The quarterback play of John Beck (pictured) and Rex Grossman has been worse than most Redskins fans could have imagined (photo by Brian Murphy)

Confession time: I didn’t see a single live snap of the latest Washington Redskins loss, a 20-9 setback at the hands of the Miami Dolphins. I had a very good reason for this: I’ve been in Vienna (as in Austria) for the last week. So it happened that the first half of Sunday’s game coincided with me flying into Dulles Airport, while the second half coincided with me going through immigration, collecting my luggage, getting on a bus to the West Falls Church Metro station and following the game on my phone.

Just when I was finally able to devote my full attention to the graphics and text on the tiny screen in front of me, the sequence that decided the game unfolded. You know the one: with 12 minutes to play in regulation and Washington trailing 13-9, newly reinstated starter Rex Grossman drives the Redskins to a first-and-goal situation at the Miami 10-yard line. On the next play, Grossman stares down Jabar Gaffney as if the former is trying to set the latter on fire with his mind and serves up an easy interception to Karlos Dansby. Miami promptly drives 81 yards for the clinching touchdown, and that is the end of that.

Trying to compose these essays on a week-by-week basis has become challenging over the course of this current five-game losing streak due to the fact that it is impossible to discuss the root causes of this decline without sounding like a broken record. But circumstances demand that we restate the obvious: I stated on record at the beginning of the year that there was no way the quarterback play would be as bad as it was in 2010. I was obviously wrong, very wrong. Grossman and  Beck’s individual performances have ranged from “merely competent” to “downright dreadful” over the course of the season, but their cumulative performance has been that of a sub-optimal backup; including Sunday’s loss, the Redskins quarterbacks have completed a pedestrian 193 passes in 329 attempts for 1,347 yards, 8 touchdowns, and 15 interceptions (as many, we hasten to point out, as Donovan McNabb threw in 2010).

It’s fun, normal, and perhaps even healthy to argue whether Mike Shanahan’s campaigning and/or acquiescence to the McNabb trade, as well as his resolve to “stake his reputation” on the quality of Beck as an NFL quarterback signaled a descent into football senility or whether Kyle Shanahan’s  ongoing association with Grossman marks him as the Dave Shula of the new millennium. Whatever the value of this exercise is, it completely misses the point, which is this: no matter how loud the baying for blood is this season (and my hunch is that it will get a good deal louder before the season mercifully ends on New Year’s Day), it won’t change the names on the organization chart.

In the NFL, as in most industries, the ally of success is stability. When Daniel Snyder signed Mike Shanahan to a five-year deal with all the trimmings, stability is precisely what he was paying for. These are the things you do when you’ve had Vinny Cerrato and Jim Zorn running your football team.

So be prepared, Redskins fans, for a lot more of the firm of Shanahan & Son. Having whiffed on McNabb, Grossman, and now Beck, they’ll likely get yet another chance to bring in the right quarterback that will pull the offense into something resembling competence. Kyle Orton, anyone?