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The growing public consensus in and around Washington on Monday morning, it seemed, was that a leadership change could be in order.
With the Commanders’ head coaching job, of course.
The criticism and expressions of disbelief continued to pile up on the day after the Commanders inexplicably allowed the clock to expire in overtime with their offense in position for a winning field goal. They had to settle for a 27-all tie with the Giants at Northwest Stadium in quarterback Jayden Daniels’s return after missing two games because of a dislocated left elbow.
The speculation about coach Dan Quinn’s job security intensified accordingly.
“I would understand if a coach did not survive this,” Michael Irvin, the Hall of Fame former wide receiver for the Cowboys, said Monday morning on ESPN.
It seemed unlikely as of Monday morning that the Commanders will fire Quinn this week. One source familiar with the team’s inner workings told Front Office Sports that was not the Commanders’ plan at this point.
Even so, Quinn’s exit also seemed increasingly inevitable, perhaps a matter of when more so than if. The Commanders are 1-3-1 and in last place in the NFC East in the third season of Quinn’s coaching tenure in D.C. And Sunday’s clock blunder was sufficiently egregious to prompt a social-media comment by Magic Johnson, the former NBA great who is a Commanders part-owner.
“I’m in total disbelief my Commanders had such poor clock management in today’s overtime game against the Giants,” he wrote Sunday. “All we had to do was kick the field goal and we would have won the game!”
Irvin said he put the blame mostly on Quinn and the rest of the team’s coaching staff.
“I do put some on Jayden Daniels, but I would put 88% on the coaching,” said Irvin, who wore jersey No. 88 as a Cowboys player.
Former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky appeared on First Take with Irvin and said: “It falls 100% on a coaching staff that it seems very clearly did not communicate.”
Orlovsky said the sequence at the end of overtime “is a disaster for Washington” and added, “It’s all on Dan Quinn.”
Quinn is a proven, respected coach who took the Falcons to the Super Bowl in the 2016 season, only for them to infamously squander a 28-3 lead and lose to the Patriots in overtime. He was fired by the Falcons following a 0-5 start to the 2020 season. Quinn restored his league-wide reputation with a successful stint as the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator. He was the Commanders’ choice to succeed the fired Ron Rivera following the 2023 season.
At the time, the Commanders pushed back on the narrative that hiring Quinn was a fallback plan because the team was unable to land Ben Johnson, who stayed with the Lions as offensive coordinator for one more season before being hired by the Bears, or Mike Macdonald, who was hired by the Seahawks.
And all seemed well when Daniels, chosen second overall in the 2024 NFL Draft, thrived as a rookie and led the Commanders to the NFC Championship Game before losing in lopsided fashion to the Eagles.
Things have unraveled since then, however. The Commanders went 5-12 last season and Daniels was plagued by a dislocated left elbow. Daniels suffered the same injury during a Week 2 loss to the Cowboys this season, leading Tom Brady to exclaim, “Oh, shit” on the Fox airwaves. Daniels returned to the lineup Sunday and provided two long touchdown runs as the Commanders forged a 14-point, fourth-quarter advantage.
But they blew that lead. They were given a reprieve in overtime when Giants running back Cam Skattebo lost a fumble with his team in position for a winning field goal. The Commanders moved to the New York 24-yard line in the final seconds of overtime but, without a timeout, somehow allowed Daniels to be sacked and the clock to run out amid mass confusion without even attempting a winning kick.
“I didn’t want anybody to say something different happened,” Giants coach John Harbaugh said during his postgame news conference. “I wanted to get off the field before they could take it away from us, I guess. I was surprised. … I can’t say that I wasn’t. It was a pretty shocking end there.”
Down the hallway, Quinn told reporters: “That is my responsibility. Nobody else’s.”
The details of Quinn’s contract are not publicly known. He is believed to be around the middle of a pay scale for NFL head coaches that now tops out around $20 million per season.
The Commanders have a potential interim head coach on their staff in running backs coach Anthony Lynn, the former head coach of the Chargers.
Josh Harris is in his fourth season as the team’s principal owner after buying the franchise from Daniel Snyder in 2023 for $6.05 billion. Harris is an experienced sports owner who perhaps can resist the impulse to react emotionally and allow the season to play out. He waited until after the 2023 season to dismiss Rivera.
The Harris-owned Commanders have managed to separate themselves in many ways from the turmoil of the Snyder era while attempting to tap into the success of the pre-Snyder days. The tumult associated with Snyder included, among many other issues, a turnstile of coaching changes; Snyder cycled through 10 head coaches in 24 years. But now, Harris faces a near-revolt among the team’s fans after Sunday’s on-field fiasco.
“I’m gutted for our team,” Quinn said Sunday. “And that’s the hardest part. … Leaving tonight with a loss—I mean with a tie—feels like a loss.”
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