Dan Quinn stood at a podium Monday and set himself on fire so Jayden Daniels wouldn’t have to, and that’s a worse problem for the Washington Commanders than if nobody had said a word at all.
Washington blew a 27-13 fourth-quarter lead and settled for a 27-27 tie against the New York Giants on Sunday, the first tie Washington has managed all season. In overtime, the Commanders had the ball at the Giants’ 24-yard line with twelve seconds left and no timeouts. Instead of spiking the ball immediately, Jayden Daniels held on, scrambled, and got tackled in bounds for no gain. There was no time for anything else, and the tie is sitting there in the final box score for good.
Twelve seconds and no timeouts is the easiest read in football, and Jayden Daniels missed it.
On Monday, Quinn called it his own fault: “If it has to come from me, I don’t have to put him into that spot. I can do that earlier, and we can finish the kick early, we don’t need to gain more yards. So, that’s on me.” That sounds like accountability, and on the surface it is. Underneath it, though, is a coach who doesn’t trust his own quarterback with a spike admitting as much on camera, in Daniels’ third season.
Taking the blame doesn’t fix that problem. It just means Washington’s head coach is managing the clock around his quarterback’s instincts instead of correcting them.
None of this erases what Jayden Daniels did to get Washington a 14-point lead in the first place. He was 17 of 25 for 199 yards through the air and added 103 more on the ground, including two second-half touchdown runs, in his first game back from a dislocated elbow. He is, by any measure, the best thing happening in that building. He also could not get himself to the turf with twelve seconds on the clock, and his coach felt the need to announce, out loud, that he would handle Jayden Daniels’ clock management personally from now on.
The tie is honestly the least embarrassing part of Sunday.
Quinn slammed his headset into the ground the instant the play died, and the replay got more airtime Monday than the scramble itself. Fitting, because his name already comes loaded with a highlight nobody in Atlanta has forgotten.
https://x.com/MLFootball/status/2109386565093093377
That highlight exists because Quinn was the Falcons’ head coach for the 28-3 collapse against the Patriots in Super Bowl LI, so this is now the second time his fingerprints are on a clock-management disaster that outlives the box score. Nobody in Washington can wave that one away, even though Jayden Daniels is the one who touched the ball last.
Asked directly about his own job security, Quinn didn’t say yes and didn’t say no.
He said instead, in comments on his own job security, that “Josh [Harris, the owner] and I talk regularly before games, after games, after good games, after tough games. That’s a normal process for us,” a line that answers nothing while sounding like it answered everything. Dan Quinn’s job security is now the actual story in Washington this week, ahead of whether Jayden Daniels can finish a possession.
Vegas didn’t wait around for an answer on Quinn’s job security either. His odds to be the next coach fired jumped from 6 percent to 75 percent over one weekend, a market move that happens when a team looks like it doesn’t trust its own quarterback with the ball in the moment that decides the game.
https://x.com/Covers/status/2109654964557811906
That number by itself sounds like a coach walking the plank.
It isn’t.
Washington isn’t expected to make an in-season change, so Quinn goes back to work this week with his job intact and his quarterback’s clock-awareness still unresolved. The franchise is quietly managing around a problem it already admitted exists on camera.
The Eagles had their own clock-management meltdown this same week, which means Washington isn’t even the only building with this exact problem right now.
Quinn called Sunday “a really hard loss, man.” It was a tie. Somewhere in that gap between what happened and what he called it is the whole season.
