Redskins 5-6 Positives/Negatives Metasciences Week 12 Recap

It only made sense the Redskins would lose today. I had plotted out a piece about how Brian Orakpo or Andre Carter would break through and finally be the wooden stake that drove evil old Brett Favre into true retirement, 5 games early, but I knew it wouldn’t come true. I had deduced a statistical analysis of remaining games and the law of averages in outcomes, which put the Redskins lucky to go 7-9, probably leaning towards 6-10 if they lost today, which I figured they would. (Perhaps it is my fault for lacking the proper psychic energy to support this team. I had to go to my aunt’s house for a late Thanksgiving with all the extended family, so listened on crackly AM radio for the first quarter, then stole glances in the living room with walls covered with pictures from the past 30 years, me and my cousin Punkin getting more and more disgusted because you could see what was gonna happen. You could see it. This is what this team is.
But it’s for the best. Shake off that playoff wild card bullshit. This is not a playoff team, and to get a berth in the postseason would just cloud the truth. This should not be a playoff team next year either, and I know diehard Skins fans will not want to wrap their head around that, but it’s the stone cold sober truth about the situation. So the focus from here on out this season should not be on anything other than the future. Five games left, including a home-and-home with the Giants, and a trip to Dallas. Let’s see what these fucking kids who are trying to earn a slot have got to show for themselves. Let’s weed out some of these older influences who bring to the locker room an old Redskins mentality of fat paychecks, entitled attitudes, and little real on-field successes. We should be setting fire to recent tradition and burning sage throughout everything, cleanse this bullshit out, and build towards 2012, pretending next year doesn’t even exist, which I guess it might not if there’s no football. But you know what I mean.
Anyways, here’s the digs and dings on this week’s game, which I hodgepodged together from multiple AM radio briefings and watching it on the oldest of old school TVs (in a big box with shit stacked on top of it… seriously, my wife was like, “I didn’t know places like that still existed”)…
THIRD DEGREE POSITIVE: PR/KR Brandon Banks. The Little Assassin, honestly, probably is the MVP of this season for the Redskins. If we were still going with Devin Thomas and Rock Cartwright, I shudder to think of what this season would be at this point. Probably 3-8 at best. Last week, they brought B-Double out for some offensive plays, running high intensity routes at WR, and then this week he actually lined up in the wildcat formation a couple of times. Though I’d prefer our 150 lb. spark plug not have to take too many runs up the middle, like he did on one of the wildcat calls, getting squashed somewhere in the middle of the Williamseses negros of Minnesota, the more he is involved, the better. And this is not so much because I think he’s some sort of undiscovered gem they’ve discovered, who will change the way football is played. But you know some little fucker who was not drafted having a chip on his shoulder trying to prove why he should be in the NFL on every fucking touch of the football. The Redskins need about 42 more players with that attitude on their active roster.
SECOND DEGREE POSITIVE: LB Lorenzo Alexander. Seriously, every fucking week this guy is key, clutch, and a crusher. He knocked Adrian Peterson out the game, which probably kept it closer than it should have been (and gave Brett Favre a chance to pretend he’s still got it on that one 3rd down run… good lord that was embarrassing). And honestly, with the One Man Gang’s history here in D.C., playing special teams as well as offensive line under Joe Gibbs his rookie season, I was wondering if they were gonna plug holmes into the offensive line again, being it is about as depleted as it’s ever been, which is saying something considering they haven’t stocked up on O-linemen much in the past 10 years. Hell, #97 might get them fired up on that side of the ball, to where they can play magically like they did last week, and not uninspiredly like they did this week.
FIRST DEGREE POSITIVE: LB London Fletcher. There’s a lot of long-term veterans on this team that I feel should be cycled out of town, to move towards actually building something different with this team, a change in psychology, removing the entitlement hopefully. I would never ever fucking dare say that about London Fletcher though. Though he got burned on a play by Visanthe Shiancoe one time, #59 was holding his own chasing the down-field TE routes, and was in the mix on everything on defense, yet again. He has been one of the more impressive defensive figures in actual on-field performance, not superstar look or superstar money, in my entire time watching these Redskins on the TV screens, which considering he’s done this during the Dan Snyder era, it makes him a Hall of Famer in my book. For this guy to be this steady and this good, and all while they drag their feet to renew his contract because he’s not famous or sold a lot of t-shirts or ballyhooed, it’s really fucking amazing. Today’s game was notable because Brett Favre, as we all know, has the longest continuous starts streak in the NFL. London Fletcher has the second longest current streak, and dare I say an undersized dude who played his college ball at something called John Carroll and who plays middle linebacker has a bit more of a physical time during his 60 minutes on the manicured turf than the ol’ gunslinger does. I hope if this is his last season, they get London involved in coaching right away like they did Chris Samuels last year. But they won’t.
STAY MEDIUM DEGREE: WR Anthony Armstrong. I love Triple A’s rise to NFL success, but he’s been a little sloppy at times the past two weeks. That motherfucker should wake up every day and realize he was playing in the Intense Football League last year, and this is a dream come true, and scratch and claw his way into our heart every week, until Donovan McNabb is finally able to hit those wide open bombs and Armstrong can start getting 50+ yard TD catches every week like he has the potential to be doing. But you gotta stay hungry, and I worry when I see some of the mannerisms I saw today and last week that he’s getting caught up in that “we are the best and if we lose it’s not because anybody beat us but because we didn’t play like we should have” attitude that’s been tossed around far too goddamned much with the Redskins the past five years.
FIRST DEGREE NEGATIVE: CB Carlos Rogers. Look, if he was making second or third cornerback money and just dropped pick-sixes regularly and got burned every now and then but was steady the rest of the team on a 2nd or 3rd receiver, I’d be fine with that. But this guy was a top ten draft pick, who feels like he still deserves that respect. He needs to move the fuck on. I’m sick of seeing his fucking contorted face trying to emotionally justify his suckiness into something better.
SECOND DEGREE NEGATIVE: QB Donovan McNabb. That first drive was a thing of beauty, and classic McNabb. Unfortunately, that’s the only classic McNabb we’ve gotten all year long. Now I know he’s got shit stacked up in front of him for an offensive line, but still, there are far too many times he has time to make a throw and he over or underthrows what would be a HUGE play by a few yards. At this point, I wouldn’t even call him inconsistent, because he’s consistently the same, rarely showing the flashes of greatness that are supposed to be his defining traits. But whatever. Like I said, we should be thinking towards 2012 at this point, so if they can keep him around and find a 3rd round QB next year to bring in and be the new Kevin Kolb to Donovan McNabb’s Donovan McNabb, working towards either phasing out McNabb in 2012 or riding him if he gets hot for a chunk of that year, then that’d be perfect. Unfortunately, nothing perfect happens to this team anymore.
THIRD DEGREE NEGATIVE: WR Santana Moss. You know what? Fuck Santana Moss. Fuck his goddamned jumpy ass always exaggeratedly making 19 yards out of a 6 yard play. Fuck him having passes consistently hit his hands (or his goddamned numbers, like the INT today that bounced into the air for the Vikings to snag, inside our own 20) but fall to the ground. This motherfucker should never fucking celebrate a goddamned thing until he actually accomplishes something other than first downs. Fuck a Santana Moss. Really, he’s a textbook example of how the Redskins have so seriously failed in the past decade. And the fact he’s top ten in the league in receptions and receiving yards means nothing to me. How does he rank in Ws and how does he rank in creating openings for his counterpart on the other side of the field? What the fuck does he do other than zip around when he’s motivated and pad his own statistics?
FOURTH DEGREE NEGATIVE: Owner Dan Snyder. Ain’t no playoffs, so we shift into Dan Snyder Crazy Man time of year, where he can accept this and allow the head coach of that marketing campaign either keep running the program, or he can start interfering. It will be really interesting from this point forward to see how this shakes out with Mike Shanahan. I’m Snyder and his ugly ass wife in NFL Shop commercials and on news interviews and he’s obviously feeling his oats and pushing himself as a public figure, which is not a good sign, because if a guy is gonna be pushing his face out there, he’s gonna be embarrassed the team is not doing as well as he’d like, which means he’s gonna start interfering. And good fucking god, if I’m right with the 2012 target date for a decent enough team to finally be in place, I don’t know if it’s possible for him to be that patient. But I’m hoping. That’s the sign of a true fan, never giving up hope, even though nothing but hopeless frustration has been sent your way for as far back as you care to remember.

Season-to-date totals: LB Lorenzo Alexander (+16), PR Brandon Banks (+13), TE Chris Cooley (+12), LB Brian Orakpo (+13), LB London Fletcher (+12), RB Clinton Portis (+7), S Laron Landry (+7), RB Ryan Torain (+7), WR Anthony Armstrong (+6), Radio man Sam Huff (+4), LB Chris Wilson (+4), GM Bruce Allen (+3), DE Philip Daniels (+2), K Graham Gano (+2), LB Rocky McIntosh (+2), S Kareem Moore (+2), CB DeAngelo Hall (+1), P Hunter Smith (+1), CB Phillip Buchanon (+1), T Trent Williams (even), DC Jim Haslet (-1), fan Raven Mack (-1), WR Malcolm Kelly (-1), S Reed Doughty (-2), P Josh Bidwell (-2), head coach Mike Shanahan (-3), WR Santana Moss (-3), OC Kyle Shanahan (-3), CB Carlos Rogers (-5), T Stephon Heyer (-7), DT Albert Haynesworth (-9), QB Donovan McNabb (-12), and owner Dan Snyder (-17).