The Takeaways, Week 2: Giants at Washington
September 18, 2021
by Steve Thomas
Welcome to the Takeaways, week 2 edition! This column is our weekly effort to discuss the big-picture issues from the Redskins’ Washington’s game, both the good and the bad – these are the “around the watercooler” issues that all WFT Washington fans discuss. This past Thursday, Washington took a thrilling, last second victory over the New York Giants, in the process snapping a five game losing streak to their division rival. Fortunately, this gives us plenty to talk about coming out of the “mini-bye” and heading into week 3, so let’s get started.
Taylor Heinicke proves himself again
Heinicke once again demonstrated that he might just be a legitimate NFL quarterback, completing 34 of 46 pass attempts for 336 yards, 1 touchdown, 1 interception, and a 99.6 quarterback rating. Perhaps just as importantly, for most of the game, he brought an energy to the team that’s largely been missing for years. Certainly, against the Giants, we saw Heinicke look downfield and play with an aggressive style that we haven’t seen around here in a long time. Even his interception, as crucial as it was, was just as much due to great play by James Bradberry as it was a bad decision by Heinicke. Players on both sides of the ball seem to like and respect Heinicke, which bodes well for his future. However, before we put him into the ring of fame, let’s all remember that’s Heinicke’s biggest problem since his first day in the NFL has been health – he’s been continually been hurt during his pro career. If Heinicke can prove that he can stay upright for the next 7 weeks, then perhaps Ron Rivera will have a legitimate debate on his hands about the future of the quarterback position. But until that happens, a significant dose of skepticism is warranted.
The offensive playcalling was much better than last year
As I said in the Heinicke section above, Washington had a more varied game plan against the Giants than we’ve seen in years past, foregoing the typical “dink and dunk” gameplans of Jay Gruden, and even Ron Rivera with Alex Smith at the helm, in favor of a more aggressive style. Whether this was due more to Heinicke himself progressing through his reads and choosing more to look downfield more, or that Scott Turner has opened up the playbook, isn’t entirely clear, but the bottom line is that – at least for 3 quarters of this game – Washington was a much more fun team to watch and was also more productive. In prior seasons, I used to track how many times a Washington quarterback made a pass attempt that was more the 10 yards downfield. Fortunately, that hasn’t been necessary this season. Let’s hope that this trend continues throughout the year, for the sake of both Washington’s win – loss record and for in-game excitement.
The defensive line played better this week
The front 4 had a better day against the Giants than they did in week 1; at times, they put Daniel Jones under duress, which was a change from last week’s game. In the end, the defensive front produced 3 sacks (Kamren Curl got the other sack on a safety blitz) and a number of quarterback pressures. Of note, two of those sacks came from Jonathan Allen up the middle versus the Giants weak interior offensive line, with the other by Montez Sweat on a sack generated by significant team pressure. In the run game, Saquon Barkley, who admittedly didn’t appear to be fully recovered from his knee injury last year, was held to minimal production outside of his one 41 yard run, averaging about 1 yard per carry, and no other running back was able to gain significant yardage. Overall, the results across the board were a marked improvement over week 1, so progress was made.
The defensive front still did not live up to the hype
The flip side to the improved play was that Washington’s vaunted defensive line still didn’t look like a top 5 unit. Daniel Jones scrambled for 95 yards, much of which came on designed runs, and spent a good chunk of the game free to pick apart Washington’s secondary. I questioned on our post-game wrap up show whether the defensive line has bought into their own hype too much, which has caused their effort and performance to decrease. Whether or not that’s actually the case or whether I’m totally wrong, the bottom line here is that while this group did much better against the Giants than they did against the Chargers (which is a much better team), they still failed to produce a complete, quality performance for a full 60 minutes. When is that going to happen? When is the defensive going to start living up to the labels that the media and fans alike placed on them?
The team that made the fewest mistakes won
If you listened to our pregame show, you know that we predicted that the team which made the fewest mistakes would emerge victorious. The Giants and Washington are two mediocre-at-best franchises. Neither is an elite, or even top 10 team, and when teams of that caliber play each other, the winner is usually the team that manages to make the fewer game-changing miscues. What happened here? Three things: (1) a pointless and irrelevant holding call that nullified a Daniel Jones 58 yard touchdown run in the second quarter, ultimately costing them a net of 4 points; (2) a Giants wide receiver dropped a touchdown pass that hit him directly in the hands despite not having a Washington defender within 15 yards of him, costing them another net 4 points, and (3) an offsides penalty on Dustin Hopkins’ missed 48 yard field goal attempt on the final play of the game, giving Hopkins another attempt and costing the Giants another net 3 points. Mediocre-to-bad teams don’t overcome those kind of soul-crushing mistakes. The bottom line is that Washington made fewer errors and as a result emerged victorious.
That’s it for The Takeaways for this week. I’ll be back after Washington travels to Buffalo on Sunday to face the Bills.