First and foremost, how about them Giants? Hat tip to reader Redskinette for this lovely video of Giants fans at their worst, not safe for work:
They can totally hear you mang. Just be louder. The rest of us fans really appreciate it.
(Also be sure to check out Redskinette's pictures from the game which I'm going to try and load up on to the site at some point this week. Law School finals finished hours ago for me so I am finally ready to start enjoying my Christmas break and maybe even catching up on some blogging.)
In horrible, frustrating, bang-my-head-against-the-wall news, hat tip to SinceTheBeginning (who, incidentally, has been a reader for some time now, perhaps since the beginning) Rocky McIntosh is out for the year and due to the injury, likely longer. Per Redskins Insider:
He's out 9-12 months at least and the history of these injuries is that it is often not until the second season after surgery that the player is back fully feeling well. It is almost impossible to expect Rocky to be ready for camp at this point, much less the start of the season.
He's at least two weeks away from surgery and so we're talking a year from that until he can play, which means there is a good chance he cannot play next season.
So, so frustrating for Rocky McIntosh. He was having a huge year, was 22nd among NFC linebackers in tackles, had three sacks, and forced three fumbles with one recovered. He was having the year we all hoped he would have and now it's been cut short, perhaps reaching into next season. A bad recovery means he won't be back until next December. A good one, per Jason's timeline, has him back in September, though they won't force him back early with such a severe injury. Nor should they. Continued aggrivation of this would threaten Rocky's career and he deserves the chance to recover fully before putting his body at risk on the field. In the interim, we turn to young H.B. Blades to help pick up the slack.
Here Rocky, per Redskins Insider, on how long he'll be out and his replacements:
"It all depends after the surgery how you respond to it. People respond differently. I don't expect it to be [a year]. Especially this day and age."
"I feel good the people that we got. I wouldn't want anybody else to fill in for me. I got a great friendship with him [HB] and the rest of the guys and I know he's going to try hard and do the best he can."
This is bad for any player -- I'm thinking of Carlos Rogers -- but in some ways it is especially bad for Rocky. He was drafted in the 2nd round with high hopes of joining a defense that turned out to be pretty lousy. For reasons unknown that might have cost our former linebackers coach his job, Rocky was benched in favor of Warrick Holdman through much of his first year (2006) and only saw time right there at the end. Still, for that entire year he got to take some reps and spend time at practice. Now he'll lose much or most or at least a non-trivial amount of his third season to injury, meaning by the end of '08 he, in all likelihood, won't have seen two full seasons of action. From everything he's shown us this year, I think we were wrong not to play in him in '06, and I think that decision is only going to appear worse and worse looking back. Warrick Holdman didn't save us from an embarrassing defensive season. Would an extra season of game time, more intensive condition, etc. saved Rocky from injury? That's kind of an absurd thing to speculate on, but at a minimum we would have enjoyed more of the young man's talent at linebacker and he would have been more seasoned, perhaps enough to adopt a leadership role for H.B. Blades. That seems far too much to ask of him, now.
Get well soon, Rocky.
