A very bad case of mood swings

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Success in pro football isn't just a matter of: How high can you fly? It's also a case of: How low can you sink?

Which brings us, naturally, to the Redskins. Every team has its ups and downs, but Joe Gibbs' club continues to be prone to huge mood swings. We saw it last season when the Redskins followed a 52-17 fracturing of the 49ers with a 36-0 stink bomb against the Giants. And we saw it again Sunday when they came up empty in a 19-3 loss at the Meadowlands -- a week after an exhilarating overtime win over the Jaguars.

Three years into Gibbs' Grand Return, the Redskins are still searching for equilibrium. When you can go from gaining 495 and 481 yards in consecutive games -- the latter against a rugged Jacksonville defense -- to gaining 164, something isn't quite right. Coach Joe is always talking about players who are "real Redskins" or "true Redskins" or "core Redskins," but he obviously doesn't have enough of those guys if he's still getting such wildly uneven results.

It's enough to make you wonder how good this team really is. Was last season the beginning of something, or did the club just catch a wave at the end? A reasonable question, given how the year has started -- with the Redskins back on the seesaw again.

"That's just football," Santana Moss says. "You're not going to come out and hit somebody over the head every week. Every team's going to have their day."

True enough. But the Redskins just went through a four-game stretch in which their offense scored three points (Dallas), 31 (Houston), 36 (Jacksonville) and three again. Or to put it another way: famine, feast, feast, famine. How far is any team going to go with those kinds of weekly fluctuations?

Last year the Snydermen went as far as the second round of the playoffs. But at no time, I'll just point out, did their offense get held to a field goal twice in the space of four games. And only once in the regular season were they beaten by more than a touchdown. They've already been beaten this season by 17 and 16.

Translation: They're not getting more consistent, as you might expect of a rebuilding club, they're getting less consistent. It's almost as if the offense has an Evil Twin -- and the defense, with its proneness to big plays, arouses similar suspicions.

"That's just something we've got to work on," Marcus Washington says. "If we want to be where we want to be, we've got to play consistent every week."

It shouldn't matter, Phillip Daniels adds, "who we line up against. We can't have a great game and follow it up with a game that's not so great. But we'll get there."