Washington Football Team quarterback and maskless partier Dwayne Haskins just stinks at his job. Sunday he played his way out of the starting job for the second time this season, and for the second time this season the quarterback to replace him was both some guy you've never heard of and also an absolute no-brainer roster move.
Haskins was replaced earlier this season by one Kyle Allen. A quick internet search of "Kyle Allen" confirms that Allen is "an American football quarterback for the Washington Football Team of the National Football League," and so almost by default he was a better option at the time than Haskins. Unfortunately, Allen suffered a grody dislocated ankle injury in Week 9, and is presently on the injured reserve list. Rather than have their hotshot young quarterback take back his starting role, the Football Team turned over starting duties to Alex Smith, whose lower right leg is an Erector Set contraption wrapped in a festering sheath of congealed meat pulp.
Smith was fine, and even good, and the Football Team recovered from a 1–5 start to get within a game of .500, which in the NFC East is the equivalent of a 14-win season. Then the breaking down of Smith's rebuilt appendage accelerated beyond anyone's ability to continue ignoring it, and the Football Team was forced once again to turn to Haskins. When I say that giving Haskins another look was not anyone's first or third or even second-to-last choice, buddy, I really mean it: They hauled Smith out onto the field Sunday morning in a desperate hope that he could amble around on that oozing Slim Jim of a right leg. It was not to be:
Fortunately, the Football Team had two completely anonymous create-a-player quarterbacks rostered this weekend, in no small part due to Haskins's ill-advised maskless partying after Week 15's loss to the Seahawks. Haskins got the start, but was both absolutely horrendous and on a bit of a short leash. His performance, the shittiness of which manages to be undersold pretty dramatically by a 14-of-28 stat line, is best captured by two shockingly bad interceptions:
Washington head coach Ron Rivera can be condemned for waiting too long to replace his blue-chip young quarterback with someone named Taylor Heinicke. Heinicke, like Allen, is for sure "an American football quarterback for the Washington Football Team of the National Football League," although even that overstates his credentials:
Heinicke has somehow thrown 58 passes in his NFL career prior to this appearance with Washington, but none since December 2018. Heinicke was immediately and definitively way the hell better than Haskins: He threw for one touchdown and had a second negated by a penalty, and for the first time in three weeks the Football Team had a coherent passing game. Haskins was reduced to sort of weirdly wandering out on the field during a stoppage to pat one of his teammates on the shoulder, and then wandering back to the sideline. His mood is not great.
If recent trends hold, one or the other of Heinicke's lower legs will soon do something painful and gross. But this time the Football Team has a better plan than handing the ball back to Haskins, who I must reiterate stinks like you would not believe: His name is Steven Montez, and you had better believe he is "an American football quarterback for the Washington Football Team of the National Football League."
