Is Washington Set Up for Record-Breaking Season?
The Washington Football Team will either be a loser or a winner in this 2021 NFL season. Thanks to an added regular season game, the days of going 8-8 are over, and even if the team goes 8-8-1 it's going to feel more like a losing record than a winning one.
That's one effect the new regular season schedule will have on teams in the NFL this year. There is also potential for players to break records this year.
"There should be an asterisk," head coach Ron Rivera told media when asked about the potential of setting new high marks in this expanded season schedule. "...to answer your question, yeah. When I played, there were 14 games and then it became 16 games...The era of the game is different, and I'd say this too, not a lot of guys can transcend all these different areas and have played today and played 20 years ago and 30 years ago at least in my opinion."
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It's something interesting to watch as we go through this first season of 17 games. Of course, you'll still have some of the talk circling the end of each season about benching star players and starters when a team has already clinched a playoff spot.
The fact only one team gets a bye week in the postseason will influence these decisions as well, compared to the two teams awarded bye weeks prior to the 2020 NFL Playoffs.
For the WFT, some marks will still be hard to get to. For example, the franchise record for points scored in a single season still stands at 541 points scored by Joe Gibbs' 1983 squad.
To do it, the team led the league in points scored and had quarterback Joe Theismann throw for nearly 4,000 yards when 3,000 was considered a high mark to reach in the NFL.
They also had the league's fifth-ranked running back in John Riggins who led the NFL in 1983 with 24 rushing scores.
In '83, the team averaged 33.8 points per game to get to the franchise mark. This season, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Antonio Gibson, and Ron Rivera can score two points less per game and still eclipse the mark.
Last year's top-scoring offense, the Green Bay Packers, averaged 31.5, while Washington scored just 21.1 per game. It's a tall order to increase the scoring output by around 12 points, but a lower requirement to set franchise records, nonetheless.
If you're looking for a record that could be easier to break with the extra game this season, look no further than wide receiver Terry McLaurin.
In just his second season in the NFL, McLaurin put himself 20th all-time for receiving yards in a single season with his 1,118-yard output last year. In doing so, he averaged 74.5 receiving yards per game.
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Expanding that average to 17 games, and the total becomes 1,192 yards which would jump him up to 13th in franchise history.
If better and more consistent passing from Fitzpatrick helps McLaurin increase his per-game output by 13 yards per game, he'll become the organization's all-time leader in receiving yards in a single season, surpassing Santana Moss' 2005 performance by a full four yards.
It's only one game, but that could be the difference between setting records, or not, and at least one NFL head coach thinks it's worth noting.
