Washington Football Team 2021 season preview: What’s different?
By Tim Payne
The Washington Football Team enters the 2021 NFL season with more answers than questions for the first time in the Dan (and Tanya) Snyder era.
As Ron Rivera brings his team to Richmond next week, there’s no doubt he has the best roster the Washington Football Team franchise has seen since the second Joe Gibbs era. The last two times this team made the playoffs, they entered the following season with massive holes in their roster and significant front office dysfunction.
Coming off the RGIII/Shanahan flash in the pan in 2012, Washington had an aging offensive roster and a terrible defensive roster, and were dealing with the dual challenges of the ridiculous salary cap penalty and the lack of draft capital resulting from having traded up for RGIII. Add to that the power struggle going on behind the scenes between RGIII, Bruce Allen, Dan Snyder, and Mike Shanahan, and any hopes of a playoff repeat were simply pipe dreams.
More recently, Jay Gruden, Kirk Cousins, Jordan Reed and Pierre Garçon had Washington in the playoffs in 2015, in spite of the objectively worst defense ever to make the NFL playoffs. As much as fans wanted to have high expectations for 2016, a quick review of the starting eleven defensively going into 2016 would have brought any reasonable fan back to reality. When you’re starting David Bruton, Ziggy Hood, Mason Foster, Will Compton and Kedric Golston on a unit coached by Joe Barry, are you expecting anyone to take you seriously?
But in 2021, Ron Rivera has the Washington Football Team positioned to seriously contend for back-to-back playoff berths. While they won a historically bad division last year, there’s every reason to expect them to take a step forward in 2021 and keep pace with any improvement the other teams in the division could make. Why do I say that? Let’s take a look.