The Takeaways, Week 4: Washington at Philadelphia

October 2, 2023

by Steve Thomas

Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it?  I mean, Washington still lost 34 – 31 in overtime to the hated Eagles, but objectively, it was an exciting game to watch.  In football, there’s never any redeeming value to losing, but there definitely are different levels of losing.  Last week’s loss to Buffalo was an unmitigated disaster; this week was a solid effort.  I won’t go so far as to say that this was a “job well done”, because at the end of the day, the Redskins Washington Football Team Commanders Washington didn’t get a win, but it was nevertheless a mostly quality effort on the road against a division rival that is a Super Bowl contender.  Let’s discuss this week’s Takeaways:

Washington looked like they belong

The fact that this game was an overtime squeaker instead of a blowout was a bit of a surprise, in a good way.  If you want to put a positive spin on a loss, Washington was able to hang with a Super Bowl team.  I realize that close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, but the fact that Washington was able to look like a legitimate, sort of quality team for a big chunk of this game, instead of the trainwreck they were last week, is a good thing.  You can’t win them all.  If Washington plays like this in every game, they’ll most likely win more games than some of us predicted to start the season.

Much improved performance from Sam Howell

Howell was an unmitigated disaster last week.  This week, he went 29 for 41 for 290 yards, with 1 touchdown, and no interceptions, for a quarterback rating of 98.6, and as an added bonus, he had 6 scrambles for 40 yards.  The most important Howell takeaway is that his delivery was greatly improved over last week.  He was still sacked 5 times, because . . . Washington, but for the most part, Howell was able to consistently get rid of the ball in an NFL-reasonable amount of time and was fairly accurate for most of the day.  It’s obvious that Howell spent a significant amount of time this week watching film and working on his delivery, and it paid off.  If he can continue to improve on this performance, Washington may just yet be in good shape at quarterback for once.  We’ll see.

Eric Beiniemy was better this week

Beiniemy has had a questionable run so far this season, with a massive overload of passing plays early on, in spite of the existence of a fairly successful running game.  This week, his play calling reflected a conscious effort to establish a run game early, despite facing one of the top rushing defenses in football.  At halftime, Washington had 17 pass attempts and 15 rushes, which is a balanced attack.  It should be said that two of those rushes were forced scrambles by Howell, so the real play calling was 19 passes and 13 runs – a bit unbalanced, but better.  They had lesser results on the ground this week – as a team, Washington only averaged 3.8 yards per carry in the game, but Antonio Gibson and Brian Robinson Jr. combined for 20 carries for 85 yards, which is 4.3 yards per carry.  Bieniemy needs to continue to remember that the running game exists in order to make Washington’s offense most effective.

The offensive line looked better, kind of

This group had only surrendered 2 sacks by halftime and generally looked better in pass protection than they had in previous weeks, particularly considering the quality of Philadelphia’s defensive front seven.  So that was progress.  The second half was less so, with three more sacks and additional pressure on passing downs.  This wasn’t the total disaster as was the case last week against Buffalo, and that’s progress.  Still, though, the offensive line remains the team’s biggest weakness, and nothing’s going to fix that as long as Ron Rivera is the coach.

Washington’s secondary eventually collapses

Emmanuel Forbes, especially, is probably not a happy camper right now, but he wasn’t the only problem.  As was the case with other position groups this week, the secondary played very well for portions of this game, with most of the Eagles receivers covered; however, that didn’t last, and they ended up surrendering 175 yards in 9 receptions to A.J. Brown in 9 receptions and 78 yards in 7 receptions to DeVonta Smith.  Considering the amount of resources they’ve spent on the secondary, Washington deserves a complete game from this crew, but didn’t get one today, and not just from Forbes, who surrendered the long touchdown to Brown near the end of the fourth quarter.  Do better, secondary.

Overall, not terrible, which is better than last week and more than I expected.  Next up for Washington is the Bears at Fed Ex Field on in a nationally-televised game on Thursday night.