Sitting at 3-8, the Washington Commanders are having the kind of season that very few people expected following their impressive playoff success in January when the team beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Detroit
Lions on the road to reaching the NFC Championship game.
The magic of Jayden Daniels’ rookie season seemed to suffuse everything in the organization in 2024. By contrast, 2025 has been a year of frustration, injury and disappointment. At this point, qualification for the playoffs seems out of reach, to say nothing of the likelihood of playoff success.
That caused us, in this week’s Hogs Haven survey of readers, to turn to questions about the approach to the final 6 games of the regular season.
In this week’s Reacts survey, we asked two questions:
The first asked readers to say whether the priority this season should be on winning as many games as possible; enhancing draft position; or developing young and returning players.
The second asked whether, once he is cleared to play by doctors, Jayden Daniels should return to the field, or whether he should be be protected from potential further injury in this ‘lost’ season.
Readers who answered the survey questions offered two majority opinions; that is, that the coaching staff should focus on developing young and returning players (55%) and that Jayden should play when he’s healthy (61%).
In a sense, the attitude towards JD5 returning to play seems, for many people, to be built on the same logic as the desire to develop other players on the team. Specifically, a number of commenters mentioned that Jayden, in the games he has played this season, hasn’t looked as sharp or decisive as he did a year ago. The feeling is that the 2nd-year quarterback needs more real game experience in 2025 to restore his sharpness and build confidence heading into the offseason.
While both questions resulted in majority opinions, they were far from unanimous. I was frankly a bit surprised that nearly 4 of 10 respondents to the survey would prefer coaches to sit Jayden Daniels even if he’s medically cleared, apparently in hopes that the extra rest and recovery time will ensure that he enters the 2026 season fully healthy. Also, it seems significant to highlight that nearly 1 in 3 respondents prefers to prioritize draft position above winning or development of the current roster.
Underlying all of this, judging by the comments added to the original survey article, is a growing distrust or dissatisfaction with the coaching staff. Some fans who either expect or hope for turnover among Washington’s coaches appear to feel that better draft position and a healthy franchise quarterback should be prioritized over development driven by coaches who, anyway, may not be here next year with those players.
Coaches and GMs of perhaps a dozen NFL teams need to walk a similar tightrope in what remains of the NFL regular season. Once playoffs are off the table — either mathematically or practically — the longer term benefit to the team has to be weighed against the professional pride and competitiveness of players, whose careers, for the most part, are brief, and for whom every win is precious, as well as coaches (and even GMs) whose immediate livelihoods and long-term careers depend on winning.
This week, Dan Quinn was asked about his approach to the rest of the season and whether the focus would be on winning games now or developing the roster with an eye on the long term:
I’m going to work like heck to try to fill both those buckets of winning now and also developing players for the future because it’s important to win now; it is.
These guys put absolutely everything you can into it, but it’s also important to bring players along, I recognize that. So, fill in both of those buckets, that’s my job to navigate that and I’ll work hard to make sure we can do both of those.
It’s not easy, but that’s the goal, for sure — to do both. And it takes…some thoughtfulness. It may not be every single game at every single position, but moments where you get guys to evaluate and see what they can do, that helps for sure.
It sounds like Dan Quinn is going to work towards giving Washington fans what most of them want — a chance for core players to develop — while still trying to win games. For six more weeks, we’ll get to see how successfully he can walk that tightrope.
