This time last year I wrote a post about how excited I was for the upcoming Redskins season, and well, I was. We aren’t even through summer at this point, barely started at that! Training camp is over a month out, but I am constantly looking for news about the team, rumors about player movement, etc. But, should I be excited? To me, football season has a lot of other reasons to be excited, I enjoy the league aside from the Redskins, but how excited should I actually be about the Redskins season?
After last season I had a lot of writing done on a post about how “the Redskins season leaves me very conflicted.” I think a lot of people were and still are very ready to write off the Redskins. There are reasons to not like ownership, management, some dislike the coach… But at the end of last season I was jaded and for the first time in my memory I actually voluntarily stopped watching games. It was impossible for me to subject myself to that level of ineptitude by the end.
I held back on sharing that post. I let the season go, and just let things pan out and did not let myself rage on the internet about it. In the end, it is a game. As important as I find the games, I couldn’t let myself get too vested in it.
Going back to the middle of the last season, the team was 6-4 and was almost guaranteed to make a playoff run… Unless some act of god happened… And it did. Looking at things in that light, and then thinking about how the mountain of injuries continued to pile up, I cannot really let myself “rage” about what happened. People are entitled to feel how they want about it, but to me – an outsider looking in – those injuries were not something that anyone in the organization had control over.
After Smith went down with that awful leg injury, many were open to Colt taking over, and felt he could handle the job. Then as we know, another act of god happened. Yes, the team signed Sanchez – that didn’t work out. Fair enough. The team was still doing everything they could to try and win. The coaches coached. The team, what was left of it, played. They were buyers at the trade deadline, not sellers. And the injuries happened.
Coming back to this upcoming season, there is a sense of excitement around the team – especially around the draft. But now there is yet another cloud over everything with the onset of uncertainty around the offensive line… The Trent Williams hold out, Scherff’s contract, injuries. Then with all of that, the lack of quality showing up in practices.
The excitement building around Haskins is definitely fun, but I was not a proponent of drafting him, which leaves me skeptical. The team obviously has actual talent evaluators, and I am only a fan who periodically writes about the team, but something just never sat right going into the draft for me when looking at Haskins. I can be swayed, and hope that I am. The trade up for Sweat is something that has me intrigued. I think adding him to an already stacked defensive front can only reap reward. Overall, the draft was a success in my eyes, without an ability to truly “grade” it due to lack of tangible evidence of quality.
With the constant back and forth of off-season frustration and excitement, noteworthy progress in the beginning of last season, a come back to reality at the end of the 2018 season, the roller coaster is leaving me with questions.
In the end, I likely wont be able to keep myself from being excited for football, but how excited should I be about this upcoming Redskins season? Is what is happening with this team worth getting excited for?
What are your thoughts?
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