The days before the first week of the preseason consist of teams releasing “unofficial” depth charts (presumably as the direction of the league) and then downplaying their significance. Often, coaches claim that the configuration of players was created by the team’s P.R. staff.
Washington coach Jay Gruden did that on Tuesday when discussing his team’s initial depth chart, which was posted at the official website and then deleted. (It wasn’t there earlier in the hour, but it is now.)
"[I]t’s just something we had to put out there,” Gruden told reporters. “I didn’t even really look at it so. I think [P.R. chief] Tony Wylie did it. Did you do it? You did. Good job, Tony.”
If Tony did a “good job” of putting the depth chart together, Washington did a bad job of drafting running back Derrius Guice in round two. He’s listed on the fourth string, but he’s actually No. 6, because the second team (Rob Kelley and Kapri Bibbs) and third team (Samaje Perine and Kapri) have two names each, behind starter Chris Thompson. (The original version flipped Kelley and Thompson.)
Surely, the team doesn’t have such a dim view of Guice. Instead, the team has a dim view of the process of compiling a depth chart, and the placement of Guice means that the whole thing is meaningless.
Making Washington’s fulfillment of the requirement to issue a depth chart the next best thing to not issuing one at all.
