Reacts Results: With the Commanders at 3-4, Washington fans are unhappy about everything

Survey results!!

July, 2023

In the wake of the sale of the team — something that most of had yearned for for over 20 years — many Commanders fans said that, no matter what happened on the field in 2023, this season was a success. The cloud had been lifted and the team could finally move forward.

3-4

But the reality of the 17-game regular season is that fans care about it, and they care about every game. Coaches and players never stop caring. It’s in our blood.

Seven games into the season, Commanders fans have lost confidence in the team’s direction, with fingers pointing in nearly every direction.

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In this week’s Reacts survey, only 10% of Hogs Haven readers who answered the survey question said that they were confident in the direction of the team.

Of course, fans don’t speak with a single voice, and social media, sports blogs, radio call-in shows and the like have amplified the reach of those with opinions. Sometimes, just two or three people shouting conflicting messages creates a sort of ‘Babel’ where no one really listens to or understands what anyone else is saying; everyone just shouts his opinion a little louder in an effort to be heard.

Most of us want to blame somebody, and with everyone throwing shade in one direction or another, there’s not much light seeping into the picture, and things seem pretty grim.

With that said, let’s briefly touch on some of the things that divide Redskins…err… Commanders nation.

Coaching

Very little has gone right from a coaching standpoint this season aside from putting three wins on the board.

Some fans predicted Ron Rivera was dead man walking a long time ago, while others took the view that a good 2023 season could save him. I doubt many people outside of his wife and kids would be willing to bet real money that the head coach will survive to see another season in his current role.

Jack Del Rio had one pretty good season and one pretty bad one to open his tenure in Washington, and a lot of people were calling for his head at the end of the ‘21 season. Jack laughed and kept coaching. A good performance by his defense in ‘22 quietened the critics, and expectations were that the Commanders defense would be a top-of-the-NFL unit this season that could be relied upon to carry the team and its rookie quarterback. The defense has, in fact, been at the bottom of the league in most traditional and advanced metrics, and the critics are now vocal again, and perhaps even greater in number.

Of course, assistant head coach and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy joined the coaching staff to revive the offense that had failed to score under Scott Turner (and hopefully give a boost to his head-coaching credentials in the process). In 7 games, the team has scored 140 points (20 ppg), and the offense was held to an end-of-the-game field goal against the Bills to avoid the shut out, and a mere 7 points last week versus the Giants, a team that had been giving up 25 points per game. The offensive ineptitude seems widespread; the line can’t block; Sam Howell has been sacked 40 times; objective measures from Next Gen Stats say that the receivers aren’t getting open, and the running backs are running less often and less effectively. All of this seems to land at the feet of the team’s OC.

At the beginning of October, many fans were calling for EB to be promoted to interim head coach. Since last week’s loss to the Giants in which the offense went 1-15 on third downs, the calls for Bieniemy’s promotion have been largely muted, and increasingly his name is being included when people talk about a January housecleaning.

Ownership

I’m not ready to say that the honeymoon is over for Josh Harris & Co, but the natives are getting restless. During the ugly 1-4 stretch of games in September and October — and especially in the wake of the losses to Bears and Giants in Weeks 5 & 7 respectively — some fans have called loudly for immediate action in the form of coaches being fired.

Other fans see value in continued non-intervention from the owners, preferring to let the season play out, even if it turns out disastrous, before stepping in and completely remaking the franchise in one massive clean sweep after the regular season ends.

Harris has already put his fingerprints onto the franchise in a small way this week when the hiring of Eugene Shen to be Senior VP in charge of analytics. Josh may not be firing coaches in late October, but he is getting a head start on the kind of front office he wants to build.

The schedule

Most 3-4 teams aren’t looked at in the competitively-balanced NFL as being in ‘season over’ mode. In fact, most fans of 3-4 teams are looking at potential playoff scenarios.

The problem for Washington is that the first 7 games were supposed to comprise the ‘easy’ part of the schedule. The Cardinals, Broncos, Bears and Giants have a combined record of 7-21. Washington is 2-2 against those 4 teams. The team’s best performance of the season came in a loss to Philadelphia. Still ahead is another game against the 6-1 Eagles, along with the 4-2 Seahawks, 5-2 Dolphins, 5-2 49ers, and the 4-2 Cowboys (twice).

If Washington loses to the Bears by 20 points and can’t score more than a touchdown against the Giants, how can they expect to put together a winning season (much less a playoff berth) in the remaining 10 games?

The Trade Deadline

The trade deadline is 4pm on Tuesday.

With new owners, a lame duck coaching staff, 24 pending veteran free agents, and $90m-plus in available cap space for 2024, the trade deadline was always going to present an issue for fans, regardless (irregardless even) of whether the team was doing well or poorly. At 3-4, the Commanders are not obvious buyers, but their record is not bad enough to make them obvious sellers.

There are, however, many complicating issues.

• As mentioned, the remaining schedule doesn’t seem to hold out any promise of playoff contention.
• Washington has a number of talented players whose contracts will expire at the end of this season. Conventional thinking would be that getting something in return for those players in a lost season would be smart.
• Ron Rivera is set up as the final decision-maker in all things football (at least he was before Josh Harris took over, and we haven’t been told differently). Should a guy who seems to be dead man walking be making decisions about the long-term that will likely never benefit him? Either way, he can’t win. Either he doesn’t trade players (he didn’t do enough), or he does trade players (he destroyed the core of the team before he left).

Fans are well aware of these and other issues, which only increase the tension between the competing opinions of whether Josh Harris should be getting rid of Rivera now or letting the season play out. Of course, Mr. Harris could always step in and make decisions about the trade deadline himself, taking it out of Ron’s hands, but then he may be seen as the same type of meddling owner that typified the reign of the last guy who sat in the owner’s chair.

The play on the field

In the end, anything that isn’t the 11 guys on the field is just distraction. Fans want to see good football.

Outside of the Week 4 game in Philadelphia — which was, as mentioned, a loss — Washington fans have not been treated to good football. The only real bright spot in the first 4 or 5 games was watching the development of Sam Howell, but as the sack numbers have climbed ever higher, Sam seems to be losing confidence in his play instead of building it. Against the Giants, Sam was simply swarmed by blue jerseys for most of the first half, and he never really looked comfortable.

Chase Young has had some highlight moments, and the defense has forced 4 turnovers in the past two games. Jamison Crowder has restored some excitement to punt returns. But the exciting positive plays that fans want to cheer for have been overshadowed by the other kind, which makes it hard to find silver linings when the losses start to pile up.

What the players are saying

There was no real ambiguity from Jonathan Allen this week.

More under-the-radar was the comment put forward by Terry McLaurin, the very carefully spoken young man whose voice is rarely ignored by fans or by other players.

That sounds like criticism of coaching decisions to me, no matter how politely it was phrased. Nobody is more coachable or a better teammate than Terry McLaurin, so when he makes a public statement like this, I feel tremors under my feet.

The mood at Commanders headquarters

In front of reporters this week, the relaxed and happy Ron Rivera we saw in training camp had disappeared to be replaced by the rather grim coach we’ve grown used to seeing by Week 7 every season.

More surprising was the disappearance of the loquacious Eric Bieniemy, who has never given a one-minute answer when he could stretch it out to three. On Thursday, EB was smiling and friendly as always, but his answers were all rather short by his standards, and many of them were off-topic as he avoided answering some of the more pointed queries. Instead of his usual 20 to 25 minutes of folksy NFL stories and EB philosophy, the offensive coordinator was brisk and finished in less than 10 minutes. When you constantly tell people that you’re ‘always the same guy no matter what’, it’s very noticeable when you’re not.

Sunday at home against the Eagles

One has to expect that the coaches and players see tomorrow’s game as a huge moment for all of them. Careers likely hang in the balance. Win, and the trade deadline may pass with the roster intact; lose, and we may see some core players in different colored uniforms a week from now.

The Commanders announced back on 13 October that the game was a sellout. Given that the opponent is Philadelphia, and given the successful season the Eagles are enjoying, it’s not hard to imagine — especially since we’ve seen it before — that the stands will be a sea of green tomorrow afternoon. It’s got to be disheartening for players. With this game being as important as it is for so many of them, I wish they could enter the stadium to a sea of roaring fans in burgundy & gold, but that probably has to wait for a future that some of these players won’t be here to witness.

Despite these two teams playing to overtime four weeks ago, the Eagles are favored by a touchdown. That hasn’t always mattered, and Washington has a recent history of playing well against Philly, so maybe it will be the game that improbably turns the season around…again.

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