Redskins Start Mini-camp!
By daveskins
One more milestone passes on the way to real football again. I could try to fool you all into thinking this was an important weekend like Redskins.com tried to do with this article about five storylines for mini-camp. But even the Washington Post knows there’s nothing really big about the weekend so they posted this puff piece about Jason Campbell which is fun reading but hardly hardcore analysis.
Why doesn’t it matter, you ask? You are wondering about the progress of Campbell, and what we’re going to do at left guard, and how Landry is going to look so you wonder why I don’t care. Well, for one thing, we aren’t going to answer any of those questions this weekend. I’ll tell you the answers to all five questions on Redskins.com right now:
1) Campbell will look great. He will be throwing mostly against air and when the defense does come at him in drills they won’t blitz him and they won’t be allowed to touch him. Casey Bramlet could look like Sammy Baugh (that’s Peyton Manning to you younger folks out there) this weekend. And bad news for you again during the preseason. We still won’t be able to tell if he is making any progress because teams still won’t blitz him then either.
2) Todd Wade will have to slip in the bathtub rushing to get to mini-camp not to get all the reps in mini-camp and training camp. The only way he doesn’t start the season as the Redskins LG is if he’s hurt. But by week 8 or so my money is on Taylor Whitley. He is younger and played guard for the Denver Broncos. Denver’s line schemes are very similar to those in the Al Saunders offense and he will fit right in.
3) Laron Landry won’t be tested in any significant way. He’ll cover kicks and be brought in slowly on the defense just like Sean Taylor. Don’t expect to see him start until week 6.
4) Rocky McIntosh will have a good camp but since they don’t hit in camp we won’t hear his name again except for the obligatory press conference question where we’re told he had a good camp.
5) Actually, I don’t have anything exciting to say about the kicking battle. I think it is a sign that even Redskins.com can’t come up with 5 exciting things about mini-camp when the lack of a kicking battle was the best they could come up with. It actually frustrates me more that Gary Fitzgerald, the guy who wrote the article, is so hung up on what he learned in journalism school that he can’t just stop at 4 interesting stories. Why are people so hung up on round numbers?
So, why am I writing about mini-camp if its so useless? Why not just link to a fun You Tube post and forget the whole weekend? Well, like I said, it is a milestone for those of us drooling for some football. Guys are wearing helmets and hitting out there and we can feel that somewhere deep in our bones. That is enough.
And if that isn’t enough, I don’t think you need to be reading football sites in June. Because if thinking about mini-camp doesn’t start making you think about propping your feet up on a cooler and hanging out with your friends waiting for another burger hot of the grill in the parking lot of Fed Ex, I don’t know what will.
Mini-camp…it means we just got one weekend closer to them strapping it on for real.
-DW