Therapeutic Retrospective 2021 Journey – Part 4…the home stretch
February 17, 2022
By Paul Francis
This past NFL postseason was one for the books. There were many epic games, from the divisional round straight to the Superbowl. Part of what made them so epic was how they came down to the wire. With minutes…even seconds to go, many of the games were anyone’s to win, including the Superbowl. I can’t imagine being in a scenario where so many countless hours, days, weeks and months of grinding work comes down to a few moments on the home stretch, but that’s what we got to see, and it was incredibly memorable for any bonafide football fan who followed it.
I use this as a slight – slight – parallel and segue into the reflection on the home stretch of the 2021 Washington season.
With a 4 game win streak jolting new life into a Washington season that was all but dead, the last 5 games suddenly had relevance. With all the games coming up against divisional opponents, EVERYTHING was suddenly still in play. Almost 3/4ths of the season was over, yet somehow winning out would deliver another NFC East title and trip to the playoffs. Losing out would mean possibly finishing last in the division.
I remember entering this stretch feeling like we’d fall somewhere in between. We could make the playoffs with a wild card, but the division felt out of reach. But that’s why you play the games, right? Sitting at 2-6, I certainly didn’t expect to kick off a 4 game win streak with a victory over Tampa Bay, so anything was possible. Game on.
Week 14: Cowboys at Home
What I Remember
I remember not liking this one at all. I had already felt that our run of wins would end in Las Vegas, but we eaked that out. This one definitely felt like a bridge too far. The Cowboys, player-for-player, were a superior team. And unlike the previous season when we stomped and swept them, this time we had to face a whole and healthy Dak Prescott. But it’s Dallas Week with everything to play for, so I sat down on the couch with my son that Sunday afternoon and settled in to get behind the team.
What Happened
With about 40 seconds to go in the 1st quarter, Washington decided to go for it on 4th and 3 from their own 46 yard line. Clearly wanting to put a spark into their performance and gain some momentum in a game where Dallas had gotten the early upper hand, Washington’s spark ended up detonating a bomb in its face. Micah Parsons burst through the line and clobbered Heinicke, fumbling the ball, which was then scooped and scored by the Dallas defense for an 18-0 lead.
I have been watching the Redskins/WFT my entire life. When you’ve watched this team for a certain amount of time, you get an early sense of when the team is “in it” and when it is not. At that point, I knew the game was over. I distinctly recall turning to my son and telling him flat out “Listen to your father, I’m here to guide you in life. Do not waste the rest of your afternoon watching this game. I’m telling you it’s over. Trust me, do something else.”
For my part I left the game, but my poor naïve and hopeful son did not. I ran some errands and had a lovely bike ride with my daughter on a lovely sunny afternoon. I floated back into the game later in the 4th quarter just in time to see Dak Prescott throw a horrible INT directly into the waiting hands of Cole Holcomb, who returned it for a pick-six cutting Dallas’s lead to a single score with minutes to go.
With my son leaping for joy, I could see the hope welling up in him. Once again, I turned to him, looked him in the eye and said “Listen to me. Do not waste your hope on this game. Trust me. They are going to break your heart.” He would not listen. After an awful WFT fumble ended a would-be-game-winning-or-tying drive, I left thinking 2 things:
- Why did I lead my poor son down this path of Washington fanhood when I know it only ends in grief?
- He’s going to have to man-up and learn for himself if he’s going to be a true fan: This is the way. (Cue Mandalorian music)
Week 15: Eagles Away
What I Remember
This is the week it went bonkers. With the newest, sexiest Covid variant “Omicron” doing its worldwide tour, it decided to come and party with the NFL. You may recall Washington being one of several teams that got ravaged by positive tests triggering mass quarantines and sending the entire league into a tailspin. The guys we were signing off the street as replacements for the guys on the COVID list, were getting put on the COVID list. Make no mistake, the week leading up to this Philly game was unprecedented in the way it scrambled a football team on every conceivable level. With the game delayed a day and Washington starting someone named “Garrett Gilbert” along with a skeleton crew of players, we rolled into Philly.
What Happened
It’s Tuesday night, and I’m doing typical “Tuesday night” things which does not include watching football. A couple cheers coming from the other room prompt me to interrupt my work and check the score online. Washington is up 10-0 in the first quarter. In typical Washington fashion, the team gave the fans just enough false hope to think something good might happen. I got rope-a-doped. I decide to invest time and eyeballs on the screen just in time to begin seeing the Washington COVID All-stars crumble like a team being led by “Garrett Gilbert”. Philly was a beatable mediocre team, but this loss flipped our playoff-run prospects. We were now on the outside looking in, needing to muster “something” from a COVID ravaged roster in the last 3 games, and get some help along the way. I knew in my heart it was over. The “math” might say otherwise, and the Washington noobs (like my son) may have been spinning scenarios where things break our way, and we squeeze into the playoffs, but…those of us who know, just know.
Week 16: Cowboys Away
What I Remember
One of the core teachings of Buddhism has to do with a paradox. Desire (or craving) is the root cause of evil; and so the path to enlightenment has to do with the conundrum of desiring to expunge “desire” and achieve the desire-free state of nirvana where one simply experiences experience. Now I’m not Buddhist, and I may have completely botched that presentation of a core teaching, but you get the point (maybe). It’s December 26th, and I’m enjoying a Christmas holiday with friends and family at Bethany Beach. And there’s a football game about to happen. But I have fully achieved WFT-nirvana at this point. I am free from desire, craving or expectation about the team. I understand that the season is over, and I have the game on merely to experience the experience.
What Happened
It’s a good thing I was in this state of mind, because a Washington fan who may still have cared certainly experienced one of the most debaculous, humiliating, and shameful experiences in the history of football experiences. But not me. There was something actually slightly amusing about the pile-on. Between teammates throwing sideline haymakers, blocked punts in the end zone, and a Cowboys backup Olineman catching a TD, I was half expecting the game to be revealed as a GEICO commercial. I will not remind us of the final scoreline, but it was a perfectly reasonable outcome for a game in which a superiorly talented team plays at home with a healthy roster and winning momentum, and their opponent has to travel on a short week with an inferior roster in COVID-recovery riding 2 losses and a history of duds in prime time. I do also remember making a killer crab-dip! So that was nice.
The public outcry after Dallas week was loud and long. Questions were not only being asked of this team, but of the overall leadership and direction of the Ron Rivera rebuild. For me, most of this was overkill. To be sure the Dallas Debacle was a low moment, but when you consider the circumstances of the prior weeks leading into the game, you have to adjust perspective. These guys are not robots, and the NFL is not an EA Madden video game. The guys came into Dallas already completely spent and suffered through “one of those games” where everything that could go wrong did. Moving on.
Week 17: Eagles at Home
What I Remember
I remember feeling like this would be a “bounce-back” game for us. I wasn’t convinced we would win, but I was pretty sure we’d look like a competitive and reasonably competent group. And we would prove that the prior week was an exception, not a trend. The knives were coming out for RR, and I believed this game would get them back in the sheaths.
What Happened
It happened mostly as I thought it would. Washington put up a decent fight in a competitive performance. I know that’s an odd way to describe a 20-16 home loss against a team that’s not much better than you (if at all), when you carried a lead into the 4th quarter. But it was “bounce-back” in a relative return to the normal mediocrity of WFT, as opposed to continuing the trend of humiliating debacles a-la Week 16. This game basically turned on a couple of 4th and goal plays that Philly ended up converting. That was the difference. Although this loss mathematically eliminated us from the playoffs, for me elimination had already happened a couple weeks prior. So this was just the facts catching up to reality.
Week 18: Giants at Home
What I Remember
With nothing to play for except the ole professional pride, the run up to Week 18 finale should have been pretty hum-drum. But then Joe Judge opened his mouth. With the Giants playing like one of the worst teams ever assembled under one of the worst head coaches ever hired, Joe Judge did what people deflecting blame typically do: try to throw someone else under the bus. And that someone else was the Washington Football Team, in a thinly-veiled reference to a “clown organization”. Now, let’s be clear. WFT has absolutely been a clown organization for decades. BUT the only people allowed to actually say that are the WFT fans, not the loudmouth incompetent coach of the New York Giants – one of the few teams in the NFL that’s been worse than us over the past 5 years. So, the meaningless Week 18 matchup between the 2 bottom-feeders of one of the worst divisions in football just got interesting.
What Happened
WFT manned up and took care of business. It was a tidy mopping of the hapless Giants, as it should have been. Adding self-inflicted insult to self-inflicted injury the highlight/lowlight of the game was Joe Judge deciding to run consecutive QB sneaks in the 2nd quarter merely to give his special teams unit more room to punt out of their own end zone. This decision was unprecedented and widely mocked league-wide as a waving the white flag when your team isn’t even out of the first half. Anyhow, if there is such thing as ending a 7-10 season on a high note, this was it. When you are a loser, you can still relish the even worse misfortune of others to make you feel better. Joe Judge, thanks for being a dummy and giving us the opportunity to get you fired. The hater-inside got to crack in a smile.
In conclusion…
Here we are at the end of our 2021 retrospective journey. With the exercise of purging and processing the different feelings of this roller-coaster year, my hope is to be more clear-eyed about the things we need as a team, but also about my investment as a fan.
I went into the season predicting 7-8 wins, and we got the 7. For me this puts us squarely in the “meh” category of a team. We’re not bad, but we’re not good. There’s enough there to make you think we can improve and be in the mix to win the division next year, but there also enough lacking in some key places to believe that Washington will follow its usual path of crapping out part way through a rebuild. I’m at least still interested in seeing where this is going.
Walking away from the 2021-2022 season, I will take all the positive memories I can. Being able to enjoy the home wins against the Giant and Seahawks at the stadium with my kids will be great memories for life. It was fun riding the Heinicke bandwagon for as long as it lasted. There’s something about the underdog story that you’ve gotta enjoy as a fan, even if you know it won’t pan out. The win against Brady and Tampa Bay will go down as one of the greatest all-time victories for me in the post-Gibbs era.
And while there’s not a whole lot of good to take away from that 1-4 stretch to close the season, I take away this: the team showed character. After the horrid COVID week and that huge Dallas loss, a lot of prior Washington teams we’ve seen probably would have folded completely. We’ve seen this organization buckle top-to-bottom at previous times under similar conditions. But credit to the culture that RR has instilled. They picked themselves up and played competitive football for the last 2 weeks. That’s something to build on even if it doesn’t show up as a position on the roster. After all, it’s not like we’re some clown organization.
So enough of the retrospective therapy-sessions! It’s back to the present day! We are refreshed, renewed, locked and loaded to tackle what’s ahead and boldly forge the way forward for Washington!
What will Year 3 of our current rebuild look like?
How will our young stars of the future emerge for the next season?
Where will we find our next franchise QB?
What name do we call ourselves as a team?
Where will we be placing a new stadium?
Will our owner be pushed out of the NFL on the heels of an ongoing sex abuse scandal that involves legal investigations and Congressional hearings?
UGH.
Anyone know a good therapist?