The Takeaways: Week 5, Redskins at Saints
October 9, 2018
by Steve Thomas
Well, that sucked. Based on the history of the team on Monday Night Football, and the fact that this event was lining up to be The Great Drew Brees Spectacular, starring The Great Drew Brees, even before the game started, we should have anticipated this, but it still sucked. The Redskins were soundly and thoroughly beaten down in every way possible tonight by the New Orleans Saints by a score of 43 – 19. This column is much more interesting and fun to write when things don’t go quite this badly, but I still need to slog through this. Consider it therapy for you to read this – it’s good for the soul. It’s going to be short tonight, because sometimes when things go badly enough, there’s just less to say, but here it goes.
The Redskins embarrassed themselves, their families, their ancestors, and their descendants
Okay, that’s perhaps being a bit overly dramatic, but the Redskins looked pathetic in every way tonight. The players failed to execute, played with zero sense of urgency, and were totally outclassed in every phase of the game except special teams. This game reminded me of a beatdown by Ohio St. or Clemson over Southeast Missouri Bible College. The Washington Redskins quite simply didn’t belong on the same field as the New Orleans Saints, and in case you were fortunate enough to miss most of this game, the final score does not accurately reflect the pathetic nature of Washington’s performance tonight. As amazing as it is to say, it could have been quite a bit worse if the Saints hadn’t stopped trying halfway through the third quarter. I recognize that the refs didn’t have a great night and missed Ryan Kerrigan getting mugged a few times, but it you’re blaming the refs for this mess, you are either lying to yourself or weren’t paying attention. Also, Jay Gruden’s gameplan was doomed from the start – he went to the short pass right from the beginning, in the first series, which isn’t going to go well against the Saints, and gave up on the running game immediately when Adrian Peterson got hurt. The Redskins needed to control the clock and the tempo tonight, and they totally failed from the get-go. This was a “burn the tape and move on” type of game. Overall grade: F.
The offensive line has significantly regressed
For an offensive line that is supposedly one of the best in the NFL and has been known to do things like wear dress shirts to practice as a joke to implicitly remind the world how good they are, this group sure looked bad. The big money guys, Morgan Moses, Brandon Scherff, and Trent Williams, were all beaten for sacks tonight (as a bonus, Trent’s ended up being an absurd fumble as well). As a unit, they generally had Alex Smith running for his life all night. The rushing lanes were utterly not there either, and the team averaged 2.2 yards per carry and couldn’t get even a semblance of a run game going despite Adrian Peterson clearly wanting to do well against his former team. I’ll leave you with this thought: is Trent Williams getting old and starting to lose it? He’s looked bad at times this year and not at all like All Pro Trent of days gone by who almost never gave up sacks. Couple that with his permanent presence on the weekly injury report and you have to wonder if his decline phase has started.
The secondary had its worst game in a long, long time
If the offensive line was bad, the secondary was worse, and please don’t just blame Josh Norman. He had a couple of massive busts, the worst of which coming on Saint Drew’s record breaking 66 yard touchdown pass in the second quarter, but none of these guys were even close to good enough. Montae Nicholson was exposed. D.J. Swearinger had busts of his own and wasn’t effective. Even Quinton Dunbar had his moments of “bad”. This unit was utterly terrible tonight. Even understanding that they were facing an elite passing unit, this wasn’t close to what a good team would expect out of its defensive backfield. Shame on you, secondary. Tonight, you were awful.
This was not the Alex Smith we signed up for
Quarterback Alex Smith was far from blameless in this debacle; in fact, he was probably the biggest problem in an offense full of problems. Yes, he was absolutely running for his life for much of the night, but Smith badly missed pass after pass, read after read, and threw one of the worst interceptions you’ll ever see. Smith did not look like what the Redskins thought they were buying when they handed him $55M guaranteed dollars. It was his worst performance of the season, by far, and if he’s going to earn his money, things need to change, alot, and rapidly.
That’s it for The Takeaways for this week. I can’t exactly muster the energy to invent a positive to tonight’s game, because there wasn’t one. It was awful, and the coverage of the team is going to be miserable for the next 6 days, including probably on our show. The only way the Redskins can fix this is to come out and play well against the Carolina Panthers next week. We’ll see. I’ll be back with another edition of The Takeaways in a week. Cheers.