Fortunately for me, I hail from New England, so I don't have to consider the Redskins to be "my home team", and probably won't untiil Dan Snyder dies.
I've considered New England to be vulnerable defensively for the last couple of years, but the salary cap eventually forces such vulnerabilities to develop, as it now costs them ten times as much a year to keep Brady at QB as it did in, say, 2002. Their impressive +/- differential becomes less impressive when you take their rout win out of the picture. Ask me again after this Sunday nights contest against Indianapolis.
The Redskins created their own salary cap problem by paying one outstanding defensive player, Haynesworth, $100 million over seven years. He is spectacular, but if they had instead, say, signed a 6 million dollar a year player, and upgraded eight other positions by a million dollars each with the available salary cap space, then they'd surely be a better team than they are now.
These Danny Boy, big-name signings are even more crippling than they seem. As I understand it, about $20 million of that $100 million is a signing bonus that is prorated over the length of the contract, but three or four years from now, when Haynesworth is no longer worth $14 million a year, if he is released I think that the entire remainder of the pro-rated signing bonus comes off that next year, meaning that they will be starting yet another season with their fiscal hands tied behind their backs.