By Mark Bacon
The Washington Redskins are imperfect yet maddeningly flaky, and oddly enjoyable. They’re the prototypical good, bad NFL East team.
They do have a 3-2 record. But serve as physical comedy every week. You’re not sure whether you’re laughing at them or laughing with them. They’re not sure, either. But they have a quality, no matter how difficult to quantify, that keeps them on the right side of mediocrity. They have a gift not only for winning ugly but for winning cray-cray. The crazier the game, the more likely they are to prevail. They have been this way for about a year now, and for all the confused facial expressions they cause, wacky works for them.
If you want to encapsulate Washington’s 16-10 victory Sunday over Baltimore in one play, fast forward the 6:09 mark of the third quarter. With Washington leading 13-10 at M&T Bank Stadium, Kirk Cousins threw an interception to Baltimore linebacker C.J. Mosley, who leaped high to snag the pass at the Washington 13-yard line. Then Mosley weaved toward the end zone, en route to one of those plays that would incite another round of DC quarterback bashing. And just when you knew that Cousins was being fitted yet again for goat’s horns, Mosley fumbled at the 1-yard line. The ball trickled through the end zone and out of bounds. It was a touchback. It was so apropos for this game.
Redskins held off the Ravens, 16-10, for third straight win
This is the NFL at its best — or its worst, depending on your blood pressure. The upper echelon is almost deserted, the slums are just as uncongested, and the middle tier is overpopulated and reeks. The middle can seem like purgatory. It’s full of bad games that produce good drama, and a team’s fate is determined by how well or poorly it handles playing bad football.
Every year, there are playoff teams that have this mystical knack for collecting wins in this manner. Every year, there are teams that finish 7-9 or 8-8 and curse how close they were to two or three more victories.
The Ravens won three close games to start the season, and now they have lost two straight close ones. Washington’s route to 3-2: Lose the first two, then claim three straight games that could have gone either way. Two of those victories have been on the road.
On Sunday, one foot was the difference between winning and losing. With 33 seconds remaining, Ravens QB Joe Flacco seemed to complete a 23-yard touchdown pass to Breshad Perriman, who made the catch over cornerback Josh Norman. But the replay showed that Perriman had only one foot inbounds. The initial touchdown call was reversed, and the pass was ruled incomplete. Baltimore went from being an extra point from winning to losing in painful fashion.
What does Washington do consistently well? What’s the one thing that you can depend on an entire unit of this team to excel at, regardless of the opponent? Unless there’s a stat for persuading opponents to join you in making stupefying errors, Washington is a team without a constant strength. Still, it knows how to manipulate a scoreboard in its favor.
Through five games, Washington has scored seven fewer points than its opponents. But it has won two of three games that have been decided by six points or fewer. The offense still abandons the run too often, especially in short-yardage situations. The defense still starts too slowly. The entire team still does too many incomprehensible things on the field.
But it also has the talent to execute an 85-yard punt return touchdown from Jamison Crowder and a beautiful 21-yard Cousins touchdown pass to Pierre Garçon. And it has the toughness that leads Norman to play the final three quarters as “the one-hand bandit” after a right wrist injury. It has the persistence to deliver its best defensive performance when the criticism is most extreme.
They don’t perform. They play football games. Judge them like you’re at the movies, and you will be disappointed. Judge them on competitiveness, and, well, they’re not beyond disappointing you there, either. Still, they keep playing and correcting. They keep winning, too.
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