Mock draft season begins
Coming into Week 7
The Washington Commanders had been just inconsistent enough to leave fans and other observers in doubt about who they were as a team. After a 2-0 start, because they had struggled in both games, it was hard to know if they were really that good, and there were indications that beating Sean Payton and Russell Wilson might not have been as big an achievement as was supposed.
The team lost the next two against two strong teams. The beatdown at the hands of the Bills in Week 3 was troubling, but it was still possible to think of it as an aberration — an outlier game in which the Commanders got behind early to an elite NFL team and couldn’t recover. When Washington took the defending NFC champion Eagles to overtime in Philly in Week 4, the team looked good in defeat, and the team’s fans started to breathe a little easier.
The panic level spiked after the winless Chicago Bears came to Landover and beat the stuffing out of Washington 40-20. Another “outlier” performance? The excuses were getting thin, but it was a Thursday night game after a physical and emotional OT loss to a division rival, so…maybe.
The levels of doubt were tamped down by a win last week on the road in Atlanta. It wasn’t pretty, but the defense forced three turnovers and Sam Howell threw three touchdown passes. There were reasons to hope that more wins were on the horizon.
Yesterday’s loss to the Giants was a doubt-eraser. The Commanders are not a playoff team. They are not a winning team. That is clear now.
The relatively healthy Commanders traveled to the Meadowlands to play an injury-ravaged Giants team that hadn’t scored an offensive touchdown in a month. This should have been a tune-up for next week’s home stand against the division-leading Eagles.
Commanders defense
Honestly, Jack Del Rio’s defense did their jobs. After another mystifyingly slow start in which they allowed two touchdowns (and a missed field goal attempt) in the first quarter-and-a-half of play, they settled down to business. The Commanders’ defensive stat line for the full game looks pretty good. They gave up just 14 points, forced a turnover, and sacked Tyrod Taylor 4 times. Saquon Barkley averaged just 3.7 yards per carry and Matt Breida a miserly 1.3. Of the Giants 12 real offensive drives, 7 ended with punts, one with a fumble, and another with a stalled 3-play drive as the first half ended. Except for the drive that ended with Daron Payne ripping the football out of Saquon Barkley’s arms for a forced turnover, for the final 38 minutes of play, the Giants didn’t muster an offensive drive that lasted more than 6 plays or that gained more than 21 yards.
Grown man effort from @94yne
#WASvsNYG: CBS pic.twitter.com/DsibXTNjph
— Washington Commanders (@Commanders) October 22, 2023
Special Teams
Punting
The special teams play in the punting game was a big part of the reason why the final score looks respectable. The Giants ended up having to use multiple punt return men when their ‘starting’ return man got knocked out of the game. Their return men combined to muff two punts, one of them recovered by Washington, resulting in a short field and a Commanders touchdown — ultimately the team’s only score of the day.
Jamison Crowder, meanwhile, fielded every punt cleanly, and returned 6 of them for 33 yards. While the average isn’t overly impressive, Crowder looked decisive and fairly explosive on his returns, and his long of 17 yards helped set up good field position for the offense.
Tress Way had a career day, punting 10 times for 513 yards (51.3 yard average). Following his first 4 punts, the Giants were forced to start drives at the 11, 11, 12, and 16 yard lines. He had only one touchback, and that was on a 58-yard punt. The only real mar in the Commanders punt game was due to Tariq Castro-Fields, a practice squad player elevated for this game, who was called for two penalties; the first was a bone-headed decision to run out of bounds voluntarily as a gunner on punt coverage.
Place kicking
Joey Slye was his usual automaton self on kickoffs. Both of them were touchbacks. The Giants kicked one short, and Brian Pringle made them pay for that decision with a 38-yard return.
Kickers for both teams failed on a field goal attempt. Graham Gano sailed a 42-yard attempt wide right, while Joey Slye’s 27-yard attempt in the 4th quarter was blocked.
Commanders offense
The tragedy of this game was the Commanders offense, which was powerless against the Giants for all of the first half.
Sam Howell was sacked 6 times, but unlike the previous 6 games, there was no one to blame but the offensive lines and the coaches. The Giants pass rush looked like the zombie attacks in World War Z, with pass rushers coming over, around and through the pass ‘protection’. At times, it looked like Dexter Lawrence and his teammates were in the Commanders backfield before the ball was snapped. Things actually improved in the second half; Howell was sacked only once after halftime, but it wasn’t enough.
Despite the incredible pressure Wink Martindale’s defense was bringing, Eric Bieniemy was too slow to adjust. In a game where the Commanders never trailed by more than two scores, and in which his QB was getting killed by the rush, Bieniemy persisted in his ways, calling 7 runs and 20 passes in the first half. In Washington’s 8 first-half drives, none lasted longer than 4 plays and none went for more than 20 yards.
When EB finally turned to the run in the 2nd half, he found success with rookie Chris Rodriguez, who averaged 4.4 ypc on 7 runs. Washington was gifted a short field on a Giants muffed punt on the opening possession of the 2nd half, and 3 Rodriguez runs, a Sam Howell pass and a Brian Robinson TD run showed what could be accomplished by relying on the ground game. But Washington called only 6 more running plays in the remainder of the game, despite trailing by only 7 points with nearly a half of football to play.
They put together 2 sustained drives in the final 16 minutes of play. They went 81 yards in 8 plays in the drive that ended with the missed field goal. On the next offensive drive, Washington got the ball at their own 8 yard line with 7:46 remaining on the clock. They ran 17 plays and moved the ball 85 yards, but ultimately came up short when Jahan Dotson couldn’t secure the catch inside the 5-yard line on 4th-down with a minute to play.
Ultimately, Washington won the statistical battle, including the scoreboard, in the second half, but it wasn’t enough. It’s hard to win games when you only manage 7 points, and the Giants had absolutely dominated the first half of play.
The season
Having been blown out by the Bills and Bears, and now having lost to an injury-ravaged Giants team, the Commanders have an identity, but not the one that they would willingly choose. This is a pass-first offense that can’t protect the quarterback. Washington is averaging exactly 20 points per game – a slight improvement over the previous 2 seasons, but not enough. The defense, after a month or more of substandard play, seems to be coming to life pretty much on-schedule, holding opponents to 16 points and 14 points in the past two games. Here’s how the Washington Post described the team in the wake of the loss:
Maybe this is who the Commanders are: a team that can compete occasionally but that too often disappoints in games it should win. Washington has a habit of falling behind early and waiting until the start of the second half, if not later, to pull it together, sending the offense into catch-up mode and leaving the defense pressured to make big plays.
Overall, It’s a formula that isn’t working. The Commanders aren’t winning the games that good teams are ‘supposed’ to win, and the challenge is only going to get tougher. Washington has 3 games remaining against teams that currently have losing records: the Giants, Patriots and Rams. We already know about the Giants. The Patriots beat the Bills yesterday, and Washington will need to fly west to LA to take on the Rams.
The Commanders have 7 other games against 6 teams (Cowboys twice) with a combined record of 27-11. At this point, it’s hard to see a path to a winning season for the under-performing 3-4 Commanders.
It won’t get any easier in Week 8, as the Commanders host the 6-1 Eagles, who are favored on the road by nearly a touchdown, on Sunday at 1:00 p.m. Buckle your chin straps.
