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Read and React – August 16^th – Week 2 of Pre-Season

Trent Williams and Chris Chester will likely play on Saturday against Chicago.  If healthy, the starting line has a chance to be pretty good, but at certain points this week everyone but Will Montgomery has been or had been injured.  It’s the single most worrisome thing about the Redskins going into the season.

Rich Campbell did a really nice job on Monday in an interview with RGIII about his adjustment to calling audibles in the pro game.   Griffin credits the coaching staff with doing a great job explaining the appropriate options for certain plays in the playbook.  Campbell also finds an interesting nugget from Kyle Shanahan from August 2010 stating that the OC likes to minimize pre-snap audibles wherever possible, to have the responses to different looks come from hot routes.  “We usually have an answer built in to most of our plays, Kyle said.

CFA believes the Redskins are going to incorporate some of the more progressive strategies coming out of the college game.  We think the offseason free agent and draft moves indicate the Skins will incorporate a lot of spread option offensive looks with similarity to what Tim Tebow ran in Florida under Urban Meyer (and RG3 ran at Baylor).   In addition to the Spread, the no-huddle offense that Oregon and other teams have used so well makes perfect sense for the Redskins to run, given the speedy, athletic makeup of their offensive linemen.   Shanahan’s zone blocking running game is principally concerned with wearing out the defensive line, so it’s obvious the Shanahans believe in tiring out a defense.  The best way to do that is with the no-huddle, and I would think having reads to compensate for what the defense is doing already embedded in the play would make the offense easier to use in a no-huddle situation.  The less time a quarterback has to spend shouting instructions on the road, the better.

To that end, Campbell discussed the importance of using tempo to put pressure on defenses with RGIII in Monday’s practice report.   He’s also excited about Dezmon Briscoe’s as well as Keenan Robinson’s.  Also noteworthy, the Skins are no longer misplaying Kevin Barnes in the slot.  He needs to be able to use his physicality to bracket receivers to the outside; he’s not great in space.   The Redskins need Cedric Griffin to be that guy, which is to say, we’re very questionable at slot corner.

RC1 started of Tuesday’s practice report with a discussion of RG3’s ability to turn around our red zone offense.  Football Outsiders found that red zone efficiency is mainly a myth – good offenses and good defenses are generally good in the Red Zone and vice versa.   But I don’t think there’s been enough data specific to having a dynamic running quarterback (of which there’s been maybe 5 who regularly started in the past 10 to 15 years) to say that there is or isn’t correlation between that type of player and improved red zone efficiency.  Basically – we think that having a running quarterback will definitely help us in the red zone, but that theory hasn’t been proven or disproven by the data yet.  Check back later, maybe we’ll get around to it.  Campbell also noticed

In yesterday’s injury report, Campbell wrote that pretty much everyone on the line is somewhat hurt, and a lot of guys may miss the game against Chicago, however, none of the injuries are very serious.  Helu apparently needs to stretch more.

Apparently the reason for Niles Paul’s dropfest against Buffalo was that he stopped practicing catching the ball.  We were pretty much thinking the same thing.

Rich Tandler did a nice job this week of breaking down who’s definitely making the roster and the guys who are on the bubble.  Check both of those out, frankly, we agree with him on basically every player.    CSN also did a nice job breaking down Dez Briscoe.