Early W/L offseason predictions (any team)...

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by Sheriff Gonna Getcha

It's very early and I'm going to get blasted, but I predict a 7-9 season for the Redskins. The defense weakens to a middle-of-the-pack unit and JC doesn't really shine until week 8. On a bright note, Portis excels in the WCO.

Think I agree with everything you said here, and I have a few thoughts to add to it.

The schedule is not as tough as it's been the last few years. Like SGG said, the talent on this team doesn't figure to return to the playoffs, and our toughest...like 4 toughest games are within the division.

With that said, the easiest way for this team to get back to the playoffs would be to excel within the NFC East. The Cowboys should be good for at least a split, hopefully two wins, but we are going to be hard pressed to pull a win against apparently superior Eagles and Giant squads (and the Cowboys seem superior also, just not quite as much).

This is the good news: all of our challenging non-divisional games will be played at home this year. So if this team does miss the playoffs, it's going to be because we were unable to defend our HFA, not because the schedulemakers threw us some bad breaks.

We, as fans, will have a tendency to underestimate the loss of our 2004 first rounder for the rest of his career and our 2005 first rounder for the first part of the season. For a team that didn't leave itself a lot of picks in that era, that's going to be downright crippling in the short term.

In the future, Jason Campbell will carry this team to where it wants to go. The team will draft intelligently and replace its vets with youth. But for this team, I'm just not very optimistic. We don't have the horses to run with the other teams in our division, and we can blame 100% of that on the football gods because with 16 games of Sean Taylor and Carlos Rogers in the secondary, we absolutely would be able to run with those guys. Instead, we have 16 games of Reed Doughty and Justin Tryon. It sucks, but that's what this team is.