The Washington Redskins go to New Jersey this weekend to play the New York Giants, and it’s not looking too good for the Skins. They’re starting the season at 0-2, and they could easily extend that record to 0-3.
The biggest problem the Redskins have this season is once again, the coaching. Redskins head coach Jay Gruden not only looks like a Walmart Auto Care Center assistant manager, but he also coaches like one. That’s assuming he even does any real coaching.
Sean McVay is the offensive coordinator. Joe Barry is the defensive coordinator. In theory, this means Jay Gruden is free to prowl the sidelines looking dumb, thinking of new ways to publicly criticize his team’s quarterback.
From what I can see, that’s what he’s doing.
Since Jay Gruden is technically the head coach, I might as well blame him for the Redskins coaching problems. Who else could I blame, Glorious Leader owner Daniel Snyder?
This past offseason the Redskins placed the Franchise tag on quarterback Kirk Cousins. What this did was it allowed the Redskins to force Kirk Cousins to sign a one-year deal worth the average of the top five quarterbacks in the league. Because of this, Kirk Cousins is making $19.9 million this season. That’s not too shabby, especially considering that he made $660,000 last year.
One of the many advantages of signing your own player during free agency is that the player is a known quantity. For the Redskins, there are no mysteries with Kirk Cousins. The Redskins coaching staff should know Kirk Cousins historically gets off to the slow start. That’s just who he is. In the first six games of last season, Kirk Cousins had a quarterback rating of 78.03. In the remaining 12 games last season, his quarterback rating was nearly 119.
A competent coaching staff would take this aspect of Kirk Cousins’s game into consideration and try to engineer game plans to start the season that take the burden away from the passing game and place it on the running game. Have the Redskins done this?
No, they most certainly have not.
The Redskins so far this season have thrown the ball 89 times and ran the ball only 29 times. The Redskins have thrown the ball three out of every four plays. Even if the Redskins were productive throwing the ball so much, and they have most certainly not been, that’s mind-numbingly one-dimensional.
One-dimensional teams don’t win a lot in the NFL. Poorly coached teams don’t win a lot either.
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