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Assembling the Best Possible Capitals Football Team

If you’re like virtually everyone in America, you probably watched a little bit of football this past weekend.

And, assuming you’re from D.C., you probably caught a little bit of the Washington Redskins game. And you saw those same Redskins do their normal thing, lose a football game. You saw the second-best football team in the Nation’s Capital lose again.

Wait, second-best team? Are the Redskins actually the best football team in Washington, or do you think we could assemble a better one using the Washington Capitals? Well, there’s really only one way to find out, and it’s by creating the Official Capitals Football Team.

Let’s start out by figuring out what our offense looks like.

Quarterback

Believe it or not, this one is really, really easy to determine. Our QB is Matt Niskanen. Niskanen played QB in Minnesota, earning himself the Duluth News-Tribune Football Player of the Year honors in high school. That was pretty easy, and we didn’t even have to trade three first-round picks for him.

Running Back

A lot of teams seem to have two different types of running backs on their team, so we’ll need to have two as well. Let’s go with a power back and a quick back. We should have Alex Ovechkin as our power back, and we’ll put Nicklas Backstrom as our quick back. We’d use Backstrom as our pass-catching back as well. Backstrom can catch, right?

Wide Receiver

Okay, young guys are pretty dominant in the NFL. You have Odell Beckham Jr., Brandin Cooks, Mike Evans, Randall Cobb, tons of young WR’s play huge roles for their teams. So why don’t we go ahead and put our young, skilled guys as our wide outs? Let’s line up Evgeny Kuznetsov on one side and Andre Burakovsky on the other. But we need a veteran player in their as well. Let’s throw in T.J. Oshie as our veteran slot receiver.

Tight End

Tom Wilson. Could you imagine Tom Wilson as a tight end?

Offensive Line

Alright, things are going to get a little dicey here. Unlike the Redskins, the Capitals don’t have 6-foot-5, 300 pound men to throw on the offensive line. So we are just going to have to throw in some of our bigger, strong players on the line and hope for the best. Let’s put Brooks Orpik as our left tackle, we’ll throw in Karl Alzner and John Carlson as our guards, Jason Chimera as our right tackle, and we’ll throw in Michael Latta as our center. Latta’s scrappy, it might end up working.

Alright, looks like we got our offense taken care of. Now, let’s see if we can assemble a respectable defense.

Defensive Line

Seriously? We have to come up with another set of gigantic people? Alright, well some guys are just going to have to play both sides of the ball. Chimera is a fast skater, so he’s also probably a fast runner, and we’d want to have him rushing in as a defensive end. We’d want Latta there as well. Who do we put in the middle? Defensive tackles don’t move all that much….and…..neither do goalies, I guess? I mean, they barely skate around the ice. So let’s throw in Braden Holtby and Philipp Grubauer in the middle to fill out our terrifying defensive line.

Linebackers

Alright, once again, we are obviously putting in Wilson as our middle linebacker, because everyone would be afraid to cut across the middle with Wilson standing there. We’ll throw in Orpik as our right linebacker, and how about Ovechkin as our left linebacker? Those guys are all tough enough, and we know they are heavy hitters.

Secondary

No matter the combination of players we come up with to create the Washington Capitals secondary, we can confidently build a secondary that is better than the Washington Redskins’. Okay, so why don’t we look for young, speedy guys to put on the corners? How about our third defensive pairing, Dmitri Orlov and Nate Schmidt? They are young and will be expected to shut people down for the Caps, so why not for our football team? Our free safety needs to be athletic, intelligent and reliable, so we definitely need to put Justin Williams there. Now, who can we put at strong safety? They need to be just like our free safety, Justin Williams, but they need a bit more strength. Welcome to the team Liam O’Brien.

Kicker

Don’t ask me why, but I think Marcus Johansson can probably kick a football decently well.

Punter

Don’t ask me why, but I think Chris Brown can probably punt a football decently well.

There you have it! That’s the Official Capitals Football Team. Think they could hold their own?

Eh….probably not. Maybe they should just stick to being the best hockey team in Washington.

Tommy Chalk

Tommy Chalk is a recent journalism graduate at the University of Maryland. He loves hockey, numbers and pretty much anything covered in ranch. Writes about fights and stuff that goes on in the Capitals world.

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