The Redskins Blog

Tuesday, January 26: Could You Have Rooted For Troy Aikman?

My thoughts on Brett Favre are well-documented here and I don’t feel at all compelled to go into them again. But watching Favre on Sunday — seeing him lead the Vikings and their fans JUST to the brink of the Super Bowl before throwing one of the stupidest interceptions in a career studded with 317 of the things — I found myself wondering if Vikings fans were really surprised by how things turned out.

Not just because Favre does throw a lot of interceptions; that stat is largely overblown, and taken as a percentage of his total passes, those 317 interceptions really aren’t that bad at all.

No, the reason Vikings fans shouldn’t have been surprised is because they had been forced all season to root for a guy that they had been trained to HATE, and I can’t imagine the level of confusion and frustration that would’ve accompanied a Favre-led Vikings Super Bowl win.

Think about it from an analogous Redskins perspective. Read more »

Tuesday, January 12: Rooting For … The Cowboys?

An interesting item on ProFootballTalk this morning about the provisions put into the CBA to prevent an uncapped year from turning into the rich getting richer. I hadn’t been thinking about it much because it was so far from relevant to the extremely non-playoff 2009 Redskins, but it boils down to this: teams in the final eight will be faced with certain limitations in the upcoming 2010 free agency period.

Here are the four major restrictions as cited in PFT, with me attempting to do a lawyerese-to-English translation on each one. Read more »

Hunter Smith On The Dallas Video Screen And (Not) Testing Out The Colts Stadium

Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback this week opens with a discussion of the controversy over the giant HD screens at the new Dallas Cowboys stadium.

(If you’ve somehow missed this controversy, here’s a quick summary: there are frankly enormous new video screens hanging over the field in the new stadium, presumably so God can watch TV through the hole in the roof. In the first preseason game at the stadium, the punters were repeatedly hitting the screens in warm-ups, and the Titans’ rookie punter bounced a ball off the screen in the game itself. This, for obvious reasons, does not sit well with the league or its punters.)

Anyhow, King’s column recaps the issue in far greater detail, then segues into a discussion with Bill Polian, owner of the Indianapolis Colts and member of the NFL Competition Committee, in which Polian delivers this anecdote.

I saw this and made a mental note to ask Smith — now punting for the Redskins — about it, but I didn’t think of it as a particularly pressing issue. I figured I’d ask him about it, he’d say something like, “Yep. I punted at a beam. It was [either great or terrible or uninteresting]” and that would be that.

That is not how the dialogue played out.

Here’s how it actually went.

Me: “Okay, so you were the guy who tested the–”

Smith: “No.” Read more »