Game Recap: Giants Snuff Out Skins 40-16

I’ve spent the last few weeks talking about how difficult analysis is when your team is injured, under-performing, and poised for another rebuild. There’s not much to glean from a week 14 loss like this, when the team is starting it’s 4th quarterback and in the midst of a 4-game losing streak, but let’s try our best anyway.

Washington’s offense – led by Mark Sanchez at first and by Josh Johnson when the final whistle blew – was dead on arrival in NY. The score was 34 – 0 at halftime, and to that point the Redskins had a whopping 9 drives to put something together. Why so much activity? Because in the first half, both the Giants and Redskins got into the Christmas spirit and gave each other the ball back. Repeatedly. General rules of etiquette dictate you offer something three times before accepting it for yourself, and that’s just what happened when, on the Redskins fourth lifeless drive, Sanchez delivered a gift-wrapped ball to NY’s Curtis Riley at the Washington 9 and NY graciously accepted the points via pick-6. More of the same happened for the next 3 drives until Sanchez’s inevitable benching. Mark Sanchez’s era was somehow even shorter than McCoys. Woo!

Then Josh Johnson came in and things got a little better. Knowing that Josh Johnson is even less of a guy to pin your hopes on than McCoy, Sanchez, or Alex Smith, I’d like to point out that he came in and offered an immediate improvement. Pump the brakes on garbage time talk – the Redskins accomplished nothing in garbage time against the Saints (up 40-13 in the 3rd quarter) or Falcons (up 28-14 in the 3rd), but managed 16 points in the 4th against New York, including a 2-point conversion attempt. That does count for something, and it does mean something.

What does it mean? That the Redskins front office has no idea what it’s doing building a roster. In Alex Smith, you had a guy with a history of mistrust for wide receivers on a team with very, very questionable wide-receivers, an untested rookie RB (until emergency injury forced the Peterson signing), and an untested offensive line. To shore up Smith, you relied on another 30+ year old QB with a laundry list of season-ending injuries. When he inevitably went down (because when has he not?), the team signed perhaps one of the most underwhelming #1 QB draft selections in butt-fumbler Mark Sanchez. And then, when Sanchez’s history repeated itself, journeyman John Johnson came in and immediately outplayed them all. I’m sorry but I have to ask: what the hell?

Take a step back and squint and you might start to see some similarities in the Sanchez and Smith signings. Smith is by far a better quarterback than Sanchez, but both acquisitions were guided by the same flawed philosophy. It’s the philosophy that says: “surely the evil we know is better than the one we don’t.” Alex Smith had one productive season through the air in recent history? We’ll take it! Beats the interceptions! Sanchez utterly sucks? We’ll take it! At least we know what we got! In both signings, the Redskins picked a veteran quarterback with plenty of game-tape over the alternative, even though the tape spoke clearly. And in both signings, the decision about which quarterback to sign seems to have been made in a vacuum with little consideration about the talent surrounding them. If we’re being honest, wasn’t a guy like Josh Johnson, who can get things done with his feet and is willing to take risks (and is tens of millions of dollars cheaper), a better fit for a team rife with with question marks? Was Alex Smith – a guy repeatedly said to depend on high-caliber talent around him – ever really going to succeed on a team without high-caliber talent? Did we get Donovan McNabbed again?

To clarify, I fully understand Sanchez was an emergency signing and I defended the Alex Smith decision when others criticized it. But as we approach the offseason poised for a rebuild that partially relies on one massively infected leg, I have to wonder if, once again, we’ve been doing it all wrong. Has the team selected any foundational talent post-Shanahan? Guys like Reed, Kerrigan, Crowder, Williams…hell, even last year’s starting QB Kirk Cousins, all predated Gruden or were selected by previous administrations. Guys like Matt Ioannidis, Jonathan Allen, Ryan Anderson (and others) have shown promise, but the team is so far away from competence elsewhere it’s not likely to make a difference. Even if they were world beaters, it’d be hard to notice right now.

The defense didn’t show up yesterday. They’re capable of stopping NY – they’ve already shown that this year – but with the offense playing like it did yesterday you can consider everything else a non-factor. I don’t know what I’d do if I was a Washington defender who just authored 3 consecutive three-and-outs, only to watch my QB throw back-to-back INTs. There’s only so much you can ask. To add, plenty of guys had awful games. I’m not going to bother spending time on it because, and I hate to sound fatalist, it doesn’t matter.

The Redskins are years away. I’m fully aware they managed a 6 – 3 record early in the season, but for an indication of how thin we are talent-wise one must only compare the first half of this season to the second. Our #1’s were just barely enough to eke out close games, and our #2’s (and 3’s and 4’s) are amateur.

That’s all I got this week. The team will be assessing what it has on the roster for the next several games, and throughout the offseason, and we’ll be right there alongside them to pick apart their decisions. It’s gonna be one hell of a ride.