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Welcome to Overreaction Monday! After a weekend full of live NFL football, we plan to look into the latest happenings in Washington and try to find a major takeaway that could either be completely legitimate or a bit of an overreaction. Often, the sentiment is going to fall somewhere in between, but that’s for you to decide.
Following their fourth-straight victory and a defensive performance that looked more like the 2015 Denver Broncos than the 2020 Washington Football Team, every fan of this squad is likely trying to perform a balancing act that lands them somewhere between keeping their expectations in check and not getting too far out over their skis.
That’s something that’s getting increasingly harder to do for someone who follows everything that Washington has done over the past month of the season. With four-straight wins and the No. 1 spot in the NFC East, Ron Rivera now has his team in the driver’s seat with the 2020 postseason punched into the GPS. Analysts are touting that Washington has a 71 percent chance to make the playoffs after their most recent win, and even if they stumble and miss out on the division title, they are still right in the mix for a wild-card spot.
So for the sake of this exercise, let’s act with some reckless abandon; let’s move forward with the assumption that Washington does indeed finish the rest of the season on this hot-streak and finds a way into the 4-seed in the playoffs. What happens then?
Should that be the case, Washington will most likely have a first-round matchup with either the Seattle Seahawks or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whichever team gets the No. 5 seed. At first glance, that’s a scary thought. Russell Wilson and Tom Brady are well known for their playoff success with a combined 11 Super Bowl appearances between them. However, to count Washington out of the running without so much as a fighting chance is dismissive of this defense, and everything that the team has done over the past month. Let’s look at some things that they might have going for them.
For starters, the defensive line in Washington is the heartbeat of the team, and they have an uncanny ability to get pressure on the opposing quarterback without needing to send extra blitzers, allowing linebackers and defensive backs to stay in coverage. Against quarterbacks like Wilson and Brady, this is a huge factor, considering they have the experience to pick a mediocre secondary apart at will. On top of that, when you consider a QB like Brady who is immobile, to put it lightly, Washington could find some real success getting in his face early on and forcing him to get the ball out quickly.
The biggest argument against Washington having any success in the postseason — again, assuming that they make it that far — rests on the offense. While they’ve managed to get by over the past few weeks, two defensive touchdowns on Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers did a great job of hiding how inexplicably bad Alex Smith was in the game. Of course, Washington was without their stud rookie RB Antonio Gibson, and Smith ended up leaving the game at the half with an injury, so you can use those as excuses if you wish. However, offensive production is still a concern nonetheless.
Next week’s game against the Steelers will be another huge measuring stick opportunity for Washington, and it could be a preview of a potential playoff matchup. If Rivera and his team can hold their own against Pete Carroll and the Seahawks, though, we can really start needing to give some weight to this question:
Just how far can Washington go in the playoffs this year?
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