Ashburn, Va. — The Washington Redskins got back to practice today after taking four days to regroup following a surprisingly bad game against the division rival New York Giants. The injury list is still long for the team, with cornerback Tracy Porter, tight end Jordan Reed and tight end Niles Paul not on the practice field. Fortunately, Pro Bowl left tackle Trent Williams, while not working out with his teammates today, is hopeful he will be back for the upcoming Monday Night Football game against the 2-1 Seattle Seahawks.
The game on Monday is an important one. The Redskins, currently 1-3, need to get their season back in order. After a good showing against the 0-4 Jacksonville Jaguars (quarterback Kirk Cousins threw for 250 yards and two touchdowns, Alfred Morris ran for 85 yards and two touchdowns and Paul had 99 receiving yards and a touchdown), and a decent game — albeit a loss — versus the Philadelphia Eagles (Cousins: 427 yards and three touchdowns, Morris: 77 yards and wide out Pierre Garçon: 138 yards and a touchdown); Washington came out last Thursday night on national television and dropped an egg, losing to the Giants 45-14 with six turnovers. While there was a question about whether or not they would win this game, no one really thought the team would lose that badly.
In the post-practice open locker room session today, Williams did say that the felt like the team went into that Thursday night game a little over-confident and didn’t put forth their best effort. But he also indicated that overall, they didn’t play as badly as originally thought.
“We need to fix a couple of things,” he said to reporters, “but we’re not as far off as we thought we were. After watching the film and re-evaluating the way everybody played, it wasn’t as bad as we thought it was.”
The team played the Eagles on Sunday September 21, and then they played the Giants four days later on Thursday the 25. They don’t play again until Monday night, October 6 and, because of the huge amount of injuries they have, they really needed the long break. A couple of guys joked that they didn’t even leave their houses on the Friday following the game. But it is hard to have a long break after such a tough loss because a lot of guys want to get back to football and play another team to get the bad taste of the loss out of their mouths. While Williams said it was good to just relax over the weekend, watch all of the other games and heal; Garçon had a different feeling about it.
“After a loss it’s tough to get away and not think about it in your off time,” the receiver told the media. “You just have to keep moving forward, keep dealing with it. I wish the results were different but I wouldn’t say ‘it was nice to get away’.”
Things generally become clearer after the high emotion and adrenaline of any game, especially a bad loss like the Redskins had Thursday night. Of course, the first order of business for head coach Jay Gruden was to watch the film and try to figure out what went so terribly wrong. He agrees with Williams in that there were at least a few things that went right.
“We’re 1-3 so there’s not a lot of positive probably people would say,” Gruden said today in his post-practice press conference, “but, I think from a positive standpoint, I think guys were flying around to the football and they were playing hard. I feel like, if you play hard, you have a better chance to win than if you don’t and we had some great chances for us to really fall asleep, lose our aggression, [to] loaf, so-to-speak. But I don’t think our guys were doing that. I just think that we were not making any plays which is different. [The Giants] were making great plays on the ball, their receivers and tight ends were making the contested catches and we weren’t. And offensively we just turned the ball over. But, guys were playing hard, they were competing until the final whistle and that’s something to be encouraged about. I think we still have the talent in this building that we can do some good things this year. We just gotta do things better, more efficiently and obviously smarter as far as what our assignments are and obviously ball security.”
Speaking of ball security, Cousins did throw more interceptions than any quarterback in the league in Week 4. But Gruden doesn’t necessarily feel like he’s got a budding Rex Grossman on his hands. As a matter of fact, he explained the errant throws from Thursday night to the media today.
“I mean, each interception is different,” Gruden said. “You can’t say that he is doing this all the time and that’s why he threw four interceptions. Each interception was different. One of them at the very end, he was trying to force the ball down the field. We told him to take a shot to [receiver] DeSean [Jackson] down the sidelines. He kind of got hit and floated it on him. One of them, he stared down Pierre a little bit long which made the safety come over and make a play. One he threw a little bit too early and didn’t really see the location of the corner; had bad ball location on the one to Ryan Grant on the sideline. So they are all different in their own way. They are all correctable mistakes in my mind and they will be corrected. I know that he is very aware of what he needs to do better and he will. He is a very aware kid and wants to do great. [He’s] very frustrated with the outcome but it’s not going to alter his performance moving forward. He’ll learn from it and he won’t go into a tank and be shell-shocked I hope. He has just got to play himself out of it and he will… like all quarterbacks do at that time.”
Washington has a huge contest coming in a week which will be, yet again, in front of a national crowd and on home turf. It’s well documented how games like this have turned out for this team in the recent past. But one would hope that the loss against the New York Giants was a wakeup call in all phases of the game, from the players to the coaches to the training staff.
On paper, the Redskins do have a lot of talent. But they need to have four quarters of well-designed play-calling and great execution to beat the reigning Super Bowl champ Seahawks. In other words, a total best effort is required. Can Seattle be beat? Williams thinks so.
“I mean, yea,” the Pro Bowler said when asked if the team could beat the Seahawks. “At the end of the day, they’re not robots. They’re human beings and nobody’s perfect. Nobody plays perfect every Sunday so… I mean, they have been beaten before. It’s not like they’re unstoppable. They’re a great team, no doubt about it. But yea… anything is possible in the NFL.”
Hail.