Chris Baker spent a long weekend in Miami with his fiancée, Jamila, yet couldn’t pull himself away from the television long enough to completely avoid the Cleveland Browns’ 24-3 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals on Thursday evening.
Andre Roberts escaped to Phoenix, where he played 36 holes of golf one day, 27 holes the next and 18 on each of his last two days in the shadow of the Arizona Cardinals’ eventual run to a league-best 8-1 record.
No matter where the Washington Redskins dispersed last week, they did so with constant reminders that the football season remained in full swing. And, as they returned from their bye week on Monday for an hour-long practice at Redskins Park, they remained mindful of the task that lies before them as they prepare to finish out the final seven weeks of the regular season.
“We’ve got to come back with a focused mindset and try to win out,” Roberts said. “That’s really the only chance we have of making the playoffs, and that’s what we want to do here — make the playoffs and see what happens. We’re trying to win out.”
The league-mandated five-day break offered players the chance to escape the cauldron of another woebegone season in Ashburn. At 3-6, they are in familiar territory, having held that record in each of the last three seasons.
Only once — in 2012, when the Redskins won their final seven games to win the NFC East and qualify for the playoffs — have they made anything of such a lackluster start. That season, then-coach Mike Shanahan said following a Week 9 loss to Carolina that the team would begin evaluating its players when it returned from the upcoming bye week, only to retroactively claim it was a motivating tactic as the Redskins began winning games.
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Coach Jay Gruden didn’t make any similar claim before players scattered last week, though he did offer a frank appraisal that, with such a record, he’d grade the team “probably a D, or an F-plus, maybe.”
Having spent much of the week at Redskins Park looking for ways to cast off the team’s skid, Gruden recognized that many of the problems have come in pressure situations. Washington ranks 30th in the NFL in third-down conversion percentage, 15th in red zone offense and 17th in goal-to-go situations, and ranks 18th in red zone defense.
But a number of errors have surfaced at other points in the game as well. The Redskins rank 17th in punt return yards and 28th in kickoff return yards. Their quarterbacks have thrown 11 interceptions, the fifth-most in the league, with Kirk Cousins one of 15 players to have thrown at least three interceptions in a game this season but one of only two to have done it twice.
“I think the big thing is we have to continue focusing on situational football, whether it’s third downs, whether it’s two-minute drill, whether it’s we have the ball at the plus-40 and we need 10 yards to get a field goal for overtime or a touchdown,” Gruden said. “We’ve had situations like that over the course of a season where we’ve not converted, other than [against] Tennessee. … Those other games we lost, it’s just about that. We’ve got to focus in on crunch-time plays. Let the big-time players make big plays in crunch time.”
On offense, the Redskins are yet to have a player take a snap who wasn’t on the 53-man roster for the season-opener at Houston — a streak that will likely end Sunday against Tampa Bay, when wide receiver Leonard Hankerson returns after missing the first nine games because of injury.
Defensively, though, they’ve had 38 players cycle onto the roster, primarily because of injury. Cornerback DeAngelo Hall and outside linebacker Brian Orakpo are each out for the season, while defensive end Stephen Bowen missed the first six games and nose tackle Barry Cofield, injured in the first game, should return Sunday.
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No injury has had a bigger effect, now and for years to come, than the dislocated left ankle sustained by quarterback Robert Griffin III in Week 2. Griffin, who made his return at Minnesota on Nov. 2, will now have seven games to show what he has learned in Gruden’s new offense and prove that he’s capable of being the team’s quarterback, health permitting, into the future.
That’s why, despite the time away, players kept football in the back of their minds last week. Not far past the midpoint of the season, there’s still much for them to prove.
“I think the majority guys probably enjoyed the bye week, but they probably didn’t want one the way we left off against Minnesota,” Gruden said. “I hope they didn’t, anyway. I know I didn’t.”
• Zac Boyer can be reached at zboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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