The 5 O'Clock Club: Poll Rewind - The Redskins starting nose tackle

The 5 o’clock club aims to provide a forum for reader-driven discussion at a time of day when there isn’t much NFL news being published. Feel free to introduce topics that interest you in the comments below.

Welcome to the Poll Rewind series!

As you probably know already, each 5 o’clock club post ends with a poll question. Usually, the results are forgotten within a day or two, but no longer!

Over the course of the off-season (From now to July 2018) we will be re-visiting some (not all) of the results of polls that were published from June to December 2017.

Several of the writers on Hogs Haven — Ken, Mark, James Dorsett & Cadillactica — have agreed to help me out with the poll reviews by adding commentary so you aren’t stuck with my voice all the time.

For today, though, the comments are mine.

We go back to 25 July 2017, when the Redskins were in training camp and fans still had hope that the team might deploy a large man in the middle of the defense to act as an immovable object on running downs. In other words, we thought we might get a nose tackle instead of Ziggy Hood.

The poll that day asked who would line up as the nose tackle.

Who will be the nose tackle on opening day against the Eagles?

• Phil Taylor 49%
• Joey Mbu 29%
• Ziggy Hood 9%
• Ondre Pipkins 7%
• Someone else 6%

With several possible candidates to choose from, the majority of fans chose Phil Taylor, and they likely would have been right.

But Phil Taylor went down with an injury in pre-season, which probably shouldn’t have been surprising given his age and history.

The injury was reported this way in an article published on 28 August 2017:

Redskins nose tackle Phil Taylor, who seemed to be on the verge of making the roster after being out of football for two years, will miss the 2017 season with a quad injury he suffered in Sunday night’s game against the Bengals.

It looked like Taylor’s career was off to a good start after the Browns made him a first-round pick in the 2011 draft. But Cleveland let him go after he suffered a knee injury. He signed with the Broncos in 2016 but they let him go early in training camp.

He was about to retire in January but the Redskins called his agent again, this time with a futures contract offer. The team has needed a nose tackle and as the offseason program and training camp went on it looked like they had found one on Taylor.

Now, Taylor will spend a third straight year on the sideline and the Redskins will go back to the drawing board at nose tackle.

Joey Mbu never did make the Redskin roster in 2017, but the combination of Matt Ioannidis and Jon Allen seemed to be enough to cure what had ailed the Redskins defense in 2016... at least until Jon Allen went down with a Lisfranc injury and Ioann Man broke his hand.

After that, Ziggy Hood was the man in the middle, and the Redskins finished 2017 with the worst-ranked run defense in the league.