At the halfway point of the 2011 NFL season, the Washington Redskins have been reduced to playing for draft position. So Sunday’s game between the Dolphins (1-7) and Redskins (3-5) in Miami is a step toward the second prize in the 2012 quarterback bonanza — USC’s Matt Barkley, Oklahoma’s Landry Jones or whoever winds up No. 2.
The winless Indianapolis Colts appear to have the winning lottery ticket for the top quarterback — Stanford’s Andrew Luck — or the ability to trade him for a bagful of draft picks.
So that leaves Washington with a shot at the second-best quarterback, and a loss to the Dolphins would put them one step closer. And not everyone needs a quarterback of the future.
Entering Sunday, there are a number of teams still ahead of the Redskins. St. Louis has just one victory, and there are five teams with two wins — Carolina, Seattle, Jacksonville, Arizona and Minnesota. Cleveland, Denver and remarkably Philadelphia are all tied with the Redskins with three wins starting the second half of the season.
But if you have faith, by the time the season ends, all of this will be sorted out and the Redskins will be in position to draft one of the top quarterbacks.
Given the performances of the last two weeks by Washington, the shutout loss to the Bills in Toronto and the nearly equally pathetic 19-11 defeat at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers at FedEx Field last week, there is reason to have faith in getting a high draft pick.
This is not the place an organization that hasn’t had long-term meaningful success for 20 years wants to be. These opportunities came and went several times before, and in the second year of the Mike Shanahan regime, the question is why didn’t this happen last season?
Why didn’t rock bottom start at rock bottom instead of being delayed one year?
The answer — Donovan McNabb.
We don’t know for sure, and we may never know, but the logic in trading two draft picks for McNabb last year appeared to be buying time while Shanahan embarked on his reconstruction (don’t use the word rebuilding) of the Redskins so no one would notice they were reconstructing.
That didn’t work, so unless Sunday’s starter, John Beck, turns out to be the quarterback Shanahan believes he was when he came out of BYU in 2007 — the top quarterback in that draft — the Redskins are embarking on their reconstruction in full view now and won’t be able to take the big step forward until April. For now, they’re jockeying for position in the line forming for future quarterbacks.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
