The Real Problem of the Redskins ...

[SmootSmack]

Originally Posted by SouperMeister

What scares me most as a Skins fan is that Snyder is right around my age, which means that as a fan, I may have to resign myself to rooting for a mediocre team for the rest of my life. During Gibbs 1.0, we won with dominant play on both lines of scrimmage. You can win with average QB's when the O line consistently knocks the opponent off the ball and protects the QB in the vertical passing game that requires a deeper dropback. Snyder clearly doesn't get this given the high draft choices and vast FA sums that he has poured into WRs (Rod Gardner, Laveranues Coles, Taylor Jacobs, Santana Moss, Antwaan Randle El, Brandon Lloyd, Devin Thomas, Malcolm Kelly) with little regard to building a team that dominates in the trenches.

Imagine this: what if we had done the right thing, and drafte Steve Hutchinson instead of Rod Gardner in the first round of the 2001 draft. We would have had Stephen Davis in his prime, running behind a young group led by Jon Jansen, Chris Samuels, and Hutchinson. That would have been a winning formula for years, but as usual picking a dominant G wasn't flashy enough for this FO.

Let's disregard 2001 because that was clearly Marty's year and Cerrato wasn't even there.

But let's also not act like the Redskins are ignoring the lines either. You can make the argument that they're not effectively addressing the lines, but I think it's wrong to simply say they're ignoring them. Or to pretend that all we do is go after WRs

Dating back to 2002 we have drafted 4 WRs, 6 OL, and 4 DL.

Additionally, besides going after Moss, Patten, ARE, and Lloyd we have gone after Andre Carter, Pete Kendall, Jason Taylor, Todd Wade, Jason Fabini, Chris Wilson (plus UDFAs Alex Buzbee and Stephon Heyer)

All which leads me to two points

1. We are definitely not ignoring the trenches, we're just not addressing them correctly

2. Scott Campbell should be held largely accountable for a lot of the late round misses due to his time serving as the team's Director of College Scouting. So I'm not sure I can or should continue to defend his ascension up the Redskins food chain.