Campbell Won’t Play and Other News

Redskins.com made the less than surprising announcement that Jason Campbell won’t play this weekend against the Ravens.  Collins gets the start, a pretty solid indication that he has won the 2nd QB slot (though Brunell will start game 4 if Campbell can’t go).

If this is the case, I hope we go ahead and ship Brunell to Atlanta as rumored.  What’s the point in keeping him around? I don’t have clips to prove it, but there were plays that it was truly agonizing to watch Brunell just try to throw the ball 20 yards down field.  It requires his whole body and given the amount of times a QB has to use less than his whole strength, this is just not acceptable.

Redskins.com confirmed that we traded for Pete Kendall pending a physical.  This is no small issue considering the aforementioned pain injection issues.  Still, he’ll likely pass.  NFL network’s Adam Schefter was reporting that we traded a conditional 5th round pick for 2009.  This would go up to a 4th rounder if Kendall plays a certain amount.  Seems fair. Oh, and we bumped up Kendall’s salary.  One wonders what the difference between Kendall’s new contract and Dockery’s contract and whether we could have saved the pain and adjustment period by just matching the offer.

This brings me to just one random thought. I wonder how the NFL keeps track of traded picks.  Obviously, it is recorded in some kind of database.  Excel?  Filemaker?  The chalkboard in the break room? I work for a magazine as my day job and one of the things I do is keep a database of articles for future publishing.  I am a well-paid, relatively conscientious professional and yet I screw up this database relatively regularly. I wonder who the NFL has the job to keep this database, how much they are paid, and whether they ever screw up.

I’m just thinking how easy it would be for someone to enter into the “official spreadsheet” that the Redskins traded a 5th round pick and then Kendall starts 16 games and every body forgets to change it.  You figure its even possible that Eric Mangini and company would be too busy with the offseason to notice.  But to my knowledge it has never happened that the NFL has screwed this up.  Of course, maybe it happened and no one noticed ever.

Anyway, it must be a pretty sophisticated system and yet there is no reason it has to be.  It could be on a cocktail napkin from one of Pac Man Jones’ favorite strip clubs if the NFL wanted it that way.  I’d sure like to know how it is done. 

Anybody know? Anybody care to guess? Anybody think I’m stupid for evening thinking about it?

-DW