Sunday Night Quarterback - Week 5

Bad Beat.

If there is not a rule that you should not be able to push a player into his teammate who is attempting a fair catch, then there ought to be. Though I can't be sure the Skins would have pulled the game out if they had retained the ball in that spot.

Their two touchdowns came on drives of 1 and 12 yards, respectively. They didn't show anything that told you they would be able to sustain a drive - again. Defensively, the second half featured so many missed tackles, none worse than the one DHall missed on the Delhomme bootleg that sealed the win.

It would be easy to pile on Hall. In fact, what he did right there was not unlike his love tap on Mario Maningham's TD run in week 1. But things run deeper here. It seems like the Skins play to stay close, to avoid the big mistake. As a result, they make a shitload of little mistakes. None that could lose the game by itself, but they add up.

The ironic thing is this: when the NFL schedules came out in April, what would you guess I had for the Skins' record after five games?

Yup. 2-3.

I figured a loss at Giants, win versus the Rams. Win at Lions. And losses to Bucs and Panthers. Don't forget, the Panthers were 12-4 divisioon winners last year, and Bucs have always presented matchup problems for the Skins.

Now that all said, I'm still disappointed as heck at the 2-3 record, because those two teams turned out to be bad, and I feel no confidence about winning the next two games.

The bright spot? I am slowly convincing my fellow fans that this season must be sacrificed.

Sacrificed for the greater good of proving to ownership that their approach won't work.

A sacrifice that leads to our owner sitting across from an esteemed coach/GM this winter and saying "obviously I don't know what I'm doing here, so I'm, handing over the football operations to you."

I will be at the Eagles game in two weeks, with plans to liveblog from there (if I can get a signal inside FedEx, which is dicey at best). If we're 2-4 going into that game. It will be ugly. Ugly probably either way, really.