Peterson’s run seals win, gives Washington third straight victory
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — In a the gray, cinder-blocked visitors’ locker room far beneath the MetLife Stadium stands, Washington Redskins left tackle Trent Williams stood in front of the team before Sunday’s 20-13 victory over the New York Giants and talked about the hurt.
Two years ago, the Redskins needed to beat the Giants on the last game of the season to make the playoffs, and lost. It was a bruising blow, he told the players Sunday, a bitter, awful defeat that still gnaws at him today. Forget that New York had won just once this season, forget that the Giants had traded away two starters last week and appeared to be quitting on their season.
“Don’t be too relaxed,” he said to the rest of the team. “Go out on the field and beat it. Play these guys like they’re the best team in the league.”
Four hours later, after the Redskins had grinded their way to a 5-2 record, holding tight to first place in the NFC East, Williams stood at his locker and stared at his right arm. Around his wrist was a cast, fashioned by doctors to hold together his thumb that was dislocated in the game. Across the room, running back Kapri Bibbs winced as he described how trainers popped his left shoulder back into place during the game. Beside him, a shirtless Adrian Peterson shook his head and said: “Man, my shoulder hurt,” referring to being knocked to the ground on a fourth-quarter fumble.
Seven games into the season, many of the Redskins players are aching, but the pregame words of Williams still lingered with many of them. “He was trying to tell the young guys that [the Giants] game is going to be a fight,” linebacker Mason Foster said.
Once again, the Washington won a game that looked wretched on a box score. Once again, quarterback Alex Smith threw for under 200 yards, this time 178. Once again, long, time-devouring drives fizzled into punts. Once again, passes flew too long or too short or were dropped when they should have been caught.
And yet, once again, the offensive futility did not matter. The Redskins have won three straight games since a disaster of a loss in New Orleans. Each of these games has been something of a duplicate of the others — quarterback Alex Smith doesn’t turn the ball over, the defense stops the opposition’s best offensive player and then the whole team holds on for a win. And anybody watching on the outside must wonder how they keep doing it.
On Sunday, inside a stadium that has been a disaster for the Redskins in recent years, the defense swarmed over Giants quarterback Eli Manning, sacking him seven times and intercepting two of his passes. The 316 yards Sunday, 1 p.m. TV: Ch. 5 Radio: 980 AM for which he threw mostly came at the end, when the Giants were down and desperate and star running back Saquon Barkley had shown he wasn’t able to run against the Redskins’ defense, recording a season-low 39 rushing yards.
With NewYork unable to move the ball for most of the game, the Redskins rode an early touchdown catch by Peterson and a 7-3 lead through halftime until they slowly pulled away with two second-half field goals and a 64-yard touchdown run by Peterson that gave Washington a late 20-6 lead and essentially put the game away.
The touchdown run, called “16 G Force” for the sweeping block that guard Brandon Scherff made to spring Peterson free, was what Peterson called a perfect example of a philosophy that has guided him through games for much of his career: “famine, famine, feast.” For much of Sunday he had stumbled ahead on runs of 2 and 3 yards, not to mention his fumble late in the third quarter that had ruined a likely scoring opportunity and been returned 43 yards by the Giants, but when the Redskins needed him to carry them in the fourth quarter, he answered with 107 of his season-high 149 yards.
Later, as he walked back to the locker room, Peterson said that, like Williams hours before, he has been talking to the younger players, offering lessons on how to survive games in which nothing goes right.
“Just keep grinding when things aren’t perfect,” he said.
Nothing about this season looks much like the Redskins of recent years. Smith doesn’t fling the ball downfield the way his predecessor, Kirk Cousins, did, but he doesn’t give it away, either. Last season, Washington had the worst run defense in the league. Over the past three weeks it has stopped three of the NFL’s better backs: Barkley, the Dallas Cowboys’ Ezekiel Elliott and Carolina Panthers’ Christian McCaffrey. The games are not works of art, but the wins keep coming.
Long after the game was over, linebacker Zach Brown (Wilde Lake) and two teammates stood near their lockers looking at the official statistics sheet from the afternoon. They ran through the interceptions — both of which were made by safety D.J. Swearinger — and the seven sacks of Manning. They celebrated eachthatwasmadebyalinebacker.
“If a linebacker gets a sack, all the linebackers get a sack,” Brown said with a smile.
In another room, just outside the locker room, Redskins coach Jay Gruden stood behind a lectern and shook his head.
“I like the way we are playing and competing,” Gruden said. “After the Saints game it could have gone a lot of different ways with this team, but our leaders stepped up and said: ‘enough is enough.’ ”
And that’s all that seemed to matter on another day in which the Redskins outlasted yet another team to stay in first place. Redskins quarterback Alex Smith finds running back Adrian Peterson for a first-quarter touchdown pass. Peterson ran for a season-high 149 yards.