Nothing about the season the Washington Commanders have had in 2024-25, especially during the playoffs, has made any sense. They have a rookie QB. They have a first-year head coach. They have a first-year general manager. They went 4-13 a season ago. Now, after stunning the top-seeded Detroit Lions 45-31 on the road, they’re one win away from going to the Super Bowl.
The Commanders this season have broken every longtime rule of how an NFL team is supposed to build itself into a contender, starting with their decision to draft Jayden Daniels. When Washington selected Daniels at No. 2 overall last summer, they were setting themselves up to fail him. Their offensive line was the second-worst in football in 2023, and their defense was the single worst. Drafting a quarterback in that situation, just because they’re the shiny prospect, is precisely how bad teams usually stay bad.
In Washington’s case, it hasn’t mattered, because Daniels has proven to be a special player who can overcome the rest of the team’s flaws. He has put together one of the best rookie seasons for a quarterback in NFL history, becoming only the sixth first-year signal-caller to ever lead his team to a championship game. All of the other five did so on the backs of top-three defenses. The Commanders rank 18th.
Daniels isn’t the only major outlier who has helped the Commanders reach this point. There is also Dan Quinn, who was hired this past offseason to replace Ron Rivera as Washington’s head coach. Quinn, mind you, was not the Commanders’ first choice for the job. Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson was, but he unexpectedly turned down their interview to stay put in Detroit (wonder how he feels about that now?).
Quinn’s subsequent hiring was immediately regarded as underwhelming, primarily due to the fact that he is a retread head coach. Seldom do coaches with their second opportunities ever fare better than they did with their first gigs, no matter how successful they may have been. Rivera didn’t. Mike McCarthy didn’t. Sean Payton hasn’t yet. Rex Ryan, Jeff Fisher, John Fox — the list goes on for days. There are some exceptions to the rule, such as Gary Kubiak and Bruce Arians, but they both inherited Super Bowl-ready rosters (or in Arians’ case, had the greatest QB of all-time decide to sign with his team a year in). Only two NFL coaches come to mind since the turn of the century who truly built teams into powerhouses after previously being fired: Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll.
Then, finally, there was the laundry list of free agency signings made by new general manager Adam Peters last summer. Zach Ertz! Bobby Wagner! Austin Ekeler! Those are the type of signings that truly signal a team going all-in to win a Super Bowl… if the year was 2019. Somehow, though, they’ve all paid off, as the players in question have turned back the clock, while a number of others have additionally emerged as key contributors. Frankie Luvu, Jeremy Chinn, Dante Fowler, Jr., and more have been massive additions for the Commanders, all out of seemingly nowhere.
Everything the Commanders have touched this year has turned to gold. None of it feels like it should be happening, and yet it is — and there’s perhaps only one explanation for it. After all, the most important change of all that Washington has made recently wasn’t drafting Daniels, or hiring Quinn or Peters. It was the ousting of former majority owner Dan Snyder in favor of Josh Harris and his group of investors. That’s something that truly turned around the Commanders’ culture. Saying Snyder was a cancer to this organization would be too nice. He took one of the proudest franchises in the NFL and sucked the soul completely out of it, with nothing but corruption and drama both on and off the field for a quarter of a century.
If you believe in karma, everything that has happened to the Commanders this season is the football gods’ way of making up for the 25 years of torture that Snyder inflicted upon this franchise. Somewhere, probably on his private yacht in the middle of some Eastern European river, he is following Washington’s magical playoff run, and he is the most bitter human being alive, knowing that this has all happened the moment he was out of the picture. For Commanders fans, that has to be the most satisfying feeling in the world.
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