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If nothing else became apparent in the Washington Redskins surprisingly dominant Week 3 win over the Green Packer Packers, it was that Washington’s defense can be as good on the field as it looks on paper. While Packers’ advocates will peddle the notion that it was QB Aaron Rodgers’ ailing knee that kept him from being effective, anyone who’s even remotely familiar with the NFL knows that pain in — or a brace on — his leg isn’t enough to keep the Green Bay icon from leading his team to a victory. Recall the 2016 game between the Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. In that contest, Rodgers completed 18 of 23 passes for 246 yards, three touchdowns and a 150.8 passer rating; despite that he injured his calf on the third play of the opening series and aggravated his hamstring. And before last season (when he broke his collarbone, missed seven games, returned for a Week 15 game with the hopes of gaining a playoff berth but didn’t and so went on IR); he had played through left calf (2014), left knee (2015) and left hamstring (2016) injuries without missing a start.
Rodgers’ knee is not why the Redskins beat the Packers last week. They won because they were the better team. And more specifically, it was because Washington’s defense contained the future Hall of Famer. There have been seasons during which this would not have happened… even if Rodgers was in even more discomfort.
Fans have been waiting for a defense like the one that has taken the field in 2018 for years, but they are not alone in that desire. There are players on the team that have been craving one as well.
“The process has been… uh… yeah,” CB Josh Norman said this week on a laugh and a sigh about what it’s been like waiting for the franchise to improve the defense. “It’s been like, ‘Wow. OK. All right. OK.’ <another sigh> ‘all right. And then, OK! Finally! Let’s go!’ You know? It’s been that kind of thing. Like, up, down, up, down, up, down. [It’s had] its great days. [It’s had] its bad days. We’d found our niche at one point and then we’d come back down. And then we’d find it again. And it’s just… like a see-saw.
“But right now, we are on the verge of something,” Norman continued. “It’s what… my third year? … of something great. You see the young talent we have. You see how effective they were. If we get those guys going man, anything can be won through them, I feel like; just because of how destructive [they are]. They are a force to be reckoned with. I mean you get guys like that… I could play with guys like that all day. Play high. Come down. OK. Play high. Come down. Teams don’t want [the way we kept Green Bay from taking the deep shots]. They don’t want that. They want the big plays. So, you don’t give it to them… you get those guys like we did today. Come back here and you can see output like this. It’s been what we’ve been working to get. We’ve been working to get that continuity that the coaches want us to have and once we had that then, hey… everything is love. And as you could see today, we stopped a wizard that commands everyone. He came here and, our [defensive] line, did a great job with him.”
Obviously, it has taken longer to bring the Redskins defense to where it is now than the three years that Norman has been in a Washington uniform. But even in that time, he and other players have been frustrated at the lack of movement from the personnel department.
Since current team president, Bruce Allen, arrived 10 years ago (in 2009), the organization has used its No. 1 draft pick on defensive players only four times. Those were OLBs Brian Orakpo and Ryan Kerrigan in 2009 and 2011 respectively; and defensive linemen Jonathan Allen and Daron Payne last year and this year, respectively.
Free agent signings of elite defensive players didn’t appear to be a priority for the front office until recently as well. For instance, for years, Bruce Allen & Co. seemed to take a band-aid-like approach to the defensive line. Since, in a 3-4 defense, the line is the anchor of the unit, it remained mediocre at best.
Guys like Ma’ake Kemoeatu were brought in to play nose tackle in 2010. No offense to Kemoeatu but he was pretty much just a guy who had already been in the league eight years. The next year defensive linemen Barry Cofield and Stephen Bowen were signed from the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys. Both had been around for a while and neither were considered elite.
In the last few years, however, the team has made a concerted effort to upgrade the defense beginning with the drafting of Jon Allen.
Of the current defensive starters, six of the 11 are Redskins draft picks and more that rotate in and out are as well. Of the free agents, LBs Zach Brown and Mason Foster were second- and third-round draft picks of their original teams. Safety D.J. Swearinger was a second-rounder and Norman was a fifth-round selection. Only CB Quinton Dunbar was an undrafted college agent entering the NFL and it was a surprise to many analysts that a team didn’t select him in the 2015 draft.
“It’s huge, man, because you want to be able to gel with guys for the long run,” Swearinger said of the consistency in the defense and priority given to that side of the ball. “The great secondaries in the game, they’re always together for two, three years. You think about [the Denver Broncos’] secondary of old, the [Seattle Seahawks] L.O.B. [Legion of Boom] secondary of old… [the Minnesota Vikings’] … their safeties have been together five years. They’re always the Top 5 in secondaries because they have a gel and chemistry. We want to have that same chemistry. Two or three years from now we want to be THE best. We’ve got Fabe [Fabian Moreau], Dunnie [Dunbar]… young guys that we can mold and feed and we’ll be where we want to be two, three years from now.”
Washington’s current defense is not only exceptional right now (ranked second in the NFL), it has the potential to develop and grow and become better and better the longer its together. That knowledge has fans and players fired up
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