Red Skins: Could a Few Good Plays a Year Leave Them Playoff Bound?

For some teams in the NFL, the difference between making the playoffs and sitting at home and watching them on TV can literally be measured in a couple plays a year.

Yes, just two plays could leave a team bound for the coveted playoffs, or out early.

Take the Washington Redskins in 2008 as an example in how just a couple of plays gone awry, turned a playoff trip into an early winter vacation.

The Redskins finished a mediocre 8-8. However if you change a couple plays, the Redskins would have been 10-6 and good enough to edge out the Philadelphia Eagles and collect the second NFC wild card slot. The Eagles finished 9-6-1, with a third of their losses coming at the hands of the Redskins.

Key play number one came at home for the Redskins, in what seemingly was the perfect set-up for a win on a sunny mid-October afternoon. The Skins were coming off back-to-back road wins against two hated rivals, the Dallas Cowboys and the Eagles, and had won four in a row.

The win-less St. Louis Rams were coming into FedEx Field having just fired their coach.

Late in the first half, the Skins led 7-3 and were in position for at least a field goal and 10-3 halftime lead.  A Jason Campbell pass was tipped at the line of scrimmage and ended up in the hands of offensive lineman Pete Kendall, who tried to run with the ball rather than falling down and protecting it.

Pisa Tinoisamoa knocked the ball away from Kendall, and Oshiomogho Atogwe picked it up, running seventy five yards for the touchdown that gave the Rams a 10-7 lead. They carried this momentum into the second half.

One play was at the least a ten point turnaround.

After the game,Tinoisamoa said, "I'm sitting there waiting for someone to blow a whistle or challenge the play or something like that to happen because that's how our year's been. But I think this kind of signifies the tides are changing."

The Redskins took a late one point lead, but couldn't hold it and lost 19-17 on a late field goal by Josh Brown.

Kendall blamed himself for the loss. He was released in the off season.

Key play number two came in mid-December, as the faltering Redskins traveled to Cincinnati to take on the woebegone Bengals.

Trailing 17-10, a shirttail tug and a timely swipe prevented the Redskins from pulling even in the third quarter.

On third-and-goal from a foot away, Mike Sellers' surge was stopped shy of the goal line, with safety Kyries Hebert grabbing his shirt tail to keep him out. Sellers stretched the ball toward the goal line, but linebacker Corey Mays snatched it out of his hands.

Cincinnati won 20-13, virtually ending the Redskins' playoff hopes.

Looking back, fullback Mike Sellers whose goal-line fumble was the final blow, said it all, "I'm speechless. We're having a hard time beating some of the worst teams."

In the days leading up to the Bengals game, tailback Clinton Portis had derisively called coach Jim Zorn a "genius" for benching him the week before.

However Portis, who dropped a pass on the the Redskins' last drive of the game, blamed no one but the players after the game.

"It's pretty tough," Portis said. "We had an opportunity to come in here and keep our season alive, and we let it slip away. We didn't execute. You can't put that on the coaches. It was on us on the field."

So it became the story for the Redskins in 2008, literally a couple of blown plays away from the playoffs.