn back into the same old sack of garbage by midseason, year in and year out, no matter how stacked with talent we are or how promising we look after the inevitable week one win?

It's comforting, though--that's the truly perverse part. When failure is what you know, the smackdowns from the failure demons that cause the disintegration of your ostensibly-amazing offense and the exposure of every weakness in your mediocrity-riddled defense start to feel strangely welcoming. "At least I know this feeling," you think. "It's familiar, and there's a comfort in its familiarity." It's like the way that, back before I was diagnosed with hypertension and the medicine I took had the happy side effect of making my chronic migraines go away, I started to kind of like the taste of BC powder. Anything, no matter how gross and awful, starts to feel strangely welcome when you're used to it. Familiarity may breed contempt, as they say, but more powerful than the contempt is that Stockholm Syndrome feeling that everyone encounters at some point in their lives (unless they're rich, I suppose. And if any rich people are reading this right now, give me some money). Sports fandom is weird, because there's no rational reason for you to even feel any sort of emotion about a professional sports team. And yet people do--and even if you wake up to the strange learned-helplessness dynamic that exists, in which you continue to show up for the beating even though you're free to leave at any time, just by turning off the TV, that emotional attachment will still be there. All it takes is news stories about your much-loved team experiencing some surprising late-season success to get dragged right back in--into a vortex of frequently-unfulfilling stress and emotion experienced in relation to a thing you have absolutely no control over.

Wow, well, that's enough psychobabble for one entry, I should think. But the point is that I had a certain set of expectations in place after two devastating losses marked by poor play and an overall inability to accomplish what we, as a team, had previously indicated was in our power to do. I figured it was time for the Skins to fold like a cheap suit, and before the year had run out, we might even be faced with the horrifying spectre of our franchise quarterback spending games holding a clipboard while we "see what we have" with less high-profile fellow rookie Kirk Cousins. It's a scenario we've all watched unfold way too many times. It's the kind of thing that made Raven quit his weekly Redskins chronicling after the crushing week two loss to the Rams--because how much more of this can we really take?

Welcome to the NFL, Nick.

That's a question that won't be answered right now, though, because we all know what happened next. The brutal defeat of Eagles rookie QB Nick Foles in his first career start was predictable, especially as the Andy Reid coaching dynasty in Philadelphia seems to be in the process of ending with a whimper as the entire team collapses around him in midseason. That didn't make it any less fun, though. And for some reason, it got me amped way up for the Cowboys game on Thanksgiving day. I went up to my parents' house, which is in the countryside west of NoVa, on the way to Front Royal, to see my relatives, eat excellent food, and watch some damn football (Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday). When I got there, I found the people who had all helped to inculcate in me my love of the Washington Redskins having a much more pessimistic attitude than I did about our chances against the Cowboys. I'm not sure it was all that rational for me to have made such a quick turnaround in thinking either, but I ended up being right, and the second quarter of that game in particular was a joy to watch. Romo and co. made somewhat of a comeback in the second half, and there was a point where it seemed like they could get fully back into the game, but RG3's talent and abilities led to an additional second-half touchdown and field goal that, to me, put the game away for the Redskins. It would have been nice for DeAngelo Hall to get that last-second touchdown and make the score more reflective of the blowout that that game really was, but he was right to kneel on the two and let RG3 kill the clock to end the game. After all, why give the Cowboys another chance to get the ball? Regardless of the score, the game was won.

It's amazing to think that, within a few weeks, my attitudes about the Redskins and their current season changed so quickly, but regardless, on the day after Thanksgiving, when the Redskins still had a losing record (5-6), I was talking about playoff chances with a friend of mine. At that point, I figured that if the Redskins won four of their last five games, they had a decent shot at taking the division. They'd have to beat the Giants, for one thing, and the Giants would have to lose to one other opponent--but with the Saints, Falcons, and Bengals on the schedule for the rest of their season, it seemed do-able. The game I saw the Redskins most likely losing was the one against the Ravens, but I thought that we could still potentially make the wildcard even if we did lose that game.

At the same time, it seemed really crazy to have the conversation. I thought then--and still think now--that the Redskins have played well enough this year that a decent number of total wins wouldn't be surprising or undeserved. But let's be honest--this squad hasn't done that much to indicate that they really deserve a playoff berth. Regardless of the fact that they've been good enough over the course of the year to pull out a whole bunch of wins that would have been losses for Sexy Rexy and the 2011 Skins, they've had quite a bit of trouble putting together 60 minutes of good football. The defense is "bend but don't break" at the best of times--meaning they can make a drive take a little longer, and force teams to settle for field goals a good bit of the time, but have trouble consistently making stops. Thankfully, the improvements in both the running and passing games have led to the offense being on the field longer, making the problems that plagued the defense late in games over the last couple of years (being tired, starting to make mistakes they wouldn't have made earlier in the game) show up far less often. But regardless, there are some glaring holes in team chemistry that mean, even if we could score a playoff berth, we're not gonna make it very far into the playoffs.

But as Clint Eastwood once said, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." If we can score a playoff berth, I don't think any of us are gonna turn it down, right? If we can win the division, I welcome that with open arms. I fully expected that the two games we played in the last two weeks would determine our fate--that either the Giants or the Ravens would end the winning streak and bring things back down to earth, leaving us with only the most ridiculously outside of shots at getting into the playoffs. Instead, we ground it out against the Giants, playing the kind of old-school football late in the game in which a team strives to shut down and outlast their opponent, rather than actively gunning for a high point total. 17-16 isn't a glamorous final score, but winning by one point is still winning, and I'm happy with it. If nothing else, it's nice to see the Redskins finally in one of those late-game lead-holding situations that we used to get in a lot over the last few years in which we end up successful. I can't count the amount of times I've watched the Redskins get about 7 or 8 minutes away from the end of the game, get the ball back with less than a one-score lead, and at exactly the time when they could put the game away with a long, clock-killing drive, they fail to get even one first down, and then the defense caves because they're at the tail end of a game in which they've spent 35 to 40 minutes on the field and they just don't have the energy to hold the other team back anymore. The 2012 Redskins offense is, more often than not, able to put together enough successful plays to push the ball down the field and finish up the game in proper fashion.

And now, after a truly miraculous win over the Baltimore Ravens--who I saw as the only team on our post-Thanksgiving schedule who was sure to beat us--the Redskins have a winning record for the first time since week one. The three games that remain are the ones that, back on Black Friday, I saw us as most likely to win. And yet, since the first of the three is the Cleveland Browns, I find myself fearing exactly what I feared when we headed into the Rams matchup in week 2. It's a trap!

Why the hell can't I find any photoshopped pics of this guy in a Redskins uniform?

Make no mistake, if this is a trap game, I don't think it is thus because the Browns have some kind of special ability to defeat the Redskins. They're either good enough to beat us, or they aren't. The thing that scares me about the Browns is that they've gone from losing their first 5 games to winning their last three, and the game before that three-game winning streak was one against the Cowboys in which they jumped out to an early lead and lost in overtime. People think of the Browns as garbage, just like they think of the Rams as garbage. And yet, like us, the Browns seem to be figuring out how to gel as a team. They did so too late to make it into the playoffs, but they're still in a position to spoil our hopes for the year. A lot of people involved with that team's coaching staff are playing for their jobs right now. Trent Richardson is just as tough and strong of a young running back as Alfred Morris has been for us. Brandon Weeden is no RG3, but he's shaping up and looking like someone who might really be capable of quarterbacking successfully on a pro level. And RG3's old receiver, Josh Gordon, looks great. That's not to mention the fact that the Browns have had a really good year defensively. If the Redskins walk into the game tomorrow thinking "It's just the Browns," they're going to be surprised, and not pleasantly.

And none of that mentions what is, for the second time this season, the elephant in the room. Is RG3 starting? Well, if you're asking me, going purely by my instincts, I'm going to say yes. I think the guy heals quickly due to his youth, loves to play, has a leader's heart, and is going to find his way onto the field anytime it's physically possible. The qualities I like most about him, both as a player and as a leader of the offensive division of our team, make me think that you'd have to do a lot more to keep him off the field than give him a sprained knee. The Shanahans are keeping their decision about whether to put him onto the field under wraps, and football pundits are saying shit like "If the Redskins are good enough to beat the Browns with RG3, they should bench RG3 and start Kirk Cousins. And if they're not good enough to beat the Browns with RG3, they should stop worrying about limping into the playoffs this year and make sure they'll be in better shape for next year by benching RG3 and starting Kirk Cousins." Which is easy to say when you aren't part of the organization and are therefore able to take a long view and concern yourself with the team's fortunes over the next several years. I'm sure RG3, the Shanahans, and anyone else involved in the organization--from Danny Snyder all the way down to some random fan who posts regularly on his facebook page about the Redskins and has RG3 as his avatar on twitter--finds the prospect of considering the game in those terms somewhat insulting. I'm way down at the low end of that particular totem pole, and therefore have much more emotion invested in the fortunes of the Redskins than I have any semblance of control over what the team does. But I will say this much, and I think I speak for everyone when I say this: This isn't about longterm fortunes. Every week, when the players suit up and we head for the stadium or turn on the TV, we're looking for a win. We might say "The team needs to rebuild, there's no way we'll make it past round two of the playoffs this year," but in that moment, when we're watching the game, we want to see the team do everything they can to win the game. There's a fine line between playing it safe and giving up, and nobody in the organization is going to be cool with giving up.

So yeah, if RG3 can't play because he's still hurt, then bench him. But if he can play, fuck this "if they can't win with Kirk Cousins, they don't deserve a playoff berth" attitude. The playoffs are an abstraction right now anyway. Even if we beat the Browns, we've still got two more games to win before we can even start thinking about them. Even then, if the Giants, Bears, and Seahawks all win out, we could finish the year 10-6 and still get eliminated. Whatever, fuck it. Worry about it later. This week, the mission is to beat the Browns, and we need to do everything in our power to do it.

Not that I'm saying Kirk Cousins is terrible, nor even that he's incapable of beating the Browns himself. I don't think he's RG3 by any means, but the kid is all right. It's nice to have a decent backup who can come in and spell the superstar if we need him to, and it's nice that he's calm under pressure and talented enough to, for the most part, deliver when we need him to. But really, he pulled off two very clutch plays in the Ravens game, and did a half-decent but not by any means perfect job in the fourth quarter of the Atlanta game, so we've got no reason to think he can play equivalently to RG3. And I'm not going to pretend that we don't need RG3's talent to win games right now. As I said earlier, there are a lot of holes in the team's performance right now. We need our upsides to compensate for our downsides. Fuck any idea of whether or not the Skins deserve to win this game if they can't do it without RG3. We're sick of waiting til next year. If there's an advantage we can have, we want to have it. We want to win.

Maybe this is just another manifestation of Redskins disease--pushing anything that seems remotely positive until it screams, until we wear it out and kill it because we're putting all of our other weaknesses on its back and hoping it can save us from them. I don't know right now. But I don't think that's it. Really, part of what has been happening since the team returned from the bye week and seemed to remember how to win games is that they now seem to be taking that next step. I could name all the players who have been playing well--the aforementioned rookie triumvirate, Pierre Garcon, London Fletcher, Ryan Kerrigan, even recent injury-replacements like outside linebacker Rob Jackson and new punt returner Richard Crawford--but it doesn't come across like the result of individual effort. It seems like the team is working together. We're not perfect, but we've figured out how to function and succeed as a unit.

Maybe the Redskins won't make the playoffs this year. Maybe they'll lose a game down the stretch, or maybe too many other teams will win and a 10-6 record won't be good enough to score them a wildcard spot. But right now, going into the Browns game, I feel good about things. RG3 or no RG3, trap game or no trap game, failure demons or no failure demons, I have become convinced that these really are not just the same old Redskins. I fell victim to Redskins Disease back in early November, and I'm not going to say I'm cured of it now, but it's definitely in remission. However, I'm not taking this Cleveland game for granted, by any means. Let's hope the team doesn't either.

Uncalled Fair Catch Interference Penalties From Three Years Ago That I'm Still Mad About, and Other Existential Horrors

The stuff of nightmares.

Let me start by apologizing for my extended absence. It wasn't for any of the typical Armchair Linebacker reasons--I wasn't rampaging naked, covered in blood and feces, through the back alleys of the worst neighborhoods in the city, knocking over trashcans and gibbering incoherent, anguished rants at the gods while shaking my fists at the sky and being stared at from behind curtains by local residents whispering to each other, "That white dude's gone CRAZY!" I also wasn't wandering along the banks of any local streams or the paths carved through the countryside by railroad tracks, occasionally pausing to throw yarrow sticks and consult the I Ching, surviving only on what I could kill with my trusty hunting knife and refusing to return home until I'd completed my vision quest. No, I was just backed up at work, and couldn't find the time at the end of a succession of 12 hour days to knock out a worthwhile post.

But make no mistake, I am feeling every bit as uncertain and fucked up about the fortunes of my team right now as Neil and Raven are when they disappear to engage in their periodic mystical wanderings/psychotic breaks. The Pittsburgh game was the first true reappearance so far this season of the unending psychological torture that I've often seen from the Redskins over the past decade. I felt like the whole team's spirit was being broken on a Catherine Wheel or something. I mean, we were never once in that game. The Steelers got the ball first, went right down the field, scored a touchdown, and then totally shut down our offense on the following drive. After that, it was over. I could look it up but I don't want to, so right now my best guess is that we were never within 10 points of the lead for the entire rest of the game.

Every time the offense would get the ball, the entire apparatus would sputter and churn, and if any concrete advances were earned, they'd soon be derailed or offset by a succession of pratfalls and bonehead plays. Alfred Morris was trying to do his thing, but the Steelers run defense were solid enough that his ability to break through the line and gain some yardage on the ground was never more than intermittent throughout the day. And when RG3 took to the air, things were even worse. Over and over, I had to deal with the sight of Santana Moss or Leonard Hankerson or Josh Morgan dropping the ball. RG3's completion percentage was under 50% for the first time in his career, but it wasn't his fault--he went 16 for 34 but 10 of the 18 incomplete passes he threw hit his receivers in the hands and they just couldn't pull them in. Josh Morgan had a huge first down taken away by a drop, Leonard Hankerson whiffed on a sure touchdown, Logan Paulsen couldn't bring in a crucial third down pass--and just to prove that things were truly out of whack, Niles Paul actually did manage to hang onto one pass for a first down. It was Redskins receiver opposite day, and we were all suffering. By the end of the game, I felt like I was having a nightmare. And with the Steelers out there in those ridiculous bumblebee-jailbird uniforms, it even had an REM-state quality. You know, like when you see someone you know in a dream, but they don't look like themselves at all? And yet, you know it was them. Then you wake up and you're telling someone about the dream, and you're like, "I mean, they didn't even look right, they were wearing these weird black-and-yellow striped uniforms that made them look like rugby players from the 1920s. But somehow I knew it was the Steelers, you know?" It was like that.

Hold my breath as I wish for death...

The worst moment for me came towards the end of the game, when one of the commentators made some comment about the Redskins jeopardizing their playoff hopes with play like this. I managed to have my very own Jim Mora moment, and leaped off the couch. "Playoffs?" I yelled. "Are you kidding me? Playoffs?" I mean, what a joke, right? I never expected the Redskins to be good enough to make the playoffs this year, and they've certainly proven to me that I was right to have less than stratospheric expectations for the season. But at this point, I really would just like to see them win a damn game. I mean, against the Giants, I didn't feel so bad about losing by less than a touchdown. Even the Bengals, who had the most decisive victory over us this year before the Steelers game, had a significant period during the game where they could not stop our offense, and we were threatening to come back and take the lead. It never quite happened, but we were definitely in both of those games, and we were very close to winning against both the Rams and the Falcons. This really felt like a team on the rise even in defeat, during all of those losses. But the Steelers totally dominated us, and made us look like every single one of the crappy, half-baked teams we've been fielding for most of the past decade-plus.

I'm sure there are excuses that could be made--rain causing receivers to drop balls, or whatever the fuck. But I don't want to hear them. What I really want is to be given reasons to believe that that lackluster, worthless performance in Pittsburgh last week was an aberration, a random glitch on the way to building a truly solid team. I've been hearing people say things this week about how the Redskins have to beat the Panthers tomorrow to save their current season. Frankly, to me, that's a ridiculous concept. I haven't felt like the playoffs were in reach since week 2 or so--as far as I'm concerned, what we're doing this year is being done to lay the groundwork for league dominance circa 2014 or so, and to look at it otherwise is to delude oneself. But other people's delusions actually do serve my purpose here, because victory over the Panthers tomorrow is yet another necessary step in fighting for the immortal soul of this Redskins team. After years and years of mediocrity and delusional garbage from the front office, after a ridiculous succession of short-term quick fixes have all failed and we've started out from square one with every new season for nearly a decade, something has to be done to make a decisive break with the miasmic doldrums of the post-Y2K Redskins. I will grant an exception to this blanket description of the last 12 Redskins seasons to the 2005 Redskins, who had double-digit wins in the regular season and won a playoff game. But Spurrier, Zorn, the Gibbs/Saunders tenure, the early Shanahan years--it all just added up to a lengthy, doomed trudge to late-season irrelevance, despair, and learned helplessness.

"We're better than this. We beat ourselves."

This team needs redemption. This team needs a clean break with its ugly past. And in order to gain such things, this 2012 Redskins squad must win all of the games that it is clearly capable of winning--playoff possibilities be damned. Hell, we shouldn't even be thinking about the playoffs. The focus should be much more immediate than that. Right now, the Redskins have an aching need for a solid, cohesive program in which every player is playing at the height of their abilities, and the coaches are bringing those players together into solid units who execute at the levels to which they're capable. Some of these guys are not world beaters, it's obvious. There will be times where certain less-than-gifted players will be put into situations that we can't rationally expect them to handle. Reed Doughty is a solid backup safety who has been there for the Redskins whenever he could be for most of a decade. He's not Sean Taylor, of course, but nobody's Sean Taylor. And we couldn't have expected Reed to handle Andre Johnson by himself on a post pattern in week two of the 2010 season. But most of the time, the guy's a solid player who makes things happen on the field. Right now we just need him and all the other second-tier starters and situational backups on the team to do what they're capable of doing. If we lose more games this year due to problems equivalent to Andre Johnson/Reed Doughty-type mismatches (or, to use another example from this year, Victor Cruz/Josh Wilson mismatches), then that's a structural problem. We fix that during the offseason by making changes through the draft and free agency, and trying to upgrade the team.

But in midseason, heading into our bye week, we can't do anything about that stuff. What we need to concentrate on, instead, is getting the players we've got to coalesce into the best unit they can be. We need them to beat teams who are hurting just as badly as we are, or worse. We need to win games in which we should obviously be favored. The Steelers game was a total toss-up. I honestly thought we had a better shot against them than we did against the Giants, and that turned out to be very wrong. Maybe that had to do with longstanding NFC East rivalries, or our respective strengths and weaknesses matching up badly with those of the Steelers--I don't know. And it's over now, so really, I don't care. What I do care about is that Carolina has been one of the worst teams in the league this year, on both sides of the ball. They aren't in the kind of widespread organizational freefall that seems to be plaguing Jacksonville (I'll be surprised if that team puts together 3 wins this year), but they aren't far off. Cam Newton's development has sputtered, the running game that helped them put together a solid offense last year seems to have collapsed, their receiving corps and offensive line are ailing, and their defense is every bit as bad as it was last year (and it was TERRIBLE). The Panthers, much like the Rams, have spent several years using the Redskins as one of their consolation prizes, one of the only teams they could still beat even in a series of floundering losing seasons. Last year the Panthers game began the truly ill-fated John Beck starting stint, but the streak goes back further than that--does anyone else remember the horrific situation in which Panthers cornerback Captain Munnerlyn shoved Byron Westbrook into Antwaan Randle El, our punt returner, who was trying to call for a fair catch? That was in 2009. Since Munnerlyn hadn't touched Randle El himself, it wasn't considered fair catch interference, and the Panthers recovered the ball on our 12 yard line. Westbrook was injured on the play, and two plays later, the Panthers scored the touchdown that won them the game--after having been down by 8 points going into the fourth quarter.

Seriously, who the hell names their son "Captain" anyway?

So yeah, I'm still mad about that--what I consider to have been a dirty play that the league conveniently turned a blind eye toward (and I'll bet they still wouldn't do anything about it now, even with all the manufactured hoopla about concern over concussions--the secret where that's concerned is that they don't care as long as they still make money). And I'm mad about Cam Newton running all over us last year. And most importantly, I'm mad at the very idea that the Redskins, who are, despite their many failings (which I've enumerated in depth over the past few weeks), still a significantly better team this year than the Panthers are, might nonetheless lose tomorrow due to sheer insufficency of character. If we lose tomorrow, regardless of how it happens, it will ultimately be the fault of a team that can't seem to pull themselves together and be the best team they can be. Even if that's not the best team taking the field in the NFL in November 2012. The fact is that the Redskins, when they're working together and firing on all cylinders, are a good enough team to solidly and assuredly handle the 2012 Panthers. And if they don't do that, I for one won't even want to talk about the fate of the 2012 Redskins season. I'll just want to know how the hell this team is going to recapture their own soul.

Where Are We? I Don't Know.

The Doom That Came To the Secondary, and other Lovecraftian Tales

This Sunday, watching the Redskins play the New York Giants was a profoundly strange experience. As you probably could tell from my pregame post, I wasn't sure what to expect, but thought the Redskins would ultimately lose the game. Sure enough, that's what happened. I've lived through devastating losses to the Giants many times since returning to full-time Redskins fandom circa 2001, so I would expect to be feeling a very familiar emotion right now. Specifically, some crossbreed of frustration and despair--the certain belief that the team could have done better, combined with a deep-seated fear that they never, ever will. Based on past experience, the way the game ended on Sunday should have ruined my day and left fuzzy contrails of depression across my brain that would subtly drag down at least the first half of the week to come. And yet, that's not how I felt at all.

In fact, in terms of my feelings, this entire Redskins season thus far has been bizarre. I'm hearing other Skins fans express much the same. On the Redskins blog I follow most regularly, the Monday morning post was talking about how no one the guys who run the site know was really bummed about the outcome of the Giants game. Instead, they were all talking about how weirdly hopeful they felt after seeing it. Sure enough, that pretty much describes my feeling at this point as well. And the thing that seems to be affecting all of our feelings is a real optimism about the performance of Robert Griffin III. On the surface, though, this doesn't make any sense. I've seen far worse Redskins teams get their asses kicked by the Giants within the past decade, and I never felt the least bit good about it. Why should I feel better about seeing the most clearly talented team we've fielded in something like ...shit, probably 20 years, now that I think of it--still manage to blow games at the last minute?

Well, I've spent the past few days thinking about it, and I think I've come up with an answer. Back when I was watching the Giants beat the pants off the Al Saunders or Jim Zorn Redskins, when I was watching Patrick Ramsey scramble or Clinton Portis get injured or Devin Thomas drop passes, I was seeing a team that was about as good as it was gonna get, at least for that year, with that lineup. Watching turnovers, bad play calls, and stupid mistakes doom a mediocre team who were trying to talk themselves up into half-decent status, I just knew they would never make the grade, that they'd remain the half-stepping, short-falling gang of underachievers that I was seeing on the field right at that moment for the foreseeable future. And it killed me. I wanted to fucking scream, so many times, watching a team that could put together a solid drive, a decent quarter, sometimes even a good half when playing an equally mediocre team expose all of their weaknesses when confronted with a football team that actually had their shit together.

Last Sunday, the Redskins confronted yet another in a long line of Giants teams who have their shit together. Tom Coughlin, who reprises his role as the gunnery sergeant from Full Metal Jacket on the sidelines every week (do you think he calls Eli Manning Gomer Pyle?) seems to have the whole team walking on eggshells, but when they hit the field they play hard and make shit happen. They won the Super Bowl last year, for fuck's sake, and if anything they look even better this year. A week ago I wasn't sure that that was really true, but I hadn't seen them play this year yet either. Now I have, I know what's up with them, and I'm sure that it was difficult for the Redskins to even hang in there with them as long as they did. There've been enough callbacks to the infamous Denny Green postgame speech over the past decade to last everyone a lifetime, but considering that I expected the Giants to, in the end, get the best of the Redskins, I'm sure you know what I'm thinking.

So the question remains--why do I feel, actually, pretty good about where things stand right now? A little less than halfway through the season, the Redskins are 3-4. The offense is putting some things together, but after scoring three takeaways against the Vikings, we responded by turning the ball over four times to the Giants--hardly a positive development. And the secondary is so shitty that they singlehandedly blew the game for us. Yeah, I know, Santana Moss's fumble with 45 seconds left is what really took away our last chance to score, but his 30 yard touchdown catch with 92 seconds left should have been enough to win the game. All the secondary needed to do was prevent any big plays and keep Eli and the Giants from scoring for a minute and a half, and we'd have won the game. They couldn't even manage a third of that--Eli's 77 yard touchdown pass to Victor Cruz happened 19 seconds of game time after Griffin's pass to Moss. That pass should have been the one all over highlight reels on the Sunday night sports shows, but that's not what happened.

I prefer to remember the good times...

The thing that keeps me from being devastated by the eventual outcome of the Giants game has a lot to do with that pass, though. As Santana pulled it in and I saw for sure that it was a touchdown, I leaped off my best friend's living room couch and (once I'd calmed down enough to speak actual words) started yelling, "That right there! That's the difference RG3 makes! That's it right there!" And I was hyper and inarticulate at the time, but I was also right. His ability to stay upright in the pocket, extend plays, and make accurate downfield passes that complete scoring drives is the difference between RG3 and most other quarterbacks playing in the NFL today. And it's definitely the difference between RG3 and pretty much every other quarterback who has played for the Redskins in the post-Gibbs 1.0 era. Who else have we seen that could have made that pass? If you said Mark Brunell, who did it not once but twice in the final moments of an incredible 2005 win against the Cowboys, I'll give you that. However, not only was Brunell the best Redskins quarterback of the pre-RG3 modern era (this is probably gonna cause controversy, but it's a judgment call I'm willing to make), that game was also a fluke for him. At least during the Redskins phase of his career, it was--if anyone who watched the Jaguars regularly between 1995 and 2003 can tell me differently about his earlier years, I will totally take your word for it, because god knows I don't now, nor have I ever, watched the Jaguars regularly.

But anyway, the thing about RG3 is not so much that he hit that clutch pass to Santana Moss to give us the lead with a very short amount of time left to play--little enough time that the majority of the teams in the 2012 NFL would have been unable to come back--but that he was doing shit like that all day. Downfield passes were dropping into the hands of Moss, Josh Morgan, Leonard Hankerson, and others in such a way that they didn't usually have to even break stride to pull the passes in. This made a definite difference in the yards after catch our receivers delivered in the game. Even the one high-profile downfield pass I can think of that wasn't caught bounced off Leonard Hankerson's fingertips--and if he'd caught it, it would have been a gain of 50 yards at minimum. It's tough for a quarterback to hit long passes like that with any degree of accuracy. From what I've read (and I'm not going to cite sources on this, so you'll just have to trust my memory), only somewhere between 20 and 40% of long bomb-style passes are completed. The fact that, as a rookie in his seventh game of pro action, RG3 was not only completing such passes frequently, but a lot of the time delivering them so accurately that receivers didn't even have to break stride to catch them, puts his performance on Sunday in borderline-elite territory. He was out there throwing like Drew Brees, and he's a goddamn rookie!

I mean, seriously, it's crazy how good the guy is. And on the ground, he's just as good--as is his most frequent backfield partner, Alfred Morris. People keep comparing that guy to Terrell Davis, and while I think such praise is premature, to say the least, at one point in the game, Fox flashed a graphic comparing Alfred's stats thus far to Terrell Davis's stats after 6 weeks in the NFL, and Morris actually has significantly more yards right now. Of course, he's also on track for something like 320 carries this season, which is good for us this year but could wear him out more quickly in the long run, and I'd hate to see that. At this moment, though, I have little to complain about, where Morris is concerned. OK, the fumble was awful--ruined a scoring drive that might very well have made a difference in the outcome of the game. But I've managed to convince myself that the fumble wasn't really Morris's fault at all; instead, I blame Tyler Polumbus.

For those who don't pay that much attention to guys that never touch the ball, let me explain the whole Polumbus thing. First of all, he's only our starting right tackle because Jammal Brown appears to be a piece of burnt toast. After four years as a New Orleans Saint, including the year they went to the Super Bowl--though he spent that year on IR with a torn ACL--Brown was traded to the Redskins, and has had trouble staying healthy ever since. In 2010, recovery from hip surgery slowed him down, but he started in 14 games. In 2011, he was in and out of the lineup, starting in 12 games. This year, he was injured in training camp, and had another hip surgery. We'll see if he can recover from this one, but in the meantime, our starting right tackle is Tyler Polumbus, one of the worst right tackles to start consistently in the NFL over the last five years. The Redskins are his fourth team--he was undrafted in 2008, and played for the Broncos in 08 and 09 before being waived by them during the 2010 preseason. The Lions claimed him off waivers, traded him to the Seahawks after a week, and the Seahawks kept him for a year and a half before waiving him midseason in 2011. The Redskins signed him two weeks later, and he's been playing for us ever since. Dude is terrible. He's a running joke at Football Outsiders, which makes it even more cringeworthy to see him out there every week as a Redskins starter. And, to bring this back around, Polumbus is responsible for Morris's fumble. How so? Because on the play before the one on which Morris fumbled, Polumbus got called for holding, nullifying a 15 yard run. Then the Skins tried the same play again, and this time the ball was stripped out of Morris's hands. If Polumbus hadn't gotten penalized, they'd never have run that play at all.

Whatever--maybe you buy that, maybe you don't. And when talking about ways in which the Redskins still have a long way to go, Polumbus is just the tip of the iceberg. It is at least nice to only be complaining about one of our offensive linemen rather than all of them, but now the secondary is the position group that needs a total overhaul. If anything, I think D. Hall has aged past his effectiveness at cornerback, and would probably be best in the role of strong safety, where he can play out the downside of his career. I've been made happy by the play of all of the rest of the Redskins secondary members at one point or another, but considering how many of them see the field regularly without managing to consistently distinguish themselves as real coverage threats, at this point I have to figure that any good plays they make are just the result of the law of averages, and someone with real talent would do a lot more than pull in an occasional interception or come blitzing in to stop a run behind the line once every other game.

And now Fred Davis is injured. Easy to let that get lost in the shuffle of the game, but I don't think we can underestimate its importance. With Garcon out, Davis had become RG3's #1 target, and while Logan Paulsen proved that he can be effective as a pass-catching tight end over the course of the second half, I'm not sure he can step into Davis's shoes. I know Niles Paul can't. Has anyone seen him catch a pass this year? The guy's as bad as Robert Royal was. We resigned Chris Cooley, which is an important move on the cosmic scale of good karma, so I'm glad it happened. But can the guy come back and be the #1 tight end he was four years ago? I have a feeling those days are behind him. I guess we'll see.

Still, though, I feel good. I have hope for the future. Between RG3, Alfred Morris, Leonard Hankerson, most of the offensive line, and several members of our defensive front seven, I feel like I'm seeing real positive development in the Redskins as a team. Kyle Shanahan continues to get positive results out of the Pop Warner-style stacked backfields I was babbling about last week (I saw a new four-man backfield pre-snap formation during the Giants game, but I didn't write it down and now I don't remember what it was), and whether he's running or throwing, RG3 is the kind of player that sets even the best defenses back on their heels a bit. This team isn't the same sort of half-stepping squad of underachievers that used to bedevil me in past years. They make great plays every week, and seem to be moving in enough of a positive direction that I don't feel like an idiot having hope for the future. Whether that will last through a few more of the inevitable losses that I expect to see this season remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Hopefully for the 2012 Redskins, such a feeling will not be the prelude to certain doom that it often has been in the past.

Do We Have A Problem Here?

Does this guy represent a legitimate concern?

So... the New York Giants. I can remember a time in the last decade when it seemed like we'd start every season with a game against them, and every season, they'd spank our asses and send us into the season with an opening day loss. It was always some kind of horrible omen for the rest of the year--even the year when Jim Zorn had just become our coach and we followed that game by winning 6 of our next 7 games, it turned to shit in the end. I always felt like the Giants were the hardest team in the NFC East to beat, and not just because they were the most likely to end up winning the division in any given year, either. With the Cowboys and the Eagles, there are decades of hot-blooded rivalry to call up, much psychology and spiritual mumbo-jumbo to tap into for inspiration and special quasi-supernatural on-field powers to embody our generally mediocre team with for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. The fans get riled up and holler for blood, and things happen, you know? That first Zorn year, we beat the Eagles twice. That was not really in the cards for that Redskins team, and yet it happened. And the situation with the Cowboys... well, we all know it's complicated, and considering we have the mother of all Cowboys matchups this year--a Thanksgiving day game in Texas Stadium--I'll have plenty of time to talk about it later.

But the Giants always felt to me like they could defeat any of our spiritual vibrations and cosmic psych-outs with the cold-eyed rationality of a team with a better on-field product. They felt like they refused to even play the game on our terms, as if walking into Jack Kent Cooke Stadium and falling under the spell of the spirit vibes swirling through the place was something they could just choose not to do. And then they'd spank us in front of our home crowd and make us all feel like idiots for even having gotten so psyched up in the first place. And in the Meadowlands? Forget it! I don't even feel like you could have a more intrinsically soulless sporting arena than one that is not only in the wrong state (yes, I know, the Redskins play in Maryland, but that's different. I'll tell you why it's different some other time. Now go help your mother with the dishes--the grownups are talking), but one that is shared with another team that plays the same sport in the same league. The Meadowlands doesn't even have its own franchise identity, and calling it "Giants Stadium" when the Giants play there and "The Meadowlands" when the Jets play there doesn't change that situation one iota. The Redskins have no spiritual powers in the Meadowlands, and neither do the Giants, but the Giants don't need it--they defeat us with math problems and an angry, rationality-based denial of the spiritual nature of football as a sport. For a team that once boasted Lawrence Taylor as their star and Bill Parcells as the sideline captain, the Giants have certainly undergone a significant change in their overall vibe since I returned to being a devoted football-watcher in the early 2000s. They've become the team of science-happy supervillains, or something like that. There's just no reaching them on the spiritual level, which is why games with them in recent years have always played out exactly as badly as they seemed like they should on paper.

So then, how do we explain last year? In a season where the Redskins only managed to win five games, how is it that their only two convincing wins came against the Giants, a team that would back into the playoffs with the minimum passable record, suddenly hit a hot streak, and go on to win the Super Bowl? I must admit that I don't have a concrete theory about that. In fact, I think it's going to take watching the Redskins play them this year to really even start to figure them out. The kind of Skins fans that comment on sports websites, and do other dumb internet-based stuff like that (as opposed to brilliant internet-based things like blogging for Armchair Linebacker), were doing a lot of gloating last year about how the Redskins had beaten the eventual Super Bowl champions, not once but twice. And I shouldn't even need to say this right now, but that was some stupid shit to be proud of. Even in the regular season, the Giants won four more games than we did, regardless of how they did against us. And the Redskins wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell against any of the teams that the Giants beat in the playoffs. The Giants were a better team last year, just like they always are. Sure, the case could be made that if the Redskins had played in their other 14 games last year the way they played against the Giants, we could very well have dominated the league. But why in the hell would we expect them to do that? Those games weren't predictive of our 2011 performance; I'd say the game against the Panthers was more accurate as far as the eventual template for that season went. But whatever; I don't want to talk about the 2011 season. At all. Ever again.

The only time Grossman actually looked good.

What I do want to talk about is that, though I haven't personally encountered it yet, I'm sure there's a significant portion of vocal Redskins fandom out there talking about how we've got this week in the bag because it's just the Giants and we beat them twice last year with Rex Grossman at QB! Yeah... not so fast, folks. For one thing, that kind of overconfidence has already worked out badly for us at least once this year--with the Rams game, which I was calling a trap game so often in the week leading up to it that I probably started sounding like Admiral Ackbar at some point. The Vikings game made me think the Redskins were pulling it together and starting to figure out how to work within their limitations and accentuate their strengths, but after all, it was just one week. Meanwhile, last week, the Giants delivered a sound beating to the 49ers, who should by all rights be one of the best teams in the league right now. Of course, the Giants beat them in the playoffs last year too, which didn't seem like it should have happened either. This brings me back to my earlier point that I have no idea what's going on with the Giants at this point. Eli Manning has seemed over the past couple of years like a better quarterback than ever before, like he's finally reaching the level that Peyton has played at for a long time now. The Giants running game is always a bit spotty, with no clear-cut #1 back, but they still put up some yardage on the ground week in and week out, and both their offensive and defensive lines are obviously skilled. And yet they don't seem to play in as dominant a fashion as they did a few years ago when Eli wasn't as good and their running game didn't do as well. It's a mystery to me, and what it means for the Redskins is equally mysterious. After all, the Giants' only two losses thus far have come in their only two divisional games. So what does that mean?

All I feel like I can say for sure about this upcoming game is that the Redskins should not get too confident. The win against the Vikings was nice, but it's in the past. Things are still wrong with the team, and considering how Eli Manning has been playing lately, he's in a prime position to exploit the secondary, which might very well be our biggest problem right now. This game could be a real struggle, and the only way we'll probably come out on the winning side of it is if RG3 and our offense can hang in there with the shootout that I expect Eli and the Giants offense will give us. Ultimately, we'll probably blow it if for no other reason than the fact that if we can win, we'll be leading the NFC East, and I can't imagine that happening at any point over the course of this year. But then again, I don't feel any more confidence in that statement than I do in much of anything else I've written in this post. Sorry guys, half a dozen posts in and I've defaulted to wishy-washy indecisiveness. I would think the game tomorrow will shake me out of these doldrums, but right now I've just got no idea. Guess we'll see.

That's What I Like To See.

Glorious.

A few days ago, in the typical Redskins-fan manner, I predicted years of doom, gloom, and heartbreak if the Redskins did not follow a specific course of action on Sunday. In so doing, I fully expected them to let me down in spectacular fashion, either by outright refusing to start Robert Griffin III or, even if they did start him, handcuffing him with a super-conservative gameplan that kept us from getting any real traction or moving the ball at all. I went into Sunday's game just waiting for the Redskins to crater, to give me an excuse to run howling back to this blog in a shredded burlap sack and a dirty loincloth, waving a broken shepherd's crook over my head and proclaiming the arrival of the end times. After all, I've been reading Neil's posts for long enough to understand exactly how these things are supposed to play out. To instead receive the gift from the gods that was bestowed upon myself and all of Redskins nation on Sunday afternoon was bounteous good fortune, and lo, there was much rejoicing. No garments were rent, and I headed over to a friend's house to catch the night game with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

But now, writing about the game has me a little wrong-footed. If what I wrote last Saturday is really true, a referendum on the future of the Redskins, at least over the next few years, has been handed down, and we're headed for a brighter tomorrow. And yet, I still see some problems not just on the horizon but in the very gameplay that we saw on Sunday during what was, for 2.5 quarters at least, a glorious beatdown of a relatively worthy opponent. So as much as I'd love to spend 1500 words giving you a really verbose version of "RG3! WOOOOO!" there are some less than positive elements of Sunday's game that we need to discuss.

First of all, where the Vikings are concerned, I'm not really sure whether the game validated my theorizing about them really just being a perennial second-tier team or not. Novelist Jim Shepard wrote a feature-length article for SBNation last week about how hard it has been to be a Vikings fan over the course of his lifetime, and went to great lengths to detail the manner in which the Vikings always manage to underachieve, pointing out that they've been to four Super Bowls but never won any of them and that in 1998, Randy Moss's rookie season, they managed to go 15-1 and still not win their conference's championship. I'm sure that's a very bitter personal history with football fandom to live through, and therefore Shepard and other Vikings fans see it as a far worse history than it is in any objective sense. Still, it feels to me like a confirmation of my theory. And yet, I didn't feel that way at first. One of the first notes on the page of my notebook that I scribbled on while watching the game last Sunday reads, "Jesus Christ. Maybe I was wrong about the Vikings." This was after I spent the first quarter watching their offense move down the field without any real difficulty, while their defense shut our offense down so thoroughly that we didn't get a first down until the last minute of the first quarter. The only thing that gave me any hope during the first 15 minutes of the game was that, whenever the Vikings got into the red zone, the Redskins defense would tighten up and hold them to a field goal, so that when RG3 finally got a drive going with a couple of over-the-middle passes to Fred Davis, we were little more than a touchdown behind.

But the issue with the defense needs to be addressed. It's a problem for us, and will doubtless remain so for the rest of the season, at minimum. This, as far as I can tell, is the problem: while the front seven is strong against the run, and can rush the passer reasonably well, the secondary is weak enough that, assuming the quarterback isn't sacked or pressured strongly enough that he has to throw it away, he'll have open men when he throws downfield. It's hard to stop a driving opponent on third down and long when receivers are being covered loosely enough that they can catch a 5 yard pass and run the rest of the way to the first-down marker, and usually several yards past it, before any tacklers show up. Our secondary is playing very deep so as to avoid getting beaten by double moves--perhaps Haslett still has nightmares about that prime time home game back in 2010 when the Eagles started the game by scoring on several long-bomb touchdown passes in a row, and ended up hanging nearly 60 points on us. It was a masochistic nightmare of a viewing experience, I can tell you that, and I certainly don't ever want to see its like again. However, when your secondary has to focus all its energy on taking away the deep pass and leave the underneath area wide open, all you're really doing is slowing a team down, not stopping them. This did, however, explain why the Vikings had to settle for field goals on the first four of their seven trips to the red zone. Once the field shortens enough to the point where there really aren't separate deep and underneath pass route zones, the Redskins are able to cover the field thoroughly enough to prevent much success with any sort of passing game. This is a better situation to have on our hands than we could have, but it isn't good enough.

Never again.

Let's talk about our secondary. Who are our clearcut starters? The first name that stands out is DeAngelo Hall, the VT alumnus who was, even in college (according to my best friend, who pretty much bleeds burnt orange and maroon), locker room poison. He's the highest paid man in our defensive backfield (shit, unless Brandon Merriweather is, but I can't imagine), he's got a big mouth, a reputation for whiffing on tackles and having trouble in man-to-man coverage, and he's made quite a few high-profile interceptions over the years, upon which he's pretty much built his career. I'm seeing more good things from D. Hall this year than I'm used to in the past--he has a sack, for one thing, and he's got two interceptions so far this year, which for him is not amazing but isn't bad either. He's still not a shutdown corner by any means, but he's decent. He probably deserves to be a clearcut starter, at least when compared to the group he's in. But who else in the defensive backfield can you say that about? Brandon Merriweather was a big free agent acquisition, but he still hasn't made it to the field during the regular season this year. Madieu Williams had an interception this week and I've seen him make a few good tackles as well. Dejon Gomes hasn't looked terrible out there, and even Reed Doughty, the bad penny of our secondary over the past several years (which is to say he always turns up in the starting lineup at some point), hasn't done anything as blatantly awful as his fourth-down coverage of Andre Johnson in week 2 of last year. But do any of them stand out to you as reliable? They don't to me. I don't think they do to Haslett either. I saw third-string safetyman Jordan Pugh spend quite a few snaps on the field during the second half of the Vikings game, while supposed starting safetyman Dejon Gomes was on the field on special teams as often as he was during defensive plays. All of these guys are capable of good plays on occasion, but when we see as many converted third downs as we do, we can't consider any of them to be the kind of consistent starters we need in order to build a world-class defense.

This realization actually helped me to understand what Haslett has been up to with the stacking-the-box defensive plays. At one point near the end of the game, when the Redskins were up by two scores and just needed to force the Vikings to have a time-consuming drive in order to salt the game away, I texted a friend of mine about how the time had come for us to slow down on the pass rush and take away Ponder's midrange passing game. I noticed that there were less defenders in the box during that drive, so I figured Haslett had the same idea--but then I noticed that short passes were still getting completed often enough that the Vikings were moving down the field. Now, as I said, they needed two scores, and the drive took long enough that they weren't going to get them (plus it ended with a D. Hall red zone interception anyway), but it was still a bit worrying to see how many successful pass plays the Vikings had on that drive (7, out of 17 total plays), and how quickly they got them (drive started with 2:43 left in the game, ended with :22 left). If we'd had one less touchdown and D. Hall had missed that final interception, we might very well have lost on the last play of this game. The secondary isn't good enough to take the passing game away from Christian Ponder, who is having a good year but is by no means one of the NFL's elite quarterbacks. What will happen when we face Joe Flacco and the Ravens on December 9? Unless things change a good bit between now and then, I won't be betting on a win.

But see, that's why I say that I'm starting to understand what Haslett has been up to. Our defense was most successful on Sunday when we were able to get to the quarterback--if not sack him, at least pressure him and drive him out of the pocket, take away the time he needed to find his (doubtlessly open) receivers. This was what was going on during the second and third quarters, when the offense was racking up 24 unanswered points. The interceptions during the second and third quarters were also a result of QB disruption--Ponder getting hit and losing the ball caused Lorenzo Alexander's whatever-you-call-it (league says it's a fumble, but you may as well call it an interception since the ball went straight from Ponder's throwing arm into Alexander's hands without ever touching the ground), and Madieu Williams's interception came from an inaccurately thrown and possibly tipped pass delivered under pressure. Haslett has to have realized at some point that, no matter game plan he goes with, he'll have to give up the short pass in order to avoid giving up the deep pass. Therefore the only hope for total play disruption will come from an aggressive front-seven attack in the passing game. Considering that our front seven are no slouches at stopping the run either--at one point in the first quarter I wrote "Adrian Peterson is scary" in my notebook, but by the third quarter he'd been pretty much neutralized--a successful blitzing attack can help the Redskins form the illusion of a complete defense. Now, if we fail to create pressure on the quarterback, we're fucked. But it seems that if we don't try, we're just as fucked, so there's little to lose at this point. Therefore, I'd like to announce that, until further notice, Haslett and I are cool and I ain't mad at his defensive game planning. The man's just trying to make lemonade out of a lemon-filled secondary, and I respect that. However, I reserve the right to flip-flop like a Massachusetts politician on this particular position later in the season if the circumstances warrant my doing so.

OK, so enough about the defense. What happened when the Redskins were on offense? Well, for starters, RG3 ran for a 76-yard touchdown to put the game away for the Redskins. That's not all there is to discuss from the offensive performance, but it's AWESOME, so let's go ahead and talk about it for a little bit. If you didn't see it live, there's a video of it on the NFL's website, complete with the original commentary from the announcers during the game, which you can watch here. Now, at one point during the replays, the announcer says something about the play having been a designed run. I take issue with that--watching the offensive line's blocking at the beginning of the play, that looks to me like they're trying to set a pocket for Griffin and it just breaks down so bad that he has to abandon it by stepping up, between the center and the left guard. At that point, rather than continuing to try for a pass, he notices that he's got running room, and just takes off. Almost any other quarterback in the NFL right now would have stepped out of bounds once they got the first down, but when RG3 saw that he had a clear path down the sideline, he took it and ran fast enough to make it all the way to the end zone untouched. That's the first time any NFL QB has pulled off something like that since Kordell Stewart of the Steelers in 1996--and apparently the time before that was 1940, back when the distinction between passing quarterbacks and single-wing tailbacks (more on that in a minute) was still a bit fuzzy. The fact that RG3 is capable of such a thing is rare and valuable, and it's a big part of the difference he makes to our offense all by himself. Jason Campbell might have been able to make that first down, but he would have gone out of bounds afterwards, and Rex Grossman's terminal lack of pocket awareness probably would have gotten him sacked in a similar situation.

The Redskins have had a lot of those late-game barely-holding-on-to-a-lead drives in past years that went three and out and left the opposing team to drive down the field in the waning moments of the game, taking the lead and giving us something like 45 seconds with no timeouts to try and make some desperation play at the end of the game and eke out a win. Most of the time it didn't happen. RG3 has now shown us that he has the ability to seal away a game for us in these same situations, and I'd like to see him do more of that--but honestly, regardless of how fast he can run, I'd rather not risk him out there doing stuff like that if we can avoid it. I was glad to see him looking over his shoulder with obvious plans to step out of bounds rather than getting tackled in the open field--he clearly learned a lesson from his concussion last week, and that's great. But the issue here, if I may briefly look at a 76-yard touchdown run and find reason to complain (thank you for the horse--let me check its teeth), is that our offensive line is still not where it needs to be on pass-blocking. I noted their success last week with run-blocking--and we saw more of that in the Vikings game, with Alfred Morris and RG3 combining for 185 yards (109 if you ignore the 76-yard TD run, which, as I said before, I am convinced was a busted play, but that's still pretty good). Morris was not as dominant against the Vikings as he was over the last two weeks against the Falcons and Bucs, but some of that might very well be due to the Vikings' formidable front four, starring Jared Allen and the remains of the Williams Wall, who were noted for their strength against the run back when both of them were still there. It's just Kevin now, but he's not to be counted out by any means. I feel confident that the line will do a decent job of blocking for Morris, Royster, and whoever else we get to carry the ball for us, but the pass blocking has to improve before we can truly become a dominant offense.

I do see some interesting decisions being made to cover the weaknesses on straight-up pass plays, though. If you were watching the pre-snap formations the Redskins were using, you may have noticed that they were starting a lot of plays with three players in the backfield in addition to RG3. Now, I don't know a ton about the nuts and bolts of football play diagramming--the "X's and O's," so to speak. However, as a nerdy pre-pubescent child who loved football and books with an equally overwhelming intensity, I used to seek out and read as quickly as possible every football-related book in any library I was given access to. At one point I found a book that related the history of American football, back to its very earliest days as a version of rugby played by Ivy League schools. The book traced the evolution of game play all the way from the early wedge formations (which literally murdered people) up through the kinds of plays that still dominated college football in the early 80s--the T formation, the single wing, etc. I never had much time for any of that stuff as a kid; I'd occasionally watch college games on Saturdays, because hey, it was football, but it seemed boring compared to the fast-action pro game of the era. And if it seemed boring then, it would come across as totally prehistoric now. And yet, from dutifully slogging through that book, I learned some interesting things, like the fact that position names like "quarterback" and "halfback" originally represented how far behind the line of scrimmage a player was lined up before the snap, rather than anything relating to their roles in the offense. In the single-wing offense, the player behind the center who received the snap was generally the tailback, the farthest-back player. It was the evolution of this role, with the arrival of 1930s-era players who were skilled at passing the ball (Sammy Baugh, Sid Luckman, etc) and the dominance of the teams that recruited said players, which led to the redefinition of backfield positions to correspond to offensive roles, and the evolution of offensive football into what we generally see on the field today.

I don't want to go through all of that in any kind of detail, because god knows I will bore the pants off of you, but I did notice a bunch of different offensive formations during the Vikings game that featured RG3 in a role analogous to the single-wing tailback, with as many as four other players lined up in the backfield with him. The formations I noticed the most were a zigzag-looking thing that featured a tight end lined up just behind the offensive line in the traditional "quarterback" spot, only inbetween the guard and the tackle in what is known in modern terms as the "H-back" position. Then RG3 would be under center in the "fullback" spot, about where a quarterback would stand in the shotgun formation, with a "halfback" a couple yards in front of him, staggered towards the side of the line without the H-back tight end, and a "tailback" a couple yards behind him and staggered towards the side of the line with the H-back. Another formation that was often used was a modified T-formation, with RG3 moved from under center to the same level as the left and right T-backs, and a third running back behind him in the position a tailback takes in the pistol formation. After reading a reference to the wishbone in a discussion of the Skins-Vikings game by my favorite football-nerd website, Football Outsiders, and doing some google image searching, I discovered that the second of those two formations was indeed a modified wishbone, as popularized by University Of Texas coach Emory Bellard in the late 60s. Meanwhile, the former turned out to be the wing-T, a formation first employed in 1907 by Pop Warner's Carlisle Indians, starring Jim Thorpe!

I'm real proud of you boys.

OK, that was some serious nerdery, huh? Sorry--I'll try to keep that kind of thing to a minimum from here on in. My point with going through all of that was to make clear that I did see the Redskins doing things in this game against the Vikings to work within their limitations by stressing fundamentals and keeping their playcalling away from the weaknesses of the team's current personnel. To some extent, as with all teams on the pro level where 55-gallon oil drums full of hundred-dollar bills are at stake, I see a team still hamstrung by the current expectations of a 2012 pro football audience, and these expectations will continue to hamper our performance going forward (though, with RG3 springing from busted pockets like the ghost of Gale Sayers, maybe not as much as they could). But there's a lot that can be done out of the wishbone, the wing-T, and other old-school backfield formations that don't show up in the NFL that often anymore, so as long as the Redskins keep using them as change-ups, they'll probably be able to squeeze 8 or 9 wins out of the team this year and lay some solid groundwork for a more well-rounded offense built around our speedy rookies in future years.

But I still don't see us making the playoffs in 2012. And you can accuse me of trotting out the traditional doom and gloom of the long-suffering, pessimistic superfan--hell, you may be right. At the same time, I think it's important to manage expectations and avoid getting carried away. We all saw what happened after the week one victory over a Saints team we now know is basically wandering in the wilderness without their gifted coach. To go from that to blowing a heartbreaker against the Rams in week two was a huge crash, tantamount to the sorts of meltdowns I've seen teenage girls go through while coming down off their first cocaine high (don't ask, I don't want to talk about it). Too many of those in too short of a time might very well send me permanently off the rails, and the last thing any of us wants is for me to get arrested naked behind John Riggins' woodpile, cradling a shattered Redskins helmet and blubbering. Right? It's Wednesday afternoon by the time I'm posting this, because my job is loading me down like a pack mule and I've been working 12 hour days that end with me feeling like my brain is leaking out of my ears. I hope by now we've all chilled out and started to prepare for our foreboding trek to the hinterlands of New Jersey, where our boys will face the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants. Because let me tell y'all, I am not feeling confident about that game right now.

But we can talk more about that on Saturday. See all of you then.