After Falcons Loss, Redskins Have Work to Do

It would be curious to know how long it took most local viewers to realize that the Washington Redskins weren’t going to arrive on the Atlanta Falcons stadium field ready to play their first regular season game. Optimism has been running so high since OTAs began that the problems shown last night by the NFC-East-division-defending-champs might have come as a shock to some. It wasn’t as awful as it could have been but the coaching staff certainly has work to do. The Redskins first preseason game was a mix of good and bad.

Fortunately, everything that was bad is fixable.

The Best

The brightest spot for the Redskins in the game has to be Kirk Cousins. The QB was crisp in his throws, he got his squad in and out of the huddle quickly and he was accurate. He distributed the ball nicely, finding wide outs Ryan Grant (twice for 11 and 9 yards respectively), Pierre Garçon (five yards), DeSean Jackson (five yards) and running back Chris Thompson (nine yards) on five passes… the only five he threw.

Cousins ran eight plays during the one series in which he played and tossed the ball for 39 yards. It was a good-looking passing series.

Wisely, Head Coach Jay Gruden then pulled his starting offense and they sat the rest of the game.

The Good

The linebackers shined in this game. From starters Will Compton and Mason Foster; to second-year players Martrell Spaight and Carlos Fields, most in this unit did really well throughout most of the game. Preston Smith, the 2015 second-round draft pick, was instrumental in the Falcons’ first series resulting in a three-and-out when he stopped Atlanta RB Devonta Freeman after just three yards. That was the only yardage the Falcons recorded in that series.

Compton set the tone in Atlanta’s next series as well when, on the first play, he stuffed Falcons Tevin Coleman for a loss.

It went on that way for a lot of the game.

OLB Trent Murphy made a couple of good plays on Atlanta’s next series. Spaight made an athletic special teams tackle early in the third quarter to hold the return to seven yards and led the defense in tackling with five for the game. Fields did his part on ST as well, holding returns to four yards consecutively in the first half.

The highly-anticipated debut of LB/S Su’a Cravens, the Redskins second-round draft pick this year and THE guy that brings a smile to GM Scot McCloughan, was not a disappointment. It became clear early that this kid has a knack for making plays and a nose for the ball. While he ended the game with only three solo tackles — one of them up-ending Falcons’ running back Brandon Wilds — he was always seen around the ball when he was on the field.

As well the USC grad had a great special teams tackle on a Justin Hardy return and had good QB pressure in the third quarter.

“Su’a did look like he was all over the place, and I’m sure we’ll look at the film and [see that] some of those places he wasn’t supposed to be,” Gruden said after the game. “But we’ll figure it out. Love his energy, though. I wanted to see a lot of these young guys come in… just to see the energy they played with. In practice it’s hard to tell sometimes as they’re feeling their way through, but you can see Su’a was fun to watch.”

The Bad

The run game.

Not much needs to be said about this. Suffice it to say that it needs work. Neither Matt Jones nor Thompson nor rookie Keith Marshall seemed to be able to find any holes and this facet of the game did not get moving until the third quarter when UCFA Robert Kelley — who’s had a good training camp — and Mack Brown (a practice squad holdover from last season) got into the game. All told, the running backs logged 68 yards on 22 carries. Kelley led the bunch with 40 of the yards on seven carries (5.7 ypc) and Brown had 28 yards on seven carries (4.0 ypc).

The one time Jones made some yards on a run off the right tackle for 12 yards, THE right tackle — Morgan Moses — incurred a holding penalty and the series ended with a punt after one first down.

In his defense, Marshall is a rookie and this was the first preseason game. There’s time.

The Awful

Much has already been written about the 14 penalties for 123 yards so I won’t beleaguer it but it began to get comical after a while and indicates either some serious rust or a serious lack of concentration… especially when guys who should know better, like veteran Niles Paul (holding) or Trent Murphy (off-sides) are making stupid ones.