It is among the hoariest, most insipid things athletes and coaches say at the dawn of a new season.

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"Last year," the player or coach intones after the first win, "we wouldn't have won this game."

I was waiting for someone to say that after the Redskins' 13-7 win Sunday, like everything is fine now that Commandant Shanahan is in charge. But the truth is, we have no idea if the Redskins are any smarter, or any tougher, or any better than they were a season ago. It's only one game.

Richie Petitbon won his first game with the Redskins. ("Rock bottom, babe," Bone said three months later, after losing 38-3 to the Cowboys, near the end of what became a 4-12 season -- his only season.)

Steve Spurrier won his first game with the Redskins. ("He looked great in Osaka," Spurrier said of his former Gators quarterback, Danny Wuerffel, famously recalling his first game, a 38-7 preseason win in Japan -- which turned out to be the high-water mark of the two-year Spurrier Era.)

Jim Zorn won his first home game with the Redskins. (Well, you know.)

So, despite Washington's season-opening victory, let's not make the reservations for Super Bowl XLV just yet. A 1-0 start is just that, a start. That's all. An NFL regular season is comprised of 16 one-act plays, each distinct from the last. The opponent, the health of the team, the time of year--everything changes every six or seven days. What works in September, when there's no film on a rookie cornerback and the sun is shining, may turn out disastrously in the cold and wind of December. And what worked against Dallas may be DOA next Sunday against the improved and hungry Texans.

"One round's over, and the first round really doesn't mean anything, and there's no knockout punches," Mike Shanahan said Monday at Redskins Park. "This takes a lot. And it's the teams that get ready for each round that are the teams that have a chance to be successful. We talked about the importance of this [Dallas] game being a division game, that kind of separates it from the rest of the games, especially when you have them at home. But I think our football team understands very quickly what Houston [is], how they've played, how they played against the Colts."

(Anybody know if Alex Barron was conveniently left behind at the Cowboys' hotel while the rest of the team jetted back to Dallas late Sunday night? No, Alex. We're not leaving until the morning. Sleep in. Order room service. Have a BLT and hold the mayo; holding is your thing, ha, ha ha.)

It will take weeks for the 2010 Redskins to take form. Here's just a little of what we don't know:

-- We still have no idea whether this reworked offensive line will work, and it's hard to imagine it won't take even longer for the starters to jell if Jamaal Brown can't get through an entire game yet. Shanahan will also continue to work Kory Lichtensteiger in at guard along with starter Derrick Dockery. And the Redskins still haven't blocked Jay Ratliff. He dominated the middle. Still, as happened frequently in Denver, Shanahan's running game with Clinton Portis in shape and running worked much better in the second half against tired defenders than in the first, though not quite well enough to put the game away.

Trent Williams did a lot of good things in his first pro start at left tackle. He embarrassed Cowboys safety Gerald Sensabaugh on a first-quarter screen to Chris Cooley, locking into Sensabaugh at the Dallas 24 and riding him eight yards downfield, and out of bounds. And Williams battled DeMarcus Ware fairly evenly most of the game, though he did get beat for the obligatory sack and had a bad illegal procedure penalty coming out of the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter on third-and-two from the Dallas 26. Didn't notice the Redskins running a lot to his side, either.

-- Nor do we know what to make of a defense that got gashed for 4.7 yards per run by the Cowboys, and could have given up much more if Dallas offensive coordinator Jason Garrett hadn't left his common sense back in the 214 area code. For some inexplicable reason Garrett decided dropping back to pass 48 times, in a close game, with two starters out on the offensive line, was the prudent thing to do. And for some equally unknowable reason, Wade Phillips didn't run on the field with four seconds left in the half to make sure that Tony Romo was going to take a knee, instead of starting that car wreck of a play that led to DeAngelo Hall's strip of Tashard Choice and 32-yard fumble return for a touchdown.

-- We don't know who is planning to catch a pass on the opposite side from Santana Moss. We have seen this tape for five years--Moss gets off to a great start, teams start doubling him with safeties over the top, the Redskins don't take advantage of single coverage on the opposite side to make them pay. Joey Galloway got one ball thrown to him on Sunday; is he getting separation? Pretty sure if he was running free, Donovan McNabb would have found him. So is it time to give Devin Thomas, who ran hard and with purpose on kickoff returns, another look? A first look? Any look? McNabb went to Anthony Armstrong on consecutive fade routes in the third quarter and Armstrong couldn't deliver.

-- And, really, we don't know what McNabb has left in the tank yet. He showed some of the quickness of old on that first-quarter scramble, and the side-by-side photo NBC showed during the game of him last year and this year would indicate he's dropped a few pounds. And he showed a veteran's presence all night against the Cowboys' pass rush, moving a foot to the right here, a slide left there, to buy himself an extra second or two to get rid of the ball. His instincts and knowledge of the position are so superior to Jason Campbell's -- and, again, I liked Campbell a lot. (This is also when I need to give the full disclosure disclosure that I'm hosting McNabb's weekly TV show on TBDTV; make of that what you'd like.)

"I think everybody knows that one of the keys to Donovan through the years is his ability to make plays when there's nothing there," Shanahan said. "And that's what great quarterbacks do. And I think as time goes on with our system, he'll just be more comfortable with the system, more comfortable with the terminology, just comfortable playing the position. Obviously he's got a lot of game experience, but there's nothing like calling the plays and executing a different offense in the heat of battle."

But he missed some throws like he was wont to do in Philly, and the bottom line is the bottom line: six points from the offense.

Here's what we do know: Jim Haslett is going to attack out of the 3-4 instead of having his safeties 20 yards off of the ball. It's not going to work every time, because other than Brian Orakpo, the Redskins don't have a lineman who can create sacks by himself.

And we know the difference in coaching competence between this season and last is off the charts. Understand: I'm not saying Zorn and his group didn't know football. Of course they could diagram plays and come up with schemes. I'm saying they stunk at teaching football. They stunk at motivating. They stunk at planning. And they stunk at putting their players in the best position to win. How else do you explain the seeming difference between how LaRon Landry played last year, and how he's playing this year? How to explain how Hall and Carlos Rogers have, suddenly, become sure tacklers? And how else to explain how Albert Haynesworth could play 25 snaps or so Sunday without coming out of the game after three, like last year?

No, Haynesworth and Shanahan are never going to like one another. But Haynesworth is already in much better shape than at any point last season. And he competed Sunday night. And, despite going out of their way to humiliate him and throw him under the bus at every turn during the offseason, Haynesworth is still around. Maybe he's only here because the Redskins haven't gotten what they want in a trade offer, but does this franchise strike you as one that plans on building exclusively through the draft in the future? Perhaps Shanahan, who expects injuries to occur during the season and plans for them -- hence the offensive line shuffling -- knows that at some point down the road, he's going to need Haynesworth to win a game.

But what do we know?

David Aldridge is the NBA Insider for TNT and NBA-TV, and will be a regular contributor to TBD.com.