Some NFL games are so horrifying, so off-the-charts gruesome, you just can’t look away. After a while, it feels more like rubbernecking than spectating, like you’re driving by a huge pileup on the interstate – replete with overturned vehicles, ambulances, firetrucks and Visible Signs of Blood.

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The Redskins’ 59-28 loss to the Eagles on Monday night was like that. You kept watching because, well, you didn’t want to miss a single detail, were determined to remember everything about it. Every turnover. Every missed tackle. Every unattended receiver. Every double-wide hole a back ran through. After all, whuppings of this magnitude – on the national stage, no less – don’t come along very often. For their incongruity alone, in this era of parity, they should be savored.

Where to begin. Maybe here:

On the day Dan Snyder signed his life away again, handed Donovan McNabb a reported five-year, $78 million contract extension, the Redskins laid a Guinness Book of World Records-sized egg at FedEx Field. The Eagles scored on the first play from scrimmage – on an 88-yard rainbow from Michael Vick to DeSean Jackson – and kept scoring until the stadium had been pretty well evacuated by Washington fans.

Nine seconds into the second quarter, the Redskins were down 35-0 (and, unforgivably, bringing back memories of their 73-0 bushwhacking by the Bears in the 1940 title game). Had the Eagles wanted to push it in the late going, 73 might have been a reachable number for them. And then . . . what? Snyder would have to fire Mike Shanahan and bring in Terry Robiskie as the interim coach? Good thing for all concerned that the Redskins, with a stirring effort in the final quarter, held the visitors to 59.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jim Zorn, on his worst day as the Redskins’ coach, never saw his team play as shabbily as Shanahan’s did Monday night. Neither did Steve Spurrier, Norv Turner or any other recent coach that Redskins zealots loved to make fun of. No, as defeats go, this was one of the all-timers in franchise history. And it came after a 15-day stretch of R & R from which the players were supposed to return rejuvenated.

I’m not sure the players DID return, though – never mind the rejuvenated part. Was that really Jim Haslett’s defense out there giving up 45 points and 425 yards in the first half? Was that really an NFL offense failing to convert all 10 third downs, even with the Eagles playing softer in the secondary once they got a big lead?

A question worth considering: Could the Redskins’ 1987 strike team – Ed Rubbert, Anthony Allen, Lionel Vital and all the rest – have done any worse against Philadelphia than the current Redskins did? Frankly, I have my doubts.