10 quick thoughts from Week 13 as Brian Johnson’s late FG helps Washington sink Raiders

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Not in this instance, because the Washington Football Team, behind the leg of newly-minted kicker Brian Johnson (!), walked out of Sin City with their fourth-straight win.

Other than the defense, there wasn’t much to like about Washington’s performance, but winning ugly counts just the same as winning in blowout fashion.

And you know what? It’s grind-it-out victories like this that show the true character of a team. Left for dead heading into the bye riding a four-game losing streak, Washington has proven over the last four weeks that they have zero quit.

I’m shaking just typing out this recap because that game was so exhilarating, so let’s avoid any potential typos and dive right into the Week 13 edition of “10 quick thoughts.”

Washington Football Team: 10 quick thoughts from Week 13

What an opening drive: We set high standards for the opening drive as soon as Antonio Gibson ripped off a 22-yard run on the first play of the game. Amazingly enough, that wasn’t even the highlight of the nine-play sequence.

From Gibson showing tremendous effort on a busted play to move the chains, Taylor Heinicke standing up in the face of pressure and delivering a strike to Terry McLaurin on third down, and Logan Thomas’ one-handed catch in the back of the end zone to open the scoring, the first drive was a thing of beauty.

Talk about setting the tone!

More two-WR sets in backfield, please: Scott Turner said we’d see DeAndre Carter and Curtis Samuel lined up in the backfield on Sunday and it only took a few plays for the second-year OC to dial it up. A beautiful fake to Carter set up a screen for Samuel, who would’ve scored on the play if he wasn’t tripped.

We need more of this in our lives. Carter and Samuel are as shifty as they come at the WR position and this formation could cause defense a lot of problems if Turner is willing to step out of his comfort zone more often.

Defense reaches milestone (sort of): Sound the alarms, folks, because Sunday marked the first time all season Washington prevented their opponents from scoring on their opening drive in back-to-back games.

In fact, they’ve now managed to do so in four of the last five weeks. Pretty impressive given they allowed points on opening drives six times in the first seven games, five of which resulted in touchdowns.