What a difference a season makes.
The Texans are 2-12, having lost 12 straight (including two games against the truly terrible Jacksonville Jaguars), and are currently leading the NFL Dead Pool race for the #1 draft pick. The Redskins are right there nipping at their heals at 3-11, and the Falcons are right there with them at 4-10. Houston has already fired their head coach, Gary Kubiak, and you wonder if Mike Shanahan and Mike Smith may suffer the same fate in D.C. and ATL as well. It's rare to see three playoff teams flop so badly simultaneously, and the failings of these three clubs provides a cautionary tale for those of us who have teams to root for which are actually good to enjoy the moment, since the moment can pass really fast. (You could also throw into this discussion the New York Giants, who won a Super Bowl two seasons ago and are now 4-10, and looked about as lifeless as any team I can remember in being shut out at home this past Sunday, but the Giants weren't really any good last year, either.)
(Administrative note: there are many media outlets which have chosen to no longer print the nickname of the Washington D.C. football team. The LOSE will continue using the name Redskins, but only in the following context:
Go potatoes! And with that, on with the opera and enough will all of these parentheticals ...)
Most professional sports leagues pay lip service to the idea of
And it goes without saying that the injury bug has hit these teams hard. Injuries are the great unknown in football – you know they're going to happen, but you don't know just how severe they will be. Championship teams in most sports typically suffer fewer than average numbers of injuries over the course of a season, and bad teams will often suffer more, at which point their lack in depth of talent is exposed. And the Falcons' woes this season have quite a bit to do with injuries, as they've missed their top two WRs for most of the year, and their offensive line is completely trashed. Atlanta's explosive offense from last season, with great talent at all the skill positions, has disintegrated about as badly as the offensive line disintegrated on this play vs. the Washington Redskins last weekend. Matt Ryan does well to avoid a jailbreak by the Skins defensive line, but his follow through on the shovel pass leaves a little to be desired:
That may be one of the worst plays I've seen all season. It sort of sums up the Falcons year.
The Falcons rode their dynamic offense all the way to the best record in the NFC last year, and they had to, because their defense wasn't very good. The defense blew a 20-point halftime lead vs. the Seahawks in the playoffs, only to be saved by Matt Ryan's late game heroics, and then the Falcons blew a 17-point lead the following week in losing to the 49ers in the NFC Championship. And to address this in the offseason, the Falcons did ... well, not much of anything, really. Their defense is just as lousy as last season, or maybe it's worse:
Yeah, it's worse. I have no idea what the DBs are doing on that play. The cornerback gets abused and the free safety misses the ball by a good four yards. They made Redskins backup QB Kirk Cousins look like Peyton Manning on Sunday. (That Cousins is playing at all is something we'll get to in a few minutes.)
Now, I've never believed the mantra that 'defense wins championships.' Most coaches preach defense because they were bad at offense when they used to play, but at least they could be the smart guy who played defense and were thus somewhat useful. Defense is, in fact, easier. It's easier to teach and easier to coach, particularly by small control freaks patrolling the sidelines. That said, you have to at least play it somewhat competently to give your team a chance to be successful regularly. And when injuries ravage your offensive weapons and you can't stop anybody, you're 4-10 in December and there are likely to be job openings.
The Houston Texans, actually, have a statistically good defense – 4th in the league in yards allowed. The problem in Houston has been that the offense keeps scoring on itself. I referenced the following play in a post earlier this year about luck, in which the Texans inexplicably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:
Forget what I said before about the worst play of the season. THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE. The Texans haven't won a game since they handed the Seahawks this game on a silver platter. The Texans have a solid running game with two good backs, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year in J.J. Watt, and one of the game's great receivers in Andre Johnson, but bad QB play just kills your football team, as it destroys your whole team's collective rhythm and confidence. And few have played the position worse this season than Texans QB Matt Schaub did, as he threw a "pick six" in four consecutive games. So after Schaub got hurt in a game vs. the Rams (which was rather unfortunately met with cheers from the Houston fans), the Texans switched to backup T.J. Yates ...
Egads.
Houston then blew a 21-3 halftime lead on Sunday Night Football, losing to the Colts 27:24 at home, and everyone involved seemed to give up after that. Despite being stingy allowing yards, the Texans are 25th in points allowed, in part because the team is -15 in turnovers and gives up short fields all the time when they aren't scoring on themselves. Injuries have shelved some of their top players, and they've gone through 3 QBs and two head coaches. But this may be a similar case to last year's Kansas City Chiefs, in that there is still a good collection of talent which will recover from an awful season pretty quickly if they can get a coach who knows what he's doing and a QB who can throw the ball to a guy in the same coloured jersey.
The Redskins imploded almost immediately this year, as the Philadelphia Eagles ran all over them in the first week of the season, and they've been behind the 8-ball ever since. RG3 rushed back from his knee injury, just as Minnesota Vikings RB/freak of nature Adrian Petersen had done the year before. What Petersen did was unprecedented, coming off a major knee surgery and playing at an MVP level the following year. It was completely unrealistic for anyone in Washington to expect RG3 – or anyone else, for that matter – to do that. Without his speed and running ability, RG3 hasn't been nearly as effective this year – and, since the QBs are always the scapegoats, this has led to him shouldering much of the blame for the Redskins atrocious season.
Which is preposterous.
He has receivers who drop passes, a defense which can't tackle, and he's become a pawn in an absurd power struggle between megalomaniacal owner Dan Snyder and head coach Mike Shanahan, who has parlayed having John Elway there to win two Super Bowls for him in Denver into a rather curious image as an elite coach. The Redskins have been a dysfunctional organization ever since Snyder bought them, and he's run through six coaches in 11 years. But Snyder loves RG3, and understandably so, as he is a potentially transcendent talent and one of the games great young personalities. Shanahan has now decided to 'shut down' RG3 for the season, supposedly because he isn't healthy enough to continue to play, but he probably wasn't healthy enough to play the first 13 games then, either.
The mismanaged organization, meanwhile, has been hamstrung by fines and penalties for flagrantly violating the salary cap, which is good in that it momentarily stymied Dan Snyder's penchant for grossly overpaying past-their-prime free agents. They'll get some relief from that next year, but this team is one hell of a mess. The Redskins haven't won a Super Bowl in over 20 years and have rarely been relevant during that time other than provide some curiosity to ambulance chasers interested in seeing a wreck. Shanahan is owed something like $7 million after this year, even though he's feuded with his QB and his owner. Snyder will likely have to bite the bullet and get rid of him, and hire his 7th coach in 12 years, but who would want this job at this point? When you are hired by the tyrannical head of the Potatoes (and humorless at that, as he's gone so far as to try to squelch radio broadcasts parodying his team), you're libel to be easily mashed.
Now there is some hope for all of this clubs for next season, of course. All three possess players who, when healthy, are elite-level talents. That's a good place to start. And while the NFL Draft is no guarantee of success when it comes to talent acquisition, they'll all get the pick of the litter. The Texans in particular have built their franchise slowly and steadily through the draft over time, preaching patience to their fan bases as the club blossomed into a budding powerhouse – which is why their sudden fall from grace has been somewhat shocking. But losing is the default option in competition. You have to do everything you possibly can to avoid it. And success is never guaranteed, which is what makes long streaks of success, such as that of the Patriots, somewhat remarkable. Enjoy it while it lasts. It's while I'm enjoying this Seahawks season greatly, and hoping they don't revert to their usual form any time soon.
