Redskins vs. Bills predictions

[SC Skins Fan]

It can go either way. I suspect they will either come out pretty strong and start taking it to a pretty beat-up and generally less talented Buffalo team, or they will come out fired up but make a bunch of mental mistakes and turnovers and the thing will turn the other way. I'd personally be very impressed if they can ride the emotions much beyond this week regardless. Probably the worst thing that could happen would be another close loss such as they went through last week in Tampa. That might really break them. The more I think about it the more I worry about their physical strength and stamina and wonder how much they've been sleeping. Really an unprecedented situation. My brother was killed four years ago, so that is really what I think about, and I didn't sleep much at all in the first days after that, but on the other side it was a lot easier when everyone was around the house and so much stuff was going on, it was only in the time after that when you get hit with some of the enormity of the situation beyond the initial shock. Who knows, everyone is different, going to be really tough in my opinion.

I've also been thinking about a question someone posed in a thread a little while ago regarding why the death of Sean Taylor in particular seems to have effected people so profoundly. While I agree with those who responded and said that there would be grief if anyone on the Redskins died, I do think it is something specific to Sean Taylor. Certainly there are many factors, including the violent nature of the crime, but I also think that it has much to do with the role that Taylor played on the team. Most, if not all, of the people who showed up for the vigil in Ashburn did not really know Sean Taylor. They knew of him, they knew what he was a great player, and they are learning more now about the importance of his daughter and family. But more than that, what I think he represented in some abstract sense was the future. He was the one player on defense, more than anyone else, who represented a real hope for change, for greatness, for unlimited possibilites, for many great things to come. That is not to say that his death is just about football, certainly not, but to us as fans of a team that is what we lost. In some ways it is similar to what the players lost too, though the future they lost is more personal in that they lost a friend, someone they saw every day, someone they expected to see in the locker room and expected to talk to when they came back from Tampa. That is the future they lost. For his family, of course, it is more personal still and they lost a future that included the holidays, graduations, triumphs, hardships, and all those intimate experiences that families go through. They are all very different experiences in many ways, but what I think links them all is that sense that part of our future, something that we expected to happen and really took for granted, has been taken from us. That, to me, is what is so raw and emotional about the death of a young person especially. It is the future that you expected, of all the things that would have been but now won't be, that you have lost. Just something I've been thinking about and probably has a place other than the prediction thread...

After all that...

Skins 21
Bills 13