The release of the 2011 Redskins schedule offers hope.
Anthony Brown took the first stab of the season with the offical pre-draft pre-season pre-lockout resolution preduction of: seven wins. The Redskins play a schedule outside of the division that seems ficticiously easy. They will play only four teams all year who had a winning record in 2010: Philadelphia, New York, other New York, and New England. 10 games will be played against competion that went sub .500 last year. Following this logic: the Redskins need only to be a mediocre team in order to expect 10 wins and a playoff berth this year.
There’s a problem with that logic: it’s not very sound. First of all, it assumes that the Redskins were already capable of being an average team, something they weren’t last year. It also assumes that none of the nine sub 500 teams the Redskins will play will get any better. This of course, would be a mistake: the team on the schedule most likely to improve off an underachieving season is the Dallas Cowboys, who the Redskins play twice. According to the above logic that would put the Redskins at ten wins based off the schedule, Dallas (a bad team last year) would account for two of those wins. Problem was, the Cowboys might have been a better team than the Redskins last year. They’re almost certain to improve at a rate that the Redskins will not. Two wins against the Cowboys this year is improbable. One win is reasonable, but hardly granted.
The hope is that the Redskins can surprise and get those two wins over the Cowboys and maybe steal one from the Eagles and Giants, and then handle business against the Vikings, Dolphins, Panthers, Cardinals and Bills (in Toronto!), and that’s 9 wins right there with five games left to play. A mediocre team COULD pull off that run (4-2 in a tough division; 5-0 against the weakest teams on ones schedule), but it would be my guess that a team that wins all those games would likely be better than mediocre. The Washington Redskins are going to have to scratch and claw to win on the road in Minnesota and Toronto and Miami and Carolina. 2-2 in those three games is likely: they are road games after all and its tough to complain about any sort of road win, but you see above, I was (falsely) picking a midding Redskins team to run off those four wins. It’s not that simple. Even with the home victory against Arizona (a legitimately bad team) taken for granted, we’re still looking at an IMPROVED Redskins team leveraging a soft schedule into a 3-2 record. And that says nothing about difficult trips to St. Louis and Seattle this year, looking possibly at 3-4 in terms of expected wins against non-playoff competition from last year. Suffice to say, a playoff Redskins team almost has to grab those divisional wins over underachieving opponents, and this is an area where last years Redskins went a mere 2-4.
What seems probable is that we’re looking at a 5-9 team with two home games against the AFCs elite, New England and New York, unaccounted for. In recent history, the Redskins have proven a poor competitor at home against an elite competition. If the Redskins are managing touchdown margin of victories at home over teams fighting for playoff lives in the AFC, this is a much improved team over last year. But if we pencil either of those games in as losses at home, the Redskins are staring at a 5-11 season, where two of the wins come over divisional opponents in the loaded NFC East.
The ‘hope’ is that the Redskins may be able to leverage an easy schedule into an improbable playoff run, but the reality is that the easy schedule may simply be leveraged into a few extra wins by a sub-par team, and a pick in the 2012 draft right around where the Redskins are picking in 2011: 10th overall.
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