After the Washington Commanders’ Week 8 Hail Mary victory over the Chicago Bears, they received a broad, first-hand look at how one gutting moment can absolutely short-circuit a franchise. The Bears went from looking like a promising team on the rise to giving up replay-worthy outlier touchdowns on a weekly basis. The offensive coordinator was fired. The head coach’s seat went from lukewarm to hotter than a suspect, off-brand phone charger purchased on Amazon. The team has lost five consecutive games and fallen to 4–7.
So, the unfolding of the Commanders’ wild Week 12 game against the Dallas Cowboys—in which Washington nearly tied the game after a delirious 86-yard touchdown pass with 21 seconds remaining, only to miss the extra point—offers some particularly high stakes for the near future of this franchise.
This is especially true for Dan Quinn, who, like Matt Eberflus, will face pointed questions about the decision-making process that led to the team getting kneed in the gut. Eberflus, you may remember, greenlit a critical handoff to the Bears’ backup center and then decided to play a puzzling spy coverage that allowed Daniels to rip the Commanders into Hail Mary position.
Quinn, after that miraculous 86-yard touchdown by Terry McLaurin pulled the Commanders within 27–26, opted to kick an extra point instead of going for the lead.
While this is not especially egregious on its face, the Commanders went into that moment with a glaring stretch of special teams issues signifying that perhaps the unit was not prepared to be counted on. Austin Seibert missed a 51-yard field goal at the end of the first quarter and missed an extra point in the third quarter. The Commanders had also just given up a kickoff return touchdown, which, while not related to the extra point and field goal teams directly, probably gave an accurately painted picture of the general state of special teams—a unit that shares players across multiple responsibilities. Seibert had come into the game nursing a hip injury. Quinn himself admitted at the podium after the game that there were other instances of concerningly low snaps that led to lower kicks.
On top of all this, the Commanders had opted to go for two at the 3:02 mark in the fourth quarter and converted successfully, drawing to within 20–17 at the time.
While it feels a tad ridiculous to take Quinn to task, given that he’s played so many of the right notes to this point with Daniels, it does force us to take a blunter look at the Commanders’ season now that 7–2 has become 7–5 and the dream seems to be fading a bit. This was a home game against a gassed and largely checked-out Cowboys defense. It was an ideal situation in which to heave all your confidence onto the laps of Daniels and OC Kliff Kingsbury—who, himself, has had a bad couple of weeks—and ride the good vibes that Quinn has been known to conjure across two head coaching jobs and as the defensive mind behind the Legion of Boom.
Failing to do so now marks a third consecutive loss for Washington, handing the team a kind of look-in-the-mirror mess amid an already difficult stretch.
The blueprint for allowing something like this to swallow you whole exists.
In Quinn’s defense, he had felt that the team needed an emotional reset. He viewed the moments that would immediately follow a successful extra point—the short break, the coin toss, etc.—would have been more beneficial than attempting a do-or-die play having just come off a moment of high emotional variability. Quinn mentioned several times this idea of “overtrying,” which he brought up when relaying the offense’s struggles over the past few weeks and his decision behind not going for a makable fourth-and-2 earlier in the game. He also watched Seibert practice during the week, which is part of the calculation that we’re not privy to while analyzing this game like we would a data sheet.
The counter: Quinn brought with him a handful of veterans to steer this team into a position where it could be ready for moments like this. Quinn has the most exciting young quarterback in the league, who can be uniquely weaponized inside the 5-yard line. The coaches who are winning games at the most consistent clip right now are the ones who have wrestled the two-point and fourth-and-short decisions away from the analytically minded and have, instead, made it a matter of belief.
Quinn says it never crossed his mind. I’d be curious whether that’s true over the next few days.
“I reminded them all that it’s never about one play,” Quinn said at the podium. Not about the two-point call, but more generally in a game that came down to several miniature breakdowns. But it could have been about two. Another miraculous throw by a quarterback who has revived this franchise and a conversion attempt that cemented it into history and put a losing streak to bed instead of magnifying it.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as With Commanders’ Dream Season Fading, Two-Point Decision Is Worth Scrutiny.