Field Gulls
The bye week has come to a close, and it’s time for the Seattle Seahawks to get back to game action, which means a Week 9 Sunday Night Football matchup against the Washington Commanders.
Washington is led by former Seahawks defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, and enters the game at 3-5, fresh off a 28-7 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football in Week 8. It’s certainly not the encore performance from a team that went to the NFC Championship Game in 2024, and joining Field Gulls to preview the matchup is Andrew Y of Hogs Haven.
So, without wasting any further time, it’s right to the questions and the answers provided.
1. Dan Quinn was a name often linked to the coaching opening in Seattle to replace Pete Carroll. Seahawks fans are happy with Mike Macdonald through a season and a half, so how do Washington fans feel about the Quinn hire at this point?
Overall, I’d say fans are pretty positive about the Dan Quinn hire. Bottom line, he took a team that was 4-13 in 2023 to the NFC Championship game the very next year (his first year as head coach), so he’s already accomplished a lot. Now obviously he had help with the addition of Jayden Daniels at QB, a roster largely rebuilt by GM Adam Peters in the offseason, and Kliff Kingsbury serving as OC, but Quinn certainly deserves some of that credit. He’s a player’s coach and the players genuinely seem to love him and play hard for him. Quinn also gets credit for being aggressive on 4th down and generally making in-game decisions that are in line with what analytics suggest a team should do to maximize win probability.
The main criticism of Dan Quinn is that he’s supposed to be a defensive head coach, but the defense looked bad since he’s been here. Granted, he inherited a terrible defensive roster and there was only so much that could be done to fix it in an offseason, but the defense still has looked poorly coached due to coverage busts or communication breakdowns, particularly to start the season. I think the problem has been that Quinn favors a specific defensive philosophy revolving around man coverage and a high blitz rate, but it’s a poor fit to his personnel and he is slow to adapt his scheme to the players.
2. So far in 2025 the Commanders are similarly ranked in terms of points per game allowed, but the team is putting nowhere near as many points on the board. Obviously Jayden Daniels missing time has played a big role in that, but what other factors have contributed?
The two biggest factors have been way more injuries and a much more difficult schedule than last year. In terms of injuries, the top three WRs for the Commanders were expected to be Terry McLaurin, Deebo Samuel, and Noah Brown. Noah Brown got injured in week 2 and is on IR. Terry McLaurin...
