The Redskins and The Turk (which only sounds like a weird picaresque novel)

I watched a good bit of the Redskins game on fastforward, thanks to the magic of Tivo, and with my eyes half open thanks to the magic of sleeping really poorly the three previous nights. The list of players who impressed me was pretty short. I remember Rian Wallace looking good, and perhaps Andre Frazier, although honestly it's kind of a blur at this point.

I'm not so concerned about the offense, which I think will come around. Commentators love to hold the following two beliefs simultaneously:

1. The preseason is completely meaningless, except for injuries.
2. A bad performance in a preseason game is a signal of existing problems and a foreshadowing of things to come.

I don't fully subscribe to either belief. I think preseason can be meaningful for a team on the rise or decline to the extent that it builds momentum, positive or negative. But for a team that has reached a certain level of performance (good or bad) and doesn't have any great reason to believe that will change, the preseason means diddly-poo. I think that's us--with the caveat that a record of 11-5 or above is basically the same level of performance in my mind.

I still expect Ben to get the ship righted when he gets full weeks of 100% of the snaps in practice and gets to play full games. People have rewritten last season as if Ben was a mere caretaker of the running game, but this ignores a couple of things. One is that we ran so much in the second half of games because we often put up points in the passing game( courtesy of Ron Jaworski) and built big leads early. The other is that Ben came through aerially in the one game he needed to win late, at Dallas.

As for the first cutdown date, it was a real yawner. Doering clearly wasn't making the team this time around after being signed a few weeks ago with Ward out of camp, and Cushing made a horrible decision to try to be the backup fullback on a team that never keeps a backup fullback. Still, I imagine he'll show up at some point for his annual catch, half-season pay, and solid blocking and special-teams play. The only other name of any note was Zamir Cobb, last year's flash in the pan, but the bottom line is that undrafted free agents are usually undrafted free agents for a reason. I was a little disappointed at the lack of news, not realizing that we got to keep 71 at this point, but that means 18 names get dropped on Sunday, with at least 1 or 2 no doubt raising eyebrows.