The Takeaways, Week 2: New York Giants at Washington
September 18, 2024
by Steve Thomas
The Washington Redskins Washington Football Team Washington Commanders Washington squeaked by the New York Giants on Sunday by a score of 21 – 18, thanks to an incredible 7 field goals. This was one of those games that was fairly ugly at times on both sides of the ball, but as we all know, all that matters in the end is that Washington is now 1 – 1 and the Giants are 0 – 2. I’m not sure what we really learned about the 2024 version of this team as a result of this contest, because by any measure, the Giants are one of the worst teams in the league, yet Washington needed every break to secure a victory. The good news is that quarterback Jayden Daniels continued to make progress. The defense didn’t. Let’s jump into this week’s Takeaways.
Brian Robinson’s career day
Brian Robinson had the best game of his career this week against the Giants, with 17 carries for 133 yards, including a long of 40, for an average of 7.8 yards per carry. Robinson’s next-best game came on November 27, 2022, against the Falcons, when he had 18 carries for 105 yards. He also averaged 7.4 yards per carry two weeks later in 2022, when he averaged 7.4 yards per carry on 12 carries, for 89 yards. Clearly, 7.8 yards per carry is not a sustainable number, and he was greatly aided by a bad Giants defense, but this is the type of performance Washington needs in order to get their offense running and to allow Daniels to get better. I can’t say I saw this coming; congratulations, Brian.
7 field goals is not good enough
I mean, win = yea, Washington, but let’s be honest: 7 field goals is something that (a) can’t be counted on, and (b) isn’t going to be enough to beat too many teams. Washington is going to need touchdowns, not scoring in 3 point chunks. The good news is that the team may have finally found a kicker who is pretty good, for once, Austin Seibert, after multiple poor choices. Regardless, even though it may have worked in this particular game, 7 field goals is no way to win an NFL game, and Washington needs to do better than this in the future, particularly against better teams.
Penalties almost doomed this game
One of the major reasons why Washington needed to kick all of those field goals is that the team’s offense continually shot themselves in the foot, metaphorically speaking, nearly ever time they got into the red zone. We’ll cover the specifics of Washington’s penalty struggles in detail in our Hold On column later this week, but suffice to say that they had 10 penalties for 69 yards. That’s a very high number of flags in one game, and some of them had serious negative impacts on the game. This is a lack of discipline, pure and simple, that could have and probably would have cost them the game against a better opponent. Washington’s coaching staff needs to make playing penalty-free football a major point of emphasis in practice this week.
Jayden Daniels improves over week 1
Last week, the highlight of Daniels’ play was more his running game than his passing abilities. He was better in this game, with 23 completions in 29 attempts for 226 yards, with no touchdowns and no interceptions, for a quarterback rating of 99.1. I still don’t think that offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury’s gameplan was all that great, but it did take a small but incremental steps towards the goal of making Daniels the focus of a high-quality NFL passing offense. He made progress this week, which is good, albeit against a very week team, but the next step should be a greater focus on mid and downfield passes to the receivers. Solid performance by Daniels, again. Hopefully the future remains bright.
One more thing: hey Jayden, for the love of all that’s good and holy, please learn to slide.
Washington got lucky . . . but they’ll take it
The primary reason Washington got a victory probably came down to the fact that Giants’ kicker Graham Gano was injured on opening kickoff and had to sit out the rest of the game. This caused New York to have to go for it on 4th down and go for 2 point conversions instead of attempting a field goal of reasonable distance and 2 extra points. Both of those conversion attempts failed, and the lack of those extra points and the fairly short field goal attempt proved to be the major difference in the game. Sometimes its better to be lucky than good.
That’s it for this week. I’ll be back with another edition after Washington’s week three battle against the Bengals in Cincinnati.