Roster transition in the Shanny era

Those guys are relevant in the discussion about the recent past, i.e. why the Redskins haven't been successful under Shanahan.I'm willing to concede that it's meaningless going forward, w/free agency around the corner for those guys. It's been a tough two years. Lots of sub-par decisions. Obviously the REALLY meaningful ones are Rogers and Carter.

2012 = make or break. That's something we can agree on that the release trades of Tryon, Rinehart, Williams, and Heyer have no effect on. If the re-building re-tooling effort worked, then it worked. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

The Redskins havent been successful in over a decade due to draft mis-management and roster rot. With an organization that much of a mess I think it will take all of Shanny's contract just to get this team back to being competitive (not great but competitive) because its impossible to fix over a decade of destruction in 2 or 3 years. IMO, to call 2012 a make or break is waaay premature.

Those guys are relevant in the discussion about the recent past, i.e. why the Redskins haven't been successful under Shanahan.I'm willing to concede that it's meaningless going forward, w/free agency around the corner for those guys. It's been a tough two years. Lots of sub-par decisions. Obviously the REALLY meaningful ones are Rogers and Carter.

2012 = make or break. That's something we can agree on that the release trades of Tryon, Rinehart, Williams, and Heyer have no effect on. If the re-building re-tooling effort worked, then it worked. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
I'll even disagree on them.. Carter is a terrible 3-4 fit, he just is. Now an argument can be made that we should have tried to get something in trade for him, which I agree with but the fact that he is an ex-Redskin isn't really a big deal.

Rogers wasn't coming back regardless. When he didn't get a big extension that he thought he deserved after the '09 season he was mentally done in DC. He vastly overrated himself in the marketplace and received a one year contract as a result. Historically he has played his best in contract years so I'll be interested to see how he performs on a long term deal.

Those guys are relevant in the discussion about the recent past, i.e. why the Redskins haven't been successful under Shanahan.I'm willing to concede that it's meaningless going forward, w/free agency around the corner for those guys. It's been a tough two years. Lots of sub-par decisions. Obviously the REALLY meaningful ones are Rogers and Carter.

2012 = make or break. That's something we can agree on that the release trades of Tryon, Rinehart, Williams, and Heyer have no effect on. If the re-building re-tooling effort worked, then it worked. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

Would our W/L record have been any different with these guys?

They're different players but I don't think it's any sort of a stretch to think that Chad Rinehart could have been a better player for less money than Chris Chester. We're talking about a projecting here, but I thought there was more to work with re: Rinehart, than Chester.

I wouldn't say that anything and everything Shanahan has done is a mistake. But let's put it this way: when you trade for Donovan McNabb with two draft picks and can't find a place for him in your offense, and somehow that gets lost in history as some sort of a necessary progression of the QB position in Washington...well, lets just say that stringing together a bunch of small evidences fits a lot better when you also have the all-time personnel gaffe.

The easiest way to make my argument seem like nitpicking is to go pick another losing team, and find six to eight players they've let go via free agency or release who have gone on to start elsewhere within the last two years (with two pro bowlers?!), and suggest that the Redskins aren't alone in their struggles to identify starters. Trust me, I am looking. I don't want to keep repeating this point only to find out that I missed a team that has been doing the same thing.

Every team has two or three of those guys (I would expect the winning teams to have a lot more of those guys), but the Redskins have six or seven even if you count Heyer as a backup.

See, I don't think you can just look at losing teams and I don't think it's fair to just say "team's back-up became starter for another team". Doing so, to me, isolates only whether the guy could play in the NFL but takes him out of context for both the team that cut him and the team that picked him up. Carter no future here b/c of the scheme switch. Rogers had no place here for reasons other than his football play (money/just didn't want to play here). There are just too many variables to make such a comparison - was it actually a miss on talent evaluation, was it a youth movement, was there an adequate or better replacement, or were there other factors that we, as casual fans of other teams, didn't get (do you think most fans of Jax looking at our decision to not pursue C. Rodgers were aware of his back story here?).

Further, except for a few, most marginal to average NFL players are not interchangeable - by that I mean they need to be in places that play to their strengths. The Chester/Rinehart comparison is very appropos of this. As I understand it, Rinehart was viewed as power blocker and not a particularly good fit for the zone blocking scheme MS runs. Chester was viewed by Baltimore as a marginal blocker in the scheme they run. In my opinion, each has been valued more by their acquiring team, in part at least, b/c the new teams play to their respective strengths. Thus, although marginal in their prior settings, each seem to be deemed average to above average in their new settings.

The QB was an epic fail and MS has absolutely punted on admitting any error. Okay. He has a history of ego-mania and poor personnel decisions. Okay. Should he have kept Campbell and forgone the McNabb trade? I think that was the best option but it wasn't really a solution. Grossman? <sigh>. When it comes to his handling of the QB position and his failure to own up to it - I am in complete agreement with you and the majority of the WP posters. That is all on MS.

Ultimately, however, I disagree with you that this current roster has as much dead weight or is as lacking in depth as the team he inherited in 2009. That's not to say it is good or deep. It is not - I would agree that a good 1/4 of this roster may be out of the NFL in 2 years and I believe another 1/4 may be on other teams (D. Hall, S. Moss for example). At the same time, I see a significant amount of contributors being here for the next two to three years and maybe beyond - most of whom have still have a potential upper level (Cofield, Bowen, Riley, T. Williams, Helu, Royster, Hankerson, Kerrigan). There are a lot that could go either way also (Smith, Chester, Hightower).

I think we all agree that this off-season will be key in determining whether this club turns the corner into the realm of well-managed teams or remains among the bottom tier in terms of talent management.

I, like you, hope it has.

P.S. - As to Buffalo, I think you missed Jason Peters but he I don't remember if the Eagles got him in 2009 or before.

these off season threads are already starting to get brutal.

And to cut Tripp some slack ...

11-21 in two years is bad. very bad - and that's the bottom line. Until and unless you win, all of your talent management moves will be suspect.

In the words of the Ol' Ball Coach: "5-11, that's not too good."

And to cut Tripp some slack ...

11-21 in two years is bad. very bad - and that's the bottom line. Until and unless you win, all of your talent management moves will be suspect.

In the words of the Ol' Ball Coach: "5-11, that's not too good."

Round of Applause

And to cut Tripp some slack ...

11-21 in two years is bad. very bad - and that's the bottom line. Until and unless you win, all of your talent management moves will be suspect.

In the words of the Ol' Ball Coach: "5-11, that's not too good."

Of course, but let's talk about some moves that matter. Talking about depth guys and borderline starters doesn't do much for me.

Would our W/L record have been any different with these guys?With vastly improved personnel management? Of course. With just one of them? Probably not.

Every one of these cases is a small symptom of a larger problem. The larger problem is one of the core reasons we can't win games. There's no obvious reason why we couldn't have picked better players to take these guys' roster spots, but we obviously did not. Pointing out that these guys once existed as Redskins is just a response to the idea that we never had any talent here. It was once here, we chose to go in a different direction.

Now to me, that was obvious at the get-go (March 2010), but to a lot of people who believed in a long term rebuilding plan, they need to be reminded that those guys were here and are now improving elsewhere. Obviously, we had a different vision for the franchise. I don't think the vision was back to back ten+ loss seasons, but that was the result of the execution.

It's only because this is a thread where we are trying to dig deeper than the final record that guys like Edwin Williams and Chad Rinehart are still relevant. If we weren't into hard analysis, well, bad record = bad coach.

See, I don't think you can just look at losing teams and I don't think it's fair to just say "team's back-up became starter for another team". Doing so, to me, isolates only whether the guy could play in the NFL but takes him out of context for both the team that cut him and the team that picked him up. Carter no future here b/c of the scheme switch. Rogers had no place here for reasons other than his football play (money/just didn't want to play here). There are just too many variables to make such a comparison - was it actually a miss on talent evaluation, was it a youth movement, was there an adequate or better replacement, or were there other factors that we, as casual fans of other teams, didn't get (do you think most fans of Jax looking at our decision to not pursue C. Rodgers were aware of his back story here?).

Further, except for a few, most marginal to average NFL players are not interchangeable - by that I mean they need to be in places that play to their strengths. The Chester/Rinehart comparison is very appropos of this. As I understand it, Rinehart was viewed as power blocker and not a particularly good fit for the zone blocking scheme MS runs. Chester was viewed by Baltimore as a marginal blocker in the scheme they run. In my opinion, each has been valued more by their acquiring team, in part at least, b/c the new teams play to their respective strengths. Thus, although marginal in their prior settings, each seem to be deemed average to above average in their new settings.

The QB was an epic fail and MS has absolutely punted on admitting any error. Okay. He has a history of ego-mania and poor personnel decisions. Okay. Should he have kept Campbell and forgone the McNabb trade? I think that was the best option but it wasn't really a solution. Grossman? <sigh>. When it comes to his handling of the QB position and his failure to own up to it - I am in complete agreement with you and the majority of the WP posters. That is all on MS.

Ultimately, however, I disagree with you that this current roster has as much dead weight or is as lacking in depth as the team he inherited in 2009. That's not to say it is good or deep. It is not - I would agree that a good 1/4 of this roster may be out of the NFL in 2 years and I believe another 1/4 may be on other teams (D. Hall, S. Moss for example). At the same time, I see a significant amount of contributors being here for the next two to three years and maybe beyond - most of whom have still have a potential upper level (Cofield, Bowen, Riley, T. Williams, Helu, Royster, Hankerson, Kerrigan). There are a lot that could go either way also (Smith, Chester, Hightower).

I think we all agree that this off-season will be key in determining whether this club turns the corner into the realm of well-managed teams or remains among the bottom tier in terms of talent management.

I, like you, hope it has.

P.S. - As to Buffalo, I think you missed Jason Peters but he I don't remember if the Eagles got him in 2009 or before.I think pretty much every team is running a zone blocking scheme these days. I know of a few teams that aren't: Dallas still runs man blocking under Hudson Houck. The Bucs still run a lot of man scheme. Sean Payton still prefers man blocking. But outside of rare exceptions to the rule, any lineman who is driving guys off the ball in 2011 is doing it zone style. That's what all the colleges are running anyway.

I think I get the individual reasons for making the moves they did (Rogers, Carter decisions). My assertion is that the evidence is abound that the Redskins cannot evaluate talent on their own roster very well. This is based on between 20 and 30 data points between playing time decisions, roster moves, and play usages. I never tried to argue that the Redskins don't act rationally. I did say I am often confused by their lines of reasoning, but I am not denying that they have their reasons.

Hypothetical time:

I think there's a good chance Roy Helu will head into next year as the starting RB and that Leonard Hankerson will start at WR, and those are two guys who we are absolutely counting on to solve our problem at two different positions of need. But lets say (hypothetically) that Mike Shanahan resigns tomorrow and we get an entirely new offensive coaching staff for next year. And that coaching staff decides that they are going to go with veterans at those two positions that they were previously chummy with at a prior stop. So they trade Helu to New York for a conditional seventh round pick, and on the last day of the preseason, Hankerson fails to win the 5th receiver job because he doesn't play special teams and is released.

If that happens, how much talent is really left behind by the Shanahan era drafts? Like: Trent Williams, Ryan Kerrigan, Jarvis Jenkins, and one year of pre FA Perry Riley? That's really not a lot for two years.

My point is that the 2011 draft looks excellent until a new coach comes and and gets rid of your developmental depth. And while the 2013 version Matty can come in and ask me if I'm really lamenting the losses of Roy Helu and Leonard Hankerson (no pro bowls between them!), or why I can't just get behind Todd Haley as head coach and trust him that Jerheme Urban is really a better fit for his offense than Hankerson, there were still some really questionable moves made and on top of that the Redskins were still not winning. That's why it matter.s