NFL Network: 32 in 32 Redskins

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Originally Posted by 44Deezel

I think it's as much on Zorn as it is on Campbell. For a guy who was originally hired to be the Offense Coordinator to average 16 points a game is cause for concern. He's proven nothing. Everyone points to the 6-2 start, but that could have been a fluke, and the 2-6 finish could be what we get with Zorn's offense moving forward. Every team experiences injuries, and we had the same WRs all season, so no excuses.

What you say is potentially true, but you're also serving the number one media dichotomy in the process: the one which suggests that the team went from good to bad in the week between the Lions and Steelers games.

No one in the world would have dared called the 4-1 start a fluke. The Redskins beat up on one quality opponent after another for four straight weeks, until they were just a half game behind the Giants for the NFC East lead. That was simply us being a better team than the competition, which included the two teams who played in the NFC Championship scatted amongst the Cowboys and the Saints.

Of course, that team would have totally crushed the Rams, Browns and Lions if it was more than a short-lived mirage. Those games wouldn't have been remotely close. And despite a 2-1 record that probably should have been 3-0, we knew about the time that we beat the Lions that we weren't as good as the 4-1 start.

At the time we were 6-2, but we had been for three weeks like the team who would play in the next 5 games. There wasn't a special date where 40 players decided to wake up and mail it in. Nothing changed. We added D-Hall. That's it. Samuels was still hurting, Jansen/Rabach/and Thomas were already struggling, Moss had totally disappeared (save a token 150 yard performance vs Detroit), Portis was only producing against the worst run defenses in the league. Then the competition got better and we went 1-4. Well duh, we weren't a better team than anyone we lost to.

Between Weeks 6 and 14, we went 3-5, and probably should have gone 4-4 with any justice. But that's who we were for the vast majority of the season: an .800 team with everyone healthy, and a .500 team after the bumps and bruises of an NFL season. We probably deserved to be a 7-6 team, plus or minus a game.

And the last three weeks, you weren't watching the team you were the rest of the year. You were watching some backups play some other backups, with a shameful performance from Donovan McNabb thrown in between. It's hard to believe we'll reach that point again in the next ten years, because most of those starters probably shouldn't have been in the league, for various reasons.

Again, there was no magical point at which the team forgot how to play football. The competition after the bye was simply harder.

So when this team is 9-4 in Week 15 this year, you'll probably be watching much of the same sort of offensive and defensive failures of the 2008 team. But the successes will be far more numerous and far less fleeting.