lspain1 said:
Rich, I also find the Commanders' experiment (because that is what it is) to build a team in today's NFL via free agency interesting. It'll be a neat trick if it works. Your depth discussion also points out the main weakness of the approach.
I think the other problem is that it will be difficult to repeat the success year in and year out. Not as in being a legit SB contender every year. More as in going to the playoffs each season. This approach will almost always create depth issues and since you're relying on bringing in FA's every year a lot more than most teams rely on rookies, if they don't fit in right away that creates a biggest setback.
Last year one of the significant weaknesses of the Cowboys was a lack of depth. That weakness was exposed by injuries and made a huge difference in the season outcome. I would also submit that both the Eagles and the Giants suffered similar fates due to injuries and lack of depth to varying degrees.
Dallas had some decent depth. Where we got killed was the lack of depth on the O-Line. We had plenty of depth on defense as the rookies and CB's turned out better than expected, but we had a ridiculous amount of injuries.
To me, the Eagles can't claim they had a worse amount of injuries than Dallas had last season. McNabb was hurt, but was still a capable QB. When he went down, their season was over with anyway. Westbrook didn't go down until their season was over with. Todd Pinkston's injury was really more significant in the grand scheme of things than McNabb or Westbrook's. Other than that, Tra Thomas went down when their season was over with, Fraley stunk and he went down in the same poor situation.
Dallas OTOH, lost Flozell and Jacob Rogers with significant time left in their season. Julius had a high ankle sprain in week 5 and wasn't the same until week 16. We lost 5 LB's to I-R, Ratliff (a starter) to I-R, and then Anthony Henry practically went on I-R after the Cardinals game as he may have played all of a dozen downs after the injury.
The Giants had LB problems. But the main problem was that Osi Umenyiora is purely a speed rusher and once Antonio Pierce went down, teams just started running at him at will. He then would either try to bull rush to stop the run and be rather ineffective or he would speed rush and they'd run at him with great success.
The team that seemed to suffer least in the NFCE to this was the Commanders. I believe the Commanders had fewer players on the DL than the rest of the division, and those players that went on came off quicker with a milder set of injuries. Unless the skins' have discovered a training regimen that magically reduces injuries, that pattern is not likely to repeat itself this season
Off the top of my head, Jansen had some broken thumbs, Portis had some shoulder issues late in the year, Thomas went down with a broken leg in the second game against us (blame Gibbs for that, it was stupid having him out there when they were up by 35 points), Springs started to break down towards the end, Griffin went out for 3 key games, and Taylor went out for a game.
The only real possible damaging injury they had last season was Griffin, but he wasn't gone long enough for it to be a problem and when he came back they didn't miss a beat. Went Portis got hurt and Thomas went down, that really killed their playoff chances since Ray Brown was awful and they couldn't run the ball without a healthy Portis.
If the Skins stay healthy, they'll be fine. But they've got quite a few players that they probably cannot afford to lose to injury.
Rich..........
