After going over 21 months without a regular season victory, the Detroit Lions ended that streak at home against the Washington Redskins.  The final score of the game was 19-14.

So, the Lions finally get the monkey off their back.  They did so against a team noted for its underachievement.  The perennial mediocre Skins seem to make every game an adventure, including a close fought 9-7 victory over another cellar-dwelling team last week, the St. Louis Rams.

Ironically, this game was blacked out in Detroit.  The Detroit fans weren’t even excited enough to sell out the stadium against a Washington team that lacks a superstar or an identity. 

Jim Zorn is certainly on the hot seat.

This loss does two things for Washington:

- After losing to a team that was dubbed “the worst team in the NFL”, this has to at least get them mentioned in the same sentence with the worst teams in the NFL.

- It definitively puts their head coach, Jim Zorn, on the hot seat.  After a 1-2 start – in which they could have just as easily been 0-3 – things won’t get any easier. 

Looking ahead, things won’t get any easier for the D.C. natives.  Being a member of the rough and tumble NFC East means they’ll get a heavy diet of Dallas, Philadelphia and New York (Giants).  From the looks of their first three contests, they could very well go winless in their division.

Although this has been a Washington franchise that has had very little success in recent years, they refuse to enter into a true rebuilding mode.  Predictably, with each new acquisition, the Washington faithful envision the most positive outcome from that particular addition.  But Washington’s problem has not really been one of personnel.  It has been one of coordination and execution, and the coaches routinely get blamed for those type of shortcomings.

But their comes a point, too, where the players have to step up and do better.  After all, the coaches aren’t the ones missing blocks, blowing coverages or missing tackles.

“You either want it or you don’t. A lot of these guys don’t want it,” Redskins cornerback DeAngelo Hall said. “They want the other stuff.”

Yeah, and they must be on some other stuff, too.

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