Our pals over at Hogs Haven aren't having the most fun football season. It's been a very trying one for those who support the Burgundy and Gold. Today, they found a way to sum it up:
There's one word to define the Redskins franchise. It's not a pleasant one. I'm searching for another word, but all I can think of is this. To couch the impact of this word, I am now on record saying I believe completely the Redskins will bounce back sometime in Shanahan's tenure.
But in summary, the state of the 2010 Redskins is this:
Hopeless.
Truer word has never been written. The whole article is excellent and worth a read. We'll have more snippets after the jump.
There are many worse teams in the NFL than the Redskins. Not coincidentally, we've lost to a few of them. I'd say the 'Skins have better top-to-bottom talent than the Lions, the Bills, the entire NFC West, and several other squads.
But the Redskins are the current product of a failed philosophy, and it has been backwards for so long that a recovery is going to take a long time. The Redskins have been using band-aids for gashing wounds for so long that eventually the entire product has critical injuries abound.
The bottom line is that the Redskins have been trying to win the wrong way for too long. You don't win with free agency, you win by stringing together a few successful drafts.
If anyone from Ashburn reads this, I plead with you: keep your draft picks. If possible, get some more. We'll part with just about anyone in order for you to do so. (Someone, please give us a 4th for Fred Davis, right?) We need to have a generation of new players, a phasing-out of the reminders of the last 12 years. The Redskins-are-just-a-paycheck-era needs to end. We need smart, fast, and well-composed leaders who are truly professional, and hungry to win, football players.
This isn't going to be fixed overnight, or even over the course of a successful offseason. The Redskins are broken, plain and simple. And it's going to take a lot of effort, and a lot of smart moves to fix them.