It's a good question, coming off a bye-week playing on Monday Night Football... this is a big game for us in terms of locking down the NFC home field advantage.
If we go down to 2-2 that would be a lot more pressure moving forward, we have a pretty brutal stretch of 6 games Weeks 11-16, plus @ Carolina Week 8.
http://espn.go.com/nfl/team/_/name/sea/seattle-seahawks
So ideally we need to hit Week 11 on the road against Kansas City with only two losses tops (7-2). If I had to pick a game too lose before week 11 it'd be @ Carolina Week 8.
So what I'm trying to say is that we NEED to win this game, and the next 2 so we can go into Carolina 5-1. If we go into Carolina 4-2 and lost then we'd suddenly be 4-3 and this whole community would be freaking out knowing the tough schedule we are about to face.
So in my opinion we have 7 "scary" games left in the season (we could still win them all easily if we play to our potential), and 6 "easy" games. The Redskins should be an "easy" game so we ideally will dominate the entire time and we'll be fully psyched up to punk Dallas afterwards.
I didn't expect us to lose to San Diego, I thought our 2 losses this season would be @ Carolina and @ San Fransisco...
And of course since it's a Monday Night game the average NFL media morons will be watching this ONE GAME closely and using it as like 25-50% of their "expert" analysis for our ENTIRE SEASON. So this is a great opportunity to show them what we're made of.
http://www.nfl.com/stats/team
So here's what I would like to see ranked in order of importance (no injuries is a given):
1) We are currently ranked 19th in Opposing Passing Yards (249), but we have faced 3 Top Tier QB's... so this will be our chance for our Legion of Boom to get booming
Right now Kirk Cousins is putting up some decent stats. Cousins has a 62.3% completion rate and a 87.4 Passer Rating. BUT HE ALSO HAS 5 INTERCEPTIONS COMPARED TO ONLY 6 TOUCHDOWNS!
http://espn.go.com/nfl/statistics/player/_/stat/passing/sort/quarterbackRating
So we should be able to easily get 1-2 interceptions, especially if we are playing with a lead.
We are also ranked 6th in Opposing Yards Per game (321) but it'd be nice to move up a bit after this week.
So far we've given up 66 points this season (22 per game), this is a stat we should dramatically improve by the end of the season.
So overall I'd like to see our Defense really step up and crush them.
2) Our Pass rush, we need to get more consistent pressure, and more sacks. I have not been too impressed with what we've shown so far this season, seems like we are lacking the adrenaline to really scare the opposing QB's.
3) Our Offensive Line, please improve... Wilson is still running for his life and taking too many hits/sacks. Okung especially needs to step his game up he seems incredibly slow and ineffective to me so far.
4) Solid offensive play calling. I don't want to see any drives halted by questionable calls until we have at least a 3 score lead.
This means no pounding it up the Middle with Turbin, (should really only use him for decoy passing stuff unless it's garbage time then let him pound it for 2-3 yards which is all he ever does...)
I also don't want to see any incompletions to Bryan Walters... if they for some reason insist to use this guy then for the love of god make sure he doesn't have the lowest catch % on our team like he did last week...
Last week Walters was 2/5 which was by far the worst on our team. I don't think he should even be in there to begin with unless it's garbage time but obviously the coaches have more faith than I do. So use him intelligently on high percentage plays if it's a necessary evil. It seems like Wilson was overthrowing Walters so he could be a little too slow to begin with, although he did seem to run some nice routes getting fairly good separation so I'm afraid we may see more of this guy...
The fact that Walters is even getting so many targets tells me that something is a little whack in our passing game... like we haven't figured out how to replace Tate yet and somehow Walters is our best guy to replicate Tate's routes?
The Redskins just gave up 449 yards to the New York Giants last week so I'm expecting the Hawks to post at least 400 yards with
intelligent offensive play calling.
Right now the Hawks are ranked 14th in the league in offensive yards per game (356.7).
We only put up 288 yards against the Chargers which to me is unacceptable given how talented our players are.
Summary:
I want to see a well rounded game with our Defense playing to their full potential and our Pass Rush stepping up big time.
I'd like our offense to consistently move the ball with good play calling. Our Offensive line should step it up to ensure this can happen.