3 goals for Washington Football Team in second half of 2021

1. Beat your division opponents

One of Washington’s two wins is against division rival New York. The final five games are against the Giants, Philadelphia and Dallas. Win at least two of them, and preferably, win three of them. That will put the Washington Football Team at 4-2 against the NFC East, and that’s something to build on.

Dallas seems much better than the rest of the division right now, but those games are usually competitive. Beat Dallas once. Take two out of three against Philly and New York. That will prove the Washington Football Team is a contender for the division as soon as 2022.

Dallas has built a good roster and they have a quarterback. Barring disaster, they will be the class of the division over the next few years. The other three teams are mirror images of each other. All have strengths – mainly on defense. All have significant holes. Philly has been taking steps to revamp an old roster and they now are actually younger across the board than Washington, which finds itself as the oldest team in the division. But the differences are minor and can be easily addressed.

That’s for next year. For this year, what the Washington Football Team can do is establish a psychological edge over its rivals. You do that by stringing together wins. Washington has been on the wrong side of this equation long enough. Even when the Giants stunk in recent years, they still managed to beat Washington. The Week 2 win was the first step in reversing that. Now Washington has to build on that by playing well, and winning, against its three primary opponents.

And that leads to this one brief addendum to this list:

DO NOT TANK

I know some fans are already on the tanking bandwagon. Secure your draft position. If we had been a little bit worse last year, maybe we could have ended up with one of the quarterbacks.

This is wrong on so many levels. Setting aside the time-tested truism that quality drafting has almost nothing to do with your draft position, there’s a larger point. In professional athletics, you never want to lose. NEVER.

Losing breeds losing. Once a franchise accepts losing as an acceptable course of action, it is very, very hard to reverse that trend. It is anathema to everything that professional athletes and coaches do. There may be a lot of reasons why Super Bowl-winning coach Doug Pederson is out of a job right now, but I guarantee you that his decision to bench his quarterback Jalen Hurts in favor of Nate Sudfeld in the final game of 2020 is a major reason. Pederson stopped trying to win the game at that point, and that is a cardinal sin in the NFL.

I admit there are nuances to this. You might argue that playing Bates over Seals-Jones, as I am suggesting above, comes dangerously close to tanking. But there is a difference between getting a young guy some work and trying to lose a game. I’ll leave it to you to determine where that line is.

I can only make so many suggestions at a time.