Show Me the Medicals
April 2, 2020
by Jay Evans
In 2014, the San Francisco 49ers sought to solidify their linebacker position and ostensibly struck gold (pun intended) with Chris Borland in the third round. Following his abrupt retirement after his lone season due to Borland’s fear of the symptoms related to CTE, San Francisco was left with an unexpected hole on their roster.
After a tumultuous 2015 season, the 49ers targeted a linebacker again in the draft. The next time, in the 2017 draft, they traded up and selected Reuben Foster with the 31st overall draft pick.
Once again, after another, final instance of off the field distractions from Foster, the 49ers were moving on from a player before the conclusion of their second season, thus ultimately prompting Kyle Shanahan last offseason to sign free agent linebacker Kwon Alexander to a four-year deal and a whopping $54 million.
San Francisco’s philosophy was sound in acquiring talent, but they got burned by unexpected injuries and departures. The significant capital investments spent on one position will have ripple effects throughout the roster and salary cap implications well into the future.
The adage “next man up” is tired, but the concept is tried-and-tested. The draft pendulum swings for every franchise between best player available and need dependent upon varying levels of desperation.
NFL rosters are fluid perpetual motion machines. No player is irreplaceable and no position is ever complete. Bill Belichick has been essentially searching for Tom Brady’s replacement ever since he became the starter.
Like every team, the Redskins have shown tendencies in their roster construction. The former regime of Bruce Allen and company had a penchant for capitalizing on players with great production in college, but were for one reason or another falling stocks in the draft. Another trend, echoed in multiple drafts, was to choose players at positions of perceived strength even with needs elsewhere on the roster.
The only problem was both strategies had monumental misfires and left the current Redskins squad bereft of a well-rounded constructed roster lacking adequate depth. Injury riddled athletes are horribly unreliable and the Redskins have led the league for three years in the number of players to land on injured reserve.
On the other hand, stacking talent at a position has been a consistent tactic used by the Redskins. Its general effectiveness is up for debate.
The Redskins received overwhelmingly positive reviews for their draft classes the past several seasons. Ron Rivera noted as much in many of his early press conferences, glowing about the young prospects on the team who have played a lot the past couple seasons and gained valuable experience. Many of those players were thrust into roles earlier than expected, but we will get to that a bit later.
If the Redskins choose defensive end Chase Young with the second overall pick, at possibly the deepest and most talented current position group on the team, the move should hardly be perceived as unprecedented.
The Redskins have “stacked” selections at individual position groups multiple times in recent years, with varying degrees of success, but have benefited from the process on more than one occasion.
After the Redskins traded a bevy of draft capital in 2012 for the rights to choose Robert Griffin III, the Redskins were all set to address other holes on the roster. With no second-round selection and penalized by “Cap-gate”, it was imperative to maximize the rest of their picks.
The Redskins followed the Griffin selection with an under the radar pick at a major need, guard Josh LeRibeus, but then delved back into the quarterback tidal pool and selected the best quarterback of the millennium in the fourth-round, Kirk Cousins. (By the way who’s ready to have the “LeRibeus was a good pick” discussion?)
As 2018 began, the Redskins were one game from a playoff appearance the previous season and injuries had taken their toll throughout the roster exposing their lack of depth. On defense there were gaping holes at every level.
On offense, there were needs at the skill positions on offense and the left guard position had been a turn style for years.
Trent Williams was firmly entrenched as the left tackle and the Redskins had signed Morgan Moses to a 5-year extension the previous year. Ty Nsekhe had evolved into one of the better swing tackles in the league and still had another year on his contract.
With needs speckled throughout the roster and a looming contract dispute with the aforementioned fourth-round selected quarterback, the need for an offensive tackle was seemingly low. Yet, the Redskins selected Geron Christian with the 74th overall pick in the 2018 draft. Instead of going for a position in more dire straits, they opted for a raw developmental tackle with no direct line of sight to playing time.
Rumors since then showed that the decision drew the ire of Trent Williams and was the beginning of the end of the pro bowl left tackle’s career in Washington. The slow development of Christian has stretched the Redskins roster thin and gas lit the team’s needs to acquire Ereck Flowers and Donald Penn last year to bolster the offensive line.
Former general manager Scott McCloughan selected Josh Doctson with the 21st overall pick in the 2016 NFL draft. The selection was deemed a luxury given that the Redskins had two starting pro bowl quality starting wide receivers on the roster.
The pick was deemed excessive, but was viewed through some prescient glasses as a shrewd move. Desean Jackson and Pierre Garcon were veteran receivers who were entering the final year on their respective contracts set to eclipse the over-the-hill status and were unlikely to continue their early career production.
The awful implosion of the entire Allen era had unintended consequences that did lead to some success. As demoralizing as it sounds, had the Redskins not stacked on quarterbacks in the 2012 draft, the record for the past decade would have been unconscionable.
It is still a tad early to officially rule on the Geron Christian project, but in essence the Redskins were right in their decision to find an athletic tackle who wouldn’t be needed for a couple years. Given the Trent Williams saga, it was objectively clairvoyant.
Had Doctson panned out, the Redskins could have withstood the departures of the two veteran wide receivers and likely returned to the playoffs more than once in the past five seasons; regardless, they avoided the mistakes made in the early 2000s that put them in cap hell.
The Redskins have attempted to draft with an eye towards an evolving roster. That might be giving them too much credit, but they did see the diminished results from the aging receivers coming and all along had reservations when it came to the longevity of Griffin. Undoubtedly, if true, at its best the strategy was admirable, albeit ultimately unsuccessful in its execution.
The strategy Ron Rivera cannot emulate is one that has landed some hits, but the misses have left the Redskins with larger issues than solely whiffing on a top draft pick. That is the inability to field a healthy roster of professional quality.
During Bruce Allen’s tenure, the Redskins had a propensity to select players who were deemed excellent values because of potential, but were flawed for one reason or another. The range in which the player was selected was lower than expected, but talent was apparent and thus justified.
The Redskins drafted high risk players who had fallen in the draft with regularity and in large part the risk was due to preexisting injury concerns. This is the draft trend the Redskins must end…forever.
The Redskins can no longer afford to repeat the mistakes of the past. No longer can they consider the injuries fluky products of bad luck or consult European soccer clubs to detail what the Redskins should adjust in the training regimen, just to accept the results of their “extensive” research with a shoulder shrug, then go into the season praying Shaun Lauvao would not be Shaun Lauvao and have no suitable replacement.
That is to say, how could you be fully aware of a player’s chronically reoccurring injury history and somehow not anticipate him being injured again? Newton’s first law people! A player in motion stays in motion, while a player on a gurney goes on injured reserve.
Robert Griffin III’s wiry frame and his comical inability to know how to slide were talking points from the time of his first snap, until his injury history was the injury reality. A significant injury in college foreshadowed two major injuries in Griffin’s rookie season and doomed any chance for a hallowed career.
Fabian Moreau was a fringe first-round prospect before he tore a pectoral muscle at the combine. The Redskins chose Moreau in the third-round and were praised by then NFL network commentator and now Las Vegas Raider General Manager Mike Mayock. Moreau has continued to battle injuries and could be a starting-quality corner in the upcoming season, but has hardly lived up to Mayock’s expectations.
They used a similar strategy when they selected fellow cornerback Kendall Fuller, who couldn’t participate in the 2016 scouting combine because of a torn meniscus. Sean Dion Hamilton, a team captain and two-time national champion, was available in the sixth-round after his career at Alabama ended with back-to-back season ending injuries.
Uber talented tight end Jordan Reed suffered three documented concussions while at the University of Florida. Montae Nicholson, the ultimate enigma, had shoulder injuries in college which carried over into his first season.
Running backs by nature are worn commodities, but the Redskins have almost exclusively sought out players who performed exceedingly well in college, but were damaged and thus available later in the draft than their college production would have suggested.
Chris Thompson, Derrius Guice, and Bryce Love were all highly successful collegians who came to the NFL with significant injuries. Thompson broke his back and tore an ACL while at Florida State and ended the season on IR three times in his career.
Guice was in the discussion for the Redskins first-round pick, which ultimately was used on Daron Payne, but maturity and in concerns prompted a draft day slide into the latter half of the second round. Guice suffered knee and ankle injuries in his final season at LSU and has landed on IR in both years of his professional career.
Last year, the Redskins invested a fourth-round pick on Bryce Love, who would be medically redshirted for his entire rookie season. Love amassed 2,118 rushing yards in 2017, was the runner-up in the Heisman trophy voting, and was primed to be a first-round selection. The Cardinal running back returned for a 2018 season, where he battled ankle injuries and poor play before his career ended with a severe knee injury last December and caused his draft stock to plummet, scaring off many teams in the process, but not the Redskins.
Jonathan Allen was branded with a medical flag in the pre-draft process, which gave multiple teams pause and led to his slip in the draft. Although Allen was fairly durable in his college career, concerns over degenerative shoulders saw the Alabama prospect slide from a surefire top-5 selection to the middle of the first-round. Once again, the Redskins were one team unfazed by the injury concerns.
Allen did have a Lisfranc injury that limited his rookie campaign but his shoulders have not been a deterrent and the Redskins have benefited in his case, but overall there are too many other scenarios that have impacted the team negatively and left the roster in a state of flux.
Athletes can be hurt at any level in any given moment. For example, Frank Gore had multiple devastating knee injuries while attending at Miami and fell into the third-round because the likelihood of another injury was viewed as a “when”, not just an “if”. All he has done since entering the NFL is become the third leading rusher in NFL history and has been one of the most durable players in the league during his hall of fame 15-year career.
The Gores of the world are the exception. The Redskins have to divert from their past. It is exceptionally rare to find any prospect in the NFL who has a complete clean bill of health. One of the most useful tools for teams is the pre-draft process used for vetting specific information. The effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on this process remains to be seen and it will be telling how accurate the medicals were at the NFL Combine a month ago.
Pro day workouts were cancelled and teams haven’t been able to conduct further follow-up interviews. Their medical diagnostics from the initial meetings will go a long way in this unique draft and any team drafting an injury prone player in this draft is inviting even greater risk than a typical year given the lack of information.
Following a third consecutive injury riddled season, the entire medical staff for the Redskins was fired two months ago. The Rivera-era Skins would be wise to part from many of the philosophies from the former regime. A ceremonial bloodletting would be welcomed.
If Rivera specifically targets players who are infrequent visitors to the training room, even if they don’t have an athletic upside as high as their peers, yet remain durable and available, that would be drastically different than his predecessor. A move like that would greatly improve the on-field talent on a game-to-game basis, while greatly reducing the volatility of the roster.
The lack of consistency was on full display back in 2017. In week 8 of that season, Washington held the Dallas Cowboys’ leading receiver to 39 yards yet somehow gave up 33 points and lost by two touchdowns. Then, an undermanned Redskin squad went to Seattle down six starters on offense, three on the offensive line alone, and won one of the most improbable victories in the NFL of past decade.
The Redskins effectively won the right to draft Chase Young by losing to the Giants on December 22nd. The debate has raged for an interminable four months and a month in time which I will refer to as the “Eternal March.”
Whether the Redskins draft best player available, regardless of position, or trade to address more needs, will set the tone for the Ron Rivera era. The underlying theme to the offseason has been to acquire depth.
Rivera has already begun to reinforce positions and may favor that strategy. Are the free agent acquisitions a sign of stacking? His acquisitions include three defensive backs, two linebackers, two offensive lineman, and two running backs. Or is that a sign of needs-based signings? Whoever the Redskins choose to draft, please I beg you, Ron Rivera, just be sure to cross examine the injury history.