What Lessons Were Learned From Redskins Victory?

Mark Brunell So what have we learned from Sunday's performance now that the fuzzy warm feelings have faded away?

The Redskins are better than the Texans. We already knew that.

Mark Brunell can complete screens and dump-offs accurately. We already knew that.

Clinton Portis completely changes the game. We already knew that.

There has to be something that we've learned, other than Ladell Betts is much better coming off the bench, but everything that was obvious is not what we need to learn to be that team we expected to see during the offseason.

Can Mark Brunell throw downfield? If you take away Clinton Portis' 74-yard scamper in which he did all the work, Brunell only racked up 187 total passing yards. With proper protection he won't throw the ball away as quickly as previous games, but he still seemed to go to his checkdown way too quickly and sometimes not even giving them time to really get in a position to make a play afterwards because the ball came too quickly. And he probably wouldn't have had so much time to throw the ball if the line wasn't called for numerous holding penalties.

The defense played much better, but that's only relative to their pass performances. Playing against a QB who gets sacked on average more than three times a game, it makes you question how the defensive line only sacked him once. And a rookie got a piece of it. As far as the secondary, I thought Reed Doughty put on Adam Archuleta's jersey and simply made rookie mistakes, but it was the $30 million safety biting on play fakes and leaving his deep zone wide open. Texan WR scorched the secondary for 152 yards. Who was covering him? Carlos Rogers, the next coming of Champ Bailey?

So what did we learn? Well, there was Derrick Frost and his booming kicks, averaging 56 yards a kick.

[NOTE: I am resisting all urges to post that I am 100% confident Jason Campbell could've made the same screen passes, short dumpoffs, checkdowns to RBs standing a few yards in front of the line of scrimmage and handed the ball off to Portis. Would Campbell have completed 22 in a row? Probably not. Al Saunders would've probably called a real passing play and went downfield to one of the numerous playmakers, and maybe even connected on one or two. But for now, I'll just trust Joe Gibbs' intuition that Mark Brunell is our best chances of winning a Super Bowl.]