Redskins fans feel like they’re watching a movie they’ve seen a hundred times before: the team starts off promising (to fans, if no longer to the media) and then doesn’t live up to even our modest expectations. Or, they do meet our modest expectations, but in a way that makes us expect more along the way.
Now they sit at 3-5, once again looking up from the bottom of the NFC East. For fans of a team that’s only finished above .500 twice in the last 10 seasons (the team’s only two playoff appearances in that span), the script looks very familiar, indeed.
Most reasonable fans I know thought they would finish about 8-8, give or take a game, but now even that record seems out of reach. Message boards and Twitter feeds are full of much teeth gnashing and plenty of suggestions of which of the many problems are the most to blame.
But I don’t want to talk about any of that today. For now, I want to talk about progress. What does progress look like in an NFL team? How can we, as fans, have any clue whether we’re going in the right direction?