Philadelphia Eagles: What happens when your HOF defensive coordinator dies of a heart attack a few weeks before the season? Their Eagles hope they can go old school and regain the playoff touch, but that's unlikely. defense was amazing last season, 3rd and 4th against the pass and run. They have a pretty stupid head coach and a qb that doesn’t know the rules of football but they have a talented offensive line after selling the farm for Jason Peters. I don’t think they’re very deep and last year they were really injury-free. This season has started out as already getting injured, they lost their MLB, Westbrook is already injured, they angered all their fans by getting a dog killer who probably won’t even be good at football after 2 years in prison (I remember how bad Jamal Lewis was after a year in prison)… they’ve had a number of injuries and… I think this season is shaping up to be a disaster on a lot of fronts for a team that really wasn’t deep enough to stomach a season like this, and I kind of think that Jim Johnson’s loss will be felt by the defense too. Fantasy Potential: Their defense was good last season but the whole blitzing schemes and everything may well be changed, I’d guess it’ll be good but wouldn’t waste an early pick on it. Westbrook is always a good fantasy bet and Desean will be good if he’s not injured for the season. Outlook: 6-10 Washington Redskins: The Redskins were a decent team for part of the season last year, with a top ten pass and rush defense and a top ten Portis needs to stay healthy and produce if Washington has a chance this year. rush offense as well. The problem is that the rush offense faltered in the second half of the season (presumably as Portis broke down) and they lost what had been a reasonably hot start. The team is actually somewhat surprisingly largely unchanged from last year. They’ve made two seemingly irrelevant changes to the o-line (I don’t think it’s a good idea to make o-line changes unnecessarily, it’s not like they brought in better talent than left) and their big acquisition is obviously Haynesworth, who should make the defense even better than it was already. In preseason unfortunately they look similar to last year, with a pretty decent defense but an offense that is bad enough (well, a quarterback who is bad enough) to mean that teams can wait it out and put up points just by virtue of having their offenses on the field all game. I expect a decent defense that is on the field too much and wears down towards the end of the year so that if your team plays the Redskins I think you’d rather it were towards the end of the season rather than the beginning. Fantasy Potential: I think both the defense and Portis are nice ways to open the season. Dropping them towards the end or trading them, if possible, wouldn’t be an awful idea though. I’d stay away from Campbell, he’s been an absolute trainwreck in preseason. Cooley is a good TE option and I feel like there are a lot of good TE options that people aren’t paying attention to. Either way he’s one of them. Santana will be the same I’d guess… Outlook: They went 8-8 last year and I kind of think they’re a very similar team. 8-8 again. BM
