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Originally Posted by lspain1
Om, I'm a staunch Cowboys fan, but beyond the Taylor thing I think the Skins had a decent offseason. I think we will see improvement this year. The big question for the Skins may come down to QB play. The defense will be solid and the OL is better as well. We'll see but I think the NFC East is going to have better all around play than we have seen in a number of years.
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Sorry I missed this post before. You'd think I'd have noticed a candle in the dark straight off.
I think this is a very fair assessment. To me, the two keys heading into the 2005 season are Ramsey and overall team health.
Patrick's certainly shown he CAN be very effective, but he's also shown enough inconsistency to make him less than a sure thing at this point. If he plays well, and stays within the offense, this team will win some games. If he struggles, the offense will struggle as well, unless Brunell decides to be born again, again. Which is not something I'd be banking on.
The other key is health. They can't afford to lose more than a couple key starters at key positions, because their depth is still a work in progress. In 15 months, they've made a lot of progress, but there's still another year or two of steady re-stocking and targeting specific player types to get to where they can expect to plug in pieces (though the D did a remarkable job of that last year) and expect to play consistent winning football. Of course ... that could also be said of all but a couple of the top teams, so it's certainly not just a Washington concern.
Mostly this year is about Patrick Ramsey, and whether he's ready both physically and between the ears to run a disciplined, timing-based offense.