Smoke Signals for Dec. 1: 'The State of the Skins' edition

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The Redskins are in trouble if they want to make the playoffs. The team has dropped 3 of its last 4 and at 7-5 overall, would be out of the playoffs if they began this weekend. The Redskins face a brutal test this Sunday night in Baltimore, where they will face as good a defense as they have encountered all season — and they haven’t been very good at scoring against top defenses. They are staring 7-6 in the face and the only hope they have is to catch the Cowboys. At 9-3, the top current wild card team, the Carolina Panthers, is probably beyond reach. Passing the 8-4 Cowboys and getting Head Coach Wade Phillips fired is all the hope Washington has right now.

I think most of us knew this was a very flawed team before the season began. The Redskins made the playoffs last year at 9-7 in a very weak conference and were immediately tossed out of the postseason by a Seahawks team that wasn’t more than merely good in its own right. In the AFC, the Redskins wouldn’t have gotten a whiff of the playoffs and they didn’t really look like a genuine playoff team to me. Joe Gibbs led the players on an emotional ride to January following the death of Sean Taylor, but on Sunday we saw how much good that sort of emotion did a year later. Some perspective is in order. The Redskins are 7-5 and in the thick of the playoff race. Their record is better now than it was at this point in the season during any of Joe Gibbs’ last 4 years as head coach. Compared to recent coaches like Steve Spurrier and Norv Turner, Head Coach Jim Zorn looks flawed, but promising in many ways.

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