Their Offense Is Their Defense

The Redskins should focus on preserving their core: their great OL coach, their good head coach, their very good QB, their first-rate TE Reed, their first-rate WR, Their blossoming pick Crowder. Their source of indefinable strength, Garcon, the first to affirm the new QB when things could have gone another way.

I do believe Cousins and Gruden can and will improve in coming years. Same for Crowder. The OL is in good shape, and Scherff and Moses are still in the waxing phase. Perhaps the left guard can be upgraded. The necessary refinements here are: Gruden must learn clock management. Cousins must learn to make better decisions re running the ball, and focus on winning games not producing stats. Less fear, more leadership, more vocal, more inspiring. 

The running game will have to be taken as it comes. It's clear Kelley can do something. He's not the best. But if he can avoid fumbling, he's good enough. Against most teams he can gain yardage on most carries. 

The downside of conventions is they trap us into one way of looking at things when we need to continually see them from as many different angles as possible so we don't miss anything. In grabbing for better defense, the Redskins might too lightly esteem the players they do have. It's convention to divide teams into offense and defense, and with obvious reason, but the reality is that the best defense any team can have is keeping its own offense on the field. And the best offense has the best players. So you don't just hurt the offense when you let a DeSean Jackson go, you hurt the defense. So if you ignore the conventional view and just look at the quality of the player, no matter his specific position, then you reach a very different way of looking at things. For every TD pass or deep completion that departs with Jackson, think about what you give up. When he scores or causes a FG to be scored, he has created a need to produce an entire successful drive for the opposition. That's not defense - that's better than defense. 

The point of football is not to keep the other guy from scoring but to keep him from having the ball until you can put at least 21 points between him and yourself (35 if your QB is named Ryan). The better your offense, the less your defense is on the field, the more rested it is, the lower the quality of players it can get by with. This is not the only way to look at things, but it is a serious way of regarding them given where the talent exists on the current roster. In giving up any of the great players up for agency the Redskins risk losing more than is apparent. 

The Redskins defense is not going to be great in 2017. It is possible they will be above average, but they will not be great. The law of averages, the wheel of Fortuna, will probably swing back their way some, and that will be enough to get them toward average, in conjunction with the offense being as good as before, or close to it. Some of the secondary players may develop some over last year. Perhaps a free agent can be brought in. Perhaps a good DL can be drafted. But these things won't cohere overnight. The offense is already in place. All moves should be made with the consideration of protecting this goose that lays the golden eggs. In my view, this translates into: the Skins are well positioned capwise. They have money. They should spend that money on retaining their great catchers, all of them if they can. Because the truth is that it will be easier for them, if they let those guys go, to go downhill on offense than to improve the defense. 

I believe what Jackson says, that the Skins are very close to being an elite team. Jackson has been more valuable than Josh Norman, who refuses to refrain from drawing selfish personal foul penalties. Jackson is like T.Y. Hilton in that he easily runs by people. It's easy to underestimate how valuable that is, and the Skins risk learning a hard lesson if they let him go. The right thing to do is retain both Jackson and Garcon -- and to pay Kirk Cousins top dollar so he's a Redskin through his most productive years. All the main players have come out in support of Cousins getting paid, and they have all said they see a bright future for the team if it continues to develop along the lines of the last two years. That's how I see it myself. It's very easy to say that X's proven ability can be supplied by Y, but you just don't know that for sure. That's precisely the glibness you repent in leisure when, say, Doctson continues to be injured, or isn't actually that good, or one of the other mainstays falls off. Anytime you give up known, proven entities such as Garcon or Jackson, who are not declining, no matter their numerical age, you run a risk. There's no need to do that given the Skins have the money to pay them both. And they both want to be Redskins and have said as much.