Redskins Pre-Season Review

The Steelers won and William Gay rose above his name.

That's about all the good news I can pull from Saturday's game.

I was at a wedding in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (birthplace of Little League Baseball!), so I missed the first seven or eight minutes while we were saying goodbye to my in-laws and trying to find a bar that had the game on. We were 200 miles from Pittsburgh and 200 miles from DC and the CBS affiliate was showing the Rams vs. the Chargers.

Twenty miles down the road in Lockhaven, it was on CBS. Go figure.

As a result, I didn't get to see Fast Willie play, but I would have to assume that he didn't do all that well. He'll do better. He's going to have a good year. I've seen too much of the first team offense running out of that three wide receiver formation to think otherwise. He may have a bunch of 2 or 3 yard runs that used to be 4 or 5 yard runs, but he'll also have a bunch of 30 or 40 yard runs that used to be 6 or 7 yard runs. I will take that trade-off.

It seems as though they only bring out the actual offense that Arians is going to employ once the season starts in emergency situations. We kicked a lot of ass between the 20s when we had to move the ball (specifically at the end of the first half when Santonio Holmes proved that he is going to be a fantasy sleeper this year - buying the jersey on Thursday, btw). Then, we couldn't punch it in. I can't be sure if that's because we didn't have the right personnel out on the field, or if it's because they didn't want to show anything too fancy in the pre-season. On the last drive of the game, they probably would've scored if they threw to a tight end off of playaction on second down. Maybe they didn't trust St. Pierre. Maybe they didn't want to show that part of the offense (though playaction in the red zone is not really all that fancy). Maybe they wanted to see if they could just punch it in with third stringers when the other team knew they were going to run it.

I'm not really sure. It's a new administration and they're handling pre-season very differently than Cowher did, so who knows.

What I do know is that four field goals (especially when they're 28, 22, 21, and 19 yards respectively) ain't gonna get it done in the regular season. They need to finish these drives and score touchdowns. They haven't scored a touchdown since the Saints game and that's very, very disconcerting.

The good news is that we've got two more games to sort all of this out. The other good news is that William Gay looks like he's actually going to make the roster and be a pretty decent player. He'll also force the Steelers to make some tough decisions when it comes time to cut the roster to 53.

But, more on that later.