LANDOVER, Md. — The Washington Redskins had been reciting the same line every week for a month. Struggling teams are the worst to play, the saying goes, because they’re desperate and unpredictable.

Enough of that political correctness. The Redskins are themselves a desperate team now. They have no problem saying out loud that they should’ve been beating all these winless teams, and — now that the cream-puff part of the schedule is coming to an end — they should, must and ought to fully dispense with the Kansas City Chiefs (0-5) on Sunday.
“We’re a couple steps from getting ready to panic right now,” cornerback DeAngelo Hall said. “You’re facing teams that ain’t won a game. We gave Detroit their first win. We gave Carolina their first win. We can’t give Kansas City their first win. That’s the bottom line. We’ve got to get 3-3.”
If anything, the Redskins (2-3) are much more desperate than the Chiefs. Washington entered the season with confident talk about winning the NFC East; instead the players are dealing with daily uncertainty over the status of Jim Zorn, who looks more and more like a lame duck coach.
Kansas City was expecting a rebuilding year, having cleaned house and installed a new coach (Todd Haley), new general manager (Scott Pioli) and new quarterback (Matt Cassel). And, with all due respect, the Chiefs have become accustomed to losing: They’re on a 2-28 skid and haven’t won since beating Oakland 20-13 on Nov. 30, 2008. They even went 0-4 in preseason this year.
“Everybody’s new, so now it’s like rebuilding all over again,” receiver Dwayne Bowe said. “Right now, we’re trying to find a way how to win. It’s hard to kind of find chemistry.”
If there is hope for Kansas City in the quest to avoid becoming the first Chiefs team in franchise history to avoid an 0-6 start, it comes from the successes the Lions and Panthers had against the Redskins. Also, KC has at least a smidgen of momentum, having taken the Dallas Cowboys to overtime last week before losing 26-20.
“It was painful for us because we had worked real hard and kind of put ourselves in a position to win the game and it didn’t turn out that way for us,” Haley said, “but I do think there was a lot of encouraging signs.”
Still, there’s no reason to expect pretty football from either team on Sunday. The Redskins’ offense has yet to score 20 points in a game this season, and the offensive line is a mess because of injuries to Randy Thomas and Chris Samuels. Will Montgomery will become the fourth player to start at right guard — and it’s only Week 6.
The Chiefs are bad all over, ranking last in the league in defense and third-from-bottom in offense. Everyone likes to make fun of the fact that punter Hunter Smith has half of Washington’s two rushing touchdowns (he ran one in as the holder on a fake field goal), but Kansas City has yet to have anyone run the ball into the end zone.
The Chiefs are the sixth consecutive winless team faced by the Redskins, a streak unmatched in NFL history and one that was supposed to produce big victories, a winning record and plenty of confidence. Instead, it’s been more noted for giving the bottom of the league a couple of rare shining moments.
“Teams feel like, ’We can get it here,’ when they see us on the schedule,” running back Clinton Portis said. “For us, we’re playing down to our competition. I think if we played the Giants and Patriots and Steelers and the top echelon teams every week, we’d go out and run around and compete, compete, compete. We have the most favorable schedule in the NFL and we really haven’t gotten it done. We’re sitting at 2-3, so that doesn’t say much about us.”