Bill-in-Bangkok’s rambling thoughts following Washington’s impressive win over Tampa Bay
I know my place and I usually stay in my lane. I am not a football analyst; I can’t break down film or decipher X’s and O’s. I have no special insights. I’m just a fan with a keyboard with the time and inclination to make sure that there’s content to read and discuss every day. My biggest skills are the ability to copy & paste, the discipline and sobriety needed to stick to a regular schedule, and a more-than-passing acquaintance with English grammar and punctuation.
I have my opinions, but, for the most part, I try to air them in the comments section like everyone else. It seems like a bit of abuse of privilege to fill up an article with thoughts from my head, which are nothing more substantial than the opinions of any other Washington fan.
My ideas about football are certainly not special. In August, I predicted a 5-win season for the 2024 Washington Commanders — and I felt I was being generous. Throughout training camp, I was of the opinion that there would not be room on the roster for Jamison Crowder, and when he went on IR early in the season, I was sure he wouldn’t be coming back. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when the team signed Marcus Mariota, but I was certain he’d be a disaster if he ever saw the field. When the Commanders got beat in Week 12 by Cooper Rush and the Dallas Cowboys, I was convinced they wouldn’t win another game all season.
Normally, when I do write an article about a football topic, I make a sincere effort to write an article that is evidence-based, and which will inform the reader, even if the ideas I share in the article are not useful.
Once or twice a season, however, I give into the urge to write an opinion article — an editorial, if you will. When I do, I casually toss out the window the idea that I need to include valuable information or evidence and I simply indulge myself in sharing my burgundy-tinted opinions, giving this type of article all the nutritional value of artificial whipped cream. I did it once this season after the 2-1 start, and with a couple of things on my mind at the moment, I thought I’d do it one more time this week.
If you’re not interested in reading my ramblings, I don’t blame you — I’ll see you tomorrow for the Daily Slop.
If, against the odds, you still want to read what I’ve written, grab your napkin and spoon and dig into a big bowl of aerated fat & sugar.
Hollywood movie
The Commanders’ 2024 season, had it been a Hollywood sports movie, would have been deemed too unbelievable to be swallowed by movie-goers.
Think about it. The evil owner running the dysfunctional organization is finally ousted and replaced by an ownership group made up primarily of men who grew up as best friends and fans of the team, and who all happen to have become billionaires along the way. Add a dash of celebrity by including one of the most beloved NBA players of the previous half-century in the group.
After suffering through a brutally bad 4-win season, the owners fire the bumbling head coach left over from the previous regime. They then, in a smooth and efficient process, hire the top GM candidate available. He, in turn, leads a search for a new coach. Along the way, the hottest name (being promoted by media members across the country) ‘disrespects’ them by cancelling his interview while the GM and owners are in the air, flying to meet him. They end up hiring a 50-ish former head coach best remembered for the biggest meltdown loss (28-3) in the history of Super Bowl championship games.
The coaching staff is rounded out by a number of former head coaches and coordinators who had not all worked together previously to form a coaching staff full of marquee names who are nonetheless doubted due to so many of them having ‘failed’ in former coaching gigs.
In the draft, the staff has to evaluate and make the right choice from among several college QBs, with the stakes being a decade or more of success or failure on the field. A key scene in the movie includes bringing all of the candidates to the team headquarters and taking them all to Top Golf, where the young players get to interact, possibly revealing key character issues that might have gone unnoticed in a sit-down interview session — and offering a rich canvas for the director to develop the characters in an environment unusual in sports movies.
When the players finally arrive at the team training facility for the first time, the re-tread head coach decides to take a novel approach, eschewing any discussion of playbooks or Xs & Os initially — insisting, instead, that his staff focus on getting to know the players as individuals. Again, the director sees rich opportunities as players open up to one another about their lives, including both triumphs and heartbreaks, with laughter and tears in equal measure.
Predictably, the movie version of the regular season opens up with a challenge to the team they are trying to build, opening with a road loss.
Slowly, in the next game, though the team doesn’t score a touchdown, the players do just enough to win, with the brand new kicker scoring every point for the team, including a field goal as the clock hit 00:00 to secure the win and become a fan favorite in his first game.
The following week, the team appears on Monday Night Football, and, despite being heavy underdogs, scores on every drive in a game where neither team punts —unbelievably, it’s the second consecutive punt-free game for our scrappy young team — as the rookie quarterback out-duels the QB on the other team who — get this — had been the starting QB on our rookie’s college team; in fact, our rookie had been forced to play in the shadow of Joe Cool during his two years as the college team’s starter. With two passing touchdowns and another one on the ground, the rookie QB beats the other QB, the other team, and sets records for his play on a nationally televised prime-time game to inspire the start of his legend.
The team goes on to win 5 of the next 6 games, putting itself in the lead for the division title, but halfway through the season, a huge challenge arises. The rookie QB gets hurt at the end of a 50-yard scramble (because those are so common in the NFL) and leaves the game. No problem — the backup QB who, like our rookie, had once been a Heisman Award winner and #2 overall pick before being disgraced when he was reported to have ‘quit’ on his team while participating in a Netflix series that documented his entire life — steps in to win the game and restore faith in his abilities.
Even so, the next several weeks prove to be a struggle for the team as the rookie QB struggles with the limitations of his injury. This section of the movie culminates in a 3-game losing streak that challenges the coaches and players and the “brotherhood” that has been central to their early success.
Of course, being a Hollywood movie, the team doesn’t descend into finger-pointing and distension. Instead, the 14-year future Hall of Fame linebacker who came to the team in hopes of helping his former coach instill a “winning culture” gives a motivational speech to the team. It, of course, does the trick. The team returns to its winning ways.
Along the way, the audience is treated to the ‘special relationship’ that develops between the rookie QB and the veteran all-pro linebacker based on the fact that they both hail from the same area of southern California. Their irreverent banter provides plenty of lighthearted moments for the audience, punctuated with fiery speeches and fantastic scenes of football on the big screen.
Of course, having survived the mid-movie crisis, the team goes on a winning streak in which the players improbably win each game on the final snap, without fail.
Earlier, when the rookie QB had been hurt, but before the losing streak, the young signal caller had played the Chicago Bears, who had drafted first overall, taking the guy that every NFL observer saw as the ‘can’t miss’ prospect, and beaten him — incredibly on a Hail Mary pass deflected into the hands of his backup receiver (who had been cut by another team just prior to the season) for a one-in-a-million victory.
Now, the team does something nearly as unbelievable every week.
- First, having acquired an injured cornerback at the trade deadline who hadn’t played in the month since the trade, he finally gets his first start. Of course, it comes against the team that traded him away and they never target him on a pass in the game, and the game is won by the defense stopping a 2-point conversion with no time left on the clock.
- A week later, against the team’s arch-rival in competition for the division crown, the rookie QB finds a veteran receiver — one who had been originally drafted by the team, left to play elsewhere and then returned, but who had just been activated from a 2-month stint on IR — in the end zone to give his team the lead and the win on the final play from scrimmage of the game.
- Next up, is an overtime win to clinch a playoff berth. The opponent, of course, misses a field goal as time expires that would have won the game. In overtime, our rookie QB gets the ball first and takes his team on a dominating 12-play, 70-yard drive offensive drive that caps the primetime win and further enhances the legend he is building nationally.
- To close out the season, the team plays its traditional most-hated rival — a team that has struggled with injuries but which also beat our guys in the final installment of the mid-movie 3-game losing streak. In this final game of the season, our rookie struggles and is benched at halftime. The backup QB with the redemption story and his offense get the ball with just over 3 minutes remaining, trailing by 4 points and needing a touchdown to close the season with a win. He extends the redemption story by leading his team 91 yards downfield in 11 plays, converting on a 4th & 1 play on which the veteran QB himself bursts through the defensive line and gallops 33 yards to set up the final series of plays, which ends with a touchdown pass to yet another veteran receiver — a hard-working and God-fearing man who has toiled for years on a dysfunctional team to become beloved by fans — to win the game, once again on the final snap.
- Our Cinderella team, like any good Hollywood story, gets into the playoffs, not as the division winner, but as a wild card team that has to play on the road. They return to where it all started — in Tampa Bay, the site of the Week 1 loss. This time, the scrappy young quarterback plays the entire game (though the veteran does get a cameo in which he runs a quarterback sneak to keep a scoring drive alive). This time, the home team scores late to tie the game, and the rookie QB leads his offense on a 10-play scoring drive that ends with a field goal attempt on the game’s final play. The young kicker — the 4th of the season; he replaced the one who won the Week 2 game but was later injured — hits the ball well, but it fades immediately and hits the upright…BUT bounces inside the post for the 3 points and the win in seemingly needless melodrama.
I’m struggling to figure out the movie’s end. Usually, these Hollywood sports stories try to avoid total unbelievability by having the team win just enough to demonstrate resilience and character, but also having them come up a bit short of beating the best team in the league for the championship.
There’s so much unreality in the movie already, I don’t know whether to expect the usual not-quite-champion Hollywood ending or the fairy tale rainbow, unicorns and championship trophy ending that would further strain credulity.
We shall not pass this way again
Let’s move away from the Hollywood movie discussion and talk a bit about Dan Quinn, the “brotherhood” and 2025.
Schedule
I have seen a fair bit of gnashing of teeth about the 2025 schedule and how brutal it will be compared to the one we played this year.
First of all, with the 17-game schedule, in odd years, NFC teams have only 8 home games, unlike even years (2024) when they have 9 home games. In addition to getting a 2nd-place schedule, which affects three of the 17 games, the NFC East will play the NFC North next year — that means the Lions, Vikings, and Packers (all successful playoff teams this year) and a Bears team that will be under new leadership. NFC East teams will also play against the AFC West — Chiefs, the Harbaugh-coached Chargers, the Payton-coached Broncos, and….oh yeah, the Raiders. So, yeah, the schedule looks tougher.
Despite the usual pablum about how teams change so much from year to year that strength of schedule based on the previous season’s W-L records doesn’t matter, let me say this: I just don’t care about the apparent ease or difficulty of the schedule. NFL seasons are long with respect to the physical nature of the sport and associated injuries, but short with respect to the impact of each and every game. Momentum, player health, travel (we had the least-strenuous travel schedule in the NFL in ‘24) and other factors combine to make evaluation of season-long schedules more guesswork than science.
We play who we play. Good quarterbacks, bad ones; injured teams or healthy ones; Sunday afternoons, Thursday nights or international games — we play anyone, anytime, anywhere. No complaints.
Roster
You’re getting better or you’re getting worse.
One reason I don’t care about the tougher schedule next year is that I expect to go into 2025 with a more talented team that should be better equipped to handle it.
I remember when the 2012 team rallied behind RG3 to win the final 7 games after a 3-6 start to make the playoffs. The front office and Mike Shanahan had no premium draft picks in 2013 because of the trade to get the pick used on RG3, and they had no cap space because of the cap penalty imposed by the league following the league-wide collusion that took place in the ‘uncapped’ season. With few resources, Shanahan basically brought back the same roster as 2012 and tried to rally the team. It was, for many reasons, a disastrous season. For different reasons and in a different manner, Jerry Jones inexplicably followed a similar pattern this season when he let a lot of veterans leave without replacing them in free agency. The result was a team that found it difficult to compete through a 17-game season.
That’s not what I expect to happen in Washington this year.
In 2025, Adam Peters will have something in the neighborhood of $100m in cap space to go with roughly 30 expiring contracts — perhaps a dozen of them for important players on this year’s roster. He will also have a pretty complete set of draft picks available. I fully expect the GM to heavily upgrade the roster this offseason in an effort to field a true playoff contender.
With a more complete and more talented roster, I feel that we should be expecting — not Washington struggling to figure out where double-digit wins will come from — but other teams on our schedule fearing the prospect of having to play the Commanders.
Dan Quinn and “the brotherhood”
One feature of the team that we have heard about again and again this season is the team trust and “the brotherhood”. It’s clearly something special that goes beyond the NFL norm, and includes seasoned star players like Bobby Wagner, less heralded vets like Luvu, Chinn and Fowler, long-tenured Washington players like McLaurin, Way, Allen and Payne, and the talented group of rookies — a roster that has been formed like metamorphic rock, which, as you probably know, is a type of rock that has been changed by intense heat or pressure from its original igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic state. It is common for a metamorphic rock to develop such a different set of minerals and such a thoroughly changed texture that it is difficult to recognize what kind of rock it was before the change.
Such a transformation in an NFL roster is unusual and the result of a perfect storm of events.
While I credit Josh Harris, Adam Peters, Dan Quinn, their relevant staffs and the players on the team for doing something extraordinary this season in creating a special environment, the fact is that it is just that — ‘extraordinary’ and ‘special’.
Even with the same owners, GM and head coach, we aren’t likely to ever get the perfect storm and see this kind of “brotherhood” on this team with this coaching staff again. Next year’s roster is likely to be more advanced in terms of the talent level of the players that comprise it, but the spirit of the ‘24 team — it’s trust and “dawg ass” resilience — is unlikely to be repeated. The current group is greater than the sum of its parts; the players work together to punch above their weight class and over-achieve. That is something special that can’t be expected to be repeated every year.
Chances are, future iterations of the Commanders will be more talented overall, but may not achieve the same magical synergy that this team has. The 2024 team is likely to be remembered by coaches, players and fans as one that was very special, with deep bonds that allowed the team to outplay its talent level.
Re-seeding the playoffs
A lot of people, for very rational reasons, think that the NFL should change its playoff seeding system so that the team with the best record always gets the home game. This would change the current system in which division champions play at home whenever they play against a wild card team (excepting, of course, the Super Bowl, which is played at a pre-designated stadium).
The ‘case study’ that many people were pointing to as Weeks 17 & 18 of the season approached was that of the NFC North, when it became apparent that a 14-win team was going to end up as a wildcard team, playing on the road against a team with an inferior record.
That team turned out to be the Vikings. Had they gone to LA and lost to the Rams at SoFi Stadium, people who are proponents of re-seeding would have pointed to it as evidence of the unfair advantage the less talented division winner gets and the disadvantage that accrues to a wild card road team.
I have never agreed with this thinking.
As things transpired, with the fires in LA, the game was shifted to a neutral field, and the crowd, based on what I heard during the broadcast, was wearing mostly purple, not electric blue.
The Vikings got creamed anyway. The Rams outplayed them offensively and defensively. It was never close.
There are a few reasons why I think the NFL owners have always had it right, and why I oppose changing the seeding system.
First, most NFL fans are NOT rabid fans of 32 teams. Most of us care greatly about one team, and because of the divisional structure, tend to pay a lot of attention to the three other teams in the division. There are a few good reasons for this. The fact that division opponents play against each other twice a year is a huge part of it — two games out of 17 is significant to final W-L records, and the annual nature of the competition breeds rivalries.
But nearly as significant is the fact that the division winner gets something more important than a banner to hang from the rafters — that team gets at least one home game in the playoffs. That makes the division title valuable…something worth fighting for.
I know that, speaking personally, I follow 4 teams closely, and that I rarely watch a game between two AFC teams. If there’s not an NFC East game on, I almost always watch other NFC teams who will be more relevant when playoff time comes. I think most NFL fans, to a greater or lesser degree, are shaped in a similar mold, and the current playoff seeding system reinforces that. Most fans simply don’t have the bandwidth to follow a 32-team league closely, so keeping the divisional structure important and relevant strengthens the league’s appeal to fans.
A less compelling argument against re-seeding based on overall W-L record is one that I would put forward in two parts: (1) all NFL schedules are not created equal; and (2) timing has more to do with playoff success than W-L record. Look at the Steelers, who put together a string of victories during the season, but finished with 4 straight losses. They came to the playoffs ice-cold, and looked overmatched against the Ravens, a team they beat in Week 11. Washington, meanwhile, recovered from a November slump to win 5 straight heading into the playoffs, where they dispatched the Buccaneers in Tampa despite having lost to the Bucs 37-20 to open the season.
Winning the regular season fight against rivals in your own division toughens a team. The rigors of the regular season are a proving ground for playoff contention, so winning the contest in your 4-team cohort should be honored. If you can’t win that divisional competition, then you haven’t actually earned home field advantage.
Minnesota, who was supposed to be the poster child for re-seeding based on season W-L record, could have won their division, but they lost to the eventual NFC North champion Lions twice in the regular season. Interestingly, their only other loss in the regular season was to the LA Rams, who beat them like a bad puppy on Monday night on a neutral field in Arizona. The Vikings were too soft, having fallen short in their quest for the NFC North crown, while the Rams, who opened the season 1-4, won 9 of 11 games from Week 7 to Week 17 and got toughened by battling to rip the division title from the Seahawks. The Rams were better than the Vikings despite having achieved fewer wins during the regular season.
Ideally, I’d prefer to see a playoff system where only the 8 division winners qualified. I’m a bit of a purist who sees that as the only legitimate way to qualify playoff teams, but I understand the financial appeal and fan appeal of the inclusion of wild card teams.
Including a few teams with strong winning records as we do now is a compromise I’m willing to make, but giving a team like the Vikings, who couldn’t even win its own division, home field advantage over a team like the Rams is one that I find objectionable, and one that would be bad for the league because it would weaken the value of winning a division and reward the wrong teams.
Washington beat Tampa Bay in the Bucs’ home stadium, proving that, on Sunday, Washington was the better team, as the Commanders’ better record (12-5 vs 10-7) indicated, but I don’t feel like the game should have been played in Landover any more than I believe the Rams should have had to travel to Minnesota because they won 10 games while the Vikes won 14. If Washington wanted to play that game at home, the Commanders should have beaten the Eagles for the NFC East title. That’s one of the benefits of winning that makes the division crown worth more than simple bragging rights among fans.
While the NFL playoff system may not be perfect, re-seeding based on overall W-L record would be a big step in the wrong direction. The Rams domination of the 14-3 Vikings on a neutral field on Monday night is a perfect illustration of why wild card teams don’t deserve to have home-field advantage against division winners. The Commanders’ win over the Buccaneers on Sunday (the only road team to win a playoff game this week) demonstrates the value (despite my philosophical objection) of including wild card teams in the competition.
The current system works very well for teams and fans. Re-seeding based on overall W-L records would be a mistake.