Survey results!!
Looking back to last Sunday
Washington was soundly beaten by Tampa Bay in the home opener. Here is a look at the final team statistics for the game:
The Buccaneers team statistics that seem to stand out more than the rest:
- Comp-Att 24-30
- Passing yards 280
- Passing first downs 15
- 3rd down efficiency 9-13 (69%)
Basically, the Commanders were unable to stop the Tampa Bay passing game. The defensive secondary was mostly ineffectual. At the end of the first week of NFL play, Baker Mayfield ranked 4th in QBR per ESPN; he ranked 2nd in EPA.
It’s no surprise, then, that, when Hogs Haven readers were asked this week what concerned them most in the Week 1 loss, the majority of respondents identified the poor pass coverage.
Nearly 6 out of 10 people who responded to the survey agreed that this was the most concerning area, while three other areas of concern — coaching, WR and TE production, and low energy from the team — each drew between 8% and 11% of the vote.
After an offseason of teeth-gnashing about the failure of the front office to do enough to address offensive line issues, the play of that OL unit was identified by only 4% of respondents as the most concerning aspect of Sunday’s loss. This may have been heavily influenced by the differences between last year’s quarterback — Sam Howell — and this year’s QB — rookie Jayden Daniels. Daniels is highly mobile with good pocket awareness, and scrambled about 7 times in 24 dropbacks against the Buccaneers, rushing for 8 total first downs and 2 touchdowns along the way.
With fans identifying coverage issues as the top concern right now, it should be noted that the team announced this week that Emmanuel Forbes will have immediate surgery on his thumb.
Dan Quinn said Emmanuel Forbes will not need to go on IR after having surgery on his thumb this morning. Mike Davis and Noah Igbinoghene will combine to fill that spot Sunday.
— John Keim (@john_keim) September 13, 2024
While Dan Quinn initially said that he thought Forbes’ injury was fairly minor and that he would be able to play with a splint this week, the surgery announcement raises questions about how quickly the 2nd-year cornerback can recover, and how the team looks while he is unable to play.
Looking ahead to this Sunday
Washington will play its first game of the season in Landover Maryland, and its first-ever regular season game at the rechristened Northwest Stadium, against the visiting New York Giants.
We asked fans in this week’s Reacts survey to predict the winner of the upcoming NFC East game between the pair of 0-1 teams.
Given how convincingly the Buccaneers handled the visiting Commanders this past weekend, the confidence of 77% of fans in a Washingotn victory might seem…unjustified.
The confidence likely springs from how much worse the Giants looked at home this past Sunday against a Minnesota Vikings team that isn’t the object of high expectations this season.
The Giants lost the season and home opener of their 100-year-anniversary season with an ugly 26-6 loss. A look at the box score for the Giants will show that they struggled mightily.
In his first game back following an ACL tear suffered on November 5th, Giants QB Daniel Jones completed just 52% of his pass attempts, threw 2 interceptions (including a pick-6), and had a passer rating of just 44.3. The team averaged just 3.5 yards per rushing attempt, and the offense mustered only 2 field goals in 4 quarters of play.
It’s been widely noted that, since signing his 4-year, $160m extension, Jones has thrown 8 interceptions but only two touchdowns. In fact, his passes have produced as many touchdowns for opposing defenses (pick-sixes) as for his own offense.
Jones looked so bad that Brian Daboll was asked about the QB’s status, and had to confirm to reporters this week that Daniel Jones remains the team’s starter. That Daboll has to answer that question in Week 2 of the season speaks volumes about the situation in New York at the moment.
Per Big Blue View, The Giants’ loss to the Vikings — and how they lost — seems to have been crushing to fan morale. Not only are fans down on the Giants’ prospects for this year, they seem to have lost faith that Daboll and GM Joe Schoen are the right men to guide the franchise.
Just 22% of fans believe the Giants are heading in the right direction.
Hogs Haven readers would appear to have more confidence in Jayden Daniels — who, in his only NFL game to date completed 71% of his passes for 184 yards and rushed for another 88 yards with 2 touchdowns and zero turnovers — to carry the Commanders than they do in Daniel Jones to experience a ‘get well’ game against Washington on Sunday.
Some people may not think that confidence is warranted since Danny Dimes’ history versus the Washington franchise is actually on Jones’ side. In his seven career starts against Washington, Jones’ record is 5-1-1. The best games of his otherwise undistinguished career seem to somehow always come at the expense of the burgundy & gold, and he has traditionally gashed the Washington defense with multiple runs per game, many for long gains and/or first downs & touchdowns.
However, Jones’ history against Washington’s new DC Joe Whitt and head coach Dan Quinn while they were coaching in Dallas was quite different. Jones was 0-1 vs the Cowboys last year, with the Giants losing to Dallas by a score of 40-0 in Week 1. Jones threw only one touchdown pass (compared to three interceptions) in four games against a Quinn-coached Dallas Cowboys defense from 2021 to 2023. New York lost each of those four games.
While many Washington fans point to the fact that Daniel Jones has experienced nearly total success against the Redskins, Football Team and Commanders since 2019, it may be that Dan Quinn and Joe Whitt can change that, starting this week. In fact, Joe Whitt was asked on Thursday about the challenge of containing Daniel Jones:
We just have to do our job running the defense. The defense is not exactly the same that we ran in Dallas, but some calls do translate, and we just have to make sure when [Daniel Jones] is ready to escape, we know where he wants to escape. We know how we’re going to pull him up; we can send him where we want to send him, and if we execute the calls properly, we should have good results.
It sounds like Whitt is confident that the defensive scheme is capable of keeping the Giants’ quarterback in check if Washington’s defensive players execute their responsibilities on the field. To do so, they will need to improve communication, awareness and tackling from the levels seen in Tampa Bay.
By the way, nationally, NFL fans don’t think much of the Commanders, ranking them as the 10th-worst team in the NFL in this week’s SB Nation national email survey, but they think even less of the Giants, ranking them as the NFL’s 3rd-worst team behind the Cardinals and Panthers.
Honestly, while 10th-worst sounds pretty bad, 23rd-best — which is the same thing — doesn’t sound as bad, and might even be a bit optimistic.
Overall confidence in the direction of the team
Every week of the season, we ask readers a yes-or-no question: Are you confident in the direction of the team?
Last week, an impressive 96% of Hogs Haven readers responding to the survey said ‘yes’; unsurprisingly, this week, that number fell off.
Despite being overmatched in the opening game, many fans continue to feel good about the overall strategic direction set by owner Josh Harris and GM Adam Peters. Many are also still impressed by the energy, tactical direction and plain-talking assessments coming from head coach Dan Quinn. Many of these fans are less concerned with early losses so long as they perceive positive improvement along a planned development strategy — even if such a strategy is likely to stretch beyond the 2024 season before the team becomes a consistent winner.
For others, however, the inability to compete with the Buccaneers in all three phases — that is, offense, defense and special teams — signals that the Peters/Quinn plan is not really working. A major concern voiced repeatedly by fans, reporters and other observers this week had to do with the number of times that Jayden Daniels carried the ball as a runner, with specific concern for a pair of called inside runs in the red zone in the waning minutes of the lopsided loss.
To keep fan confidence from collapsing, the Commanders probably need to get the first win of the Peters/Quinn era this week against a flailing Giants team. The burgundy & gold can probably count on an electric crowd providing high energy vocal support. The circumstances for securing a win are not likely to get much better any time soon.
Based on the odds set by Fanduel, Washington is narrowly favored to win. The game kicks off at 1:00 pm, and will be broadcast on FOX. Let’s hope that the confidence of the majority of Hogs Haven readers expressed in this week’s Reacts poll turns out to be justified.
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