Redskins: Is a winning 2018 season truly what’s best for the franchise?

The Washington Redskins have been contenders for much of the 2018 season. But is their current playoff status merely a mirage, disillusioning onlookers from the truth?

There is a telling hint in the way that the Washington Redskins won five games in their first seven outings with Alex Smith, before dropping three of their last four. The Redskins won a certain way. A strange, unorthodox way. They won ugly.

In a vacuum, winning ugly works. It’s still winning, after all. But in the NFL, finding a simple way to win isn’t good enough. That method has to be sustainable, across a number of years. The teams who sustain success, and the ones that establish themselves as blue-bloods, are the ones remembered most.

If teams fool themselves into thinking they’re better than they are, through unexpected winning streaks, then they’ll only move backward. Take the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars, for example. They went 10-6 last season, and won two playoff games, with an elite defense and a run-first offense. They convinced themselves that they could keep winning with this formula, and with Blake Bortles at quarterback.

Now look at the 2018 Jaguars. They’re 3-8. The defense has regressed, and the continued stagnation on offense has rendered the team inert, with a lack of motivation and identity. The Jaguars failed to adapt because they didn’t think they needed to. And if the Redskins win out in 2018, they risk succumbing to the same self-deception.

It’s not so much the talent that’s missing in Washington. There are promising building blocks present on both offense and defense. But teams who think they’re ready prepare differently than teams who know they aren’t quite there yet. Sure, a winning season might give the fan base hope. But that hope would be temporary. They’d just be disappointed again the next year.

Say Washington wins ten games, in spite of their slump, and makes the playoffs as a wild card team. Jay Gruden will most likely be back, as will Greg Manusky. Two coaches who, with an opportunity to prove their doubters wrong this year, only fell deeper for their own bad habits. And with every passing year, the offenses around the league will continue to innovate. But Jay Gruden will refuse to change his ways. And Manusky will refuse to use his players the right way.

Philosophical gridlock endangers the Redskins’ chances of sustaining a winning pedigree, but if they lose out in 2018, perhaps it’s for the best. Nothing is a guarantee with Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen at the top of the pecking order, but when a change needs to be made, any change is better than nothing. Winning ugly convinces the impatient thinker that winning ugly can last. But it can’t. And in today’s NFL, it won’t.