Hogs Haven
Two overtime losses in which the Commanders looked competitivre have done a lot to ameliorate the lack of fan confidence that blossomed in the wake of four consecutive ugly losses that occurred between Weeks 7 and 10 — a sting of games in which the Commanders were out-scored 154-65. Losing by an average of more than 22 points per game for a quarter of the season will take the heart out of most any fan base. The surprise, if there is any, is that anyone at all still expressed confidence in the Commanders by mid-November.
And yet, many Washington fans did. At its lowest point in Week 11 (following the 44-22 loss to the Lions at Landover) fan confidence still stood at 32%. In other words, nearly 1 in every 3 Hogs Haven readers that responded to our survey still said ‘yes’ when asked if they were confident in the direction of the team.
That number has now more than doubled following two overtime losses, the second of which was a 1-point loss to the Broncos, one of the NFL’s best teams at the moment, in which the Commanders showed that they continue to fight and that the quality of the team’s play is getting better.
In this week’s Reacts survey, 66% of survey respondents expressed confidence in the direction of the team. In a season where the playoffs are no longer something we can talk about with a straight face, confidence needs to be focused on the longer term prospects for the team, which have been hard to discount ever since the day Jayden Daniels was drafted to give the Commanders the franchise quarterback for whom they’d been searching for many, many years.
The Vikings game
That said, there is a lot of confidence even in the team’s most immediate prospects.
Asked to pick the winner of Sunday’s game against the Vikings in Minnesota, three-quarters of the Hogs Haven readers who responded to this week’s survey picked Washington to win.
This is consistent with oddsmakers and NFL fans across the country. According to FanDuel, the Commanders are 1.5-point road favorites, and in SB Nation’s nationwide email survey, the Commanders were picked to win by a majority of NFL fans.
Full season record
Enthusiasm for picking the reinvigorated Commanders to keep on winning, however, is limited.
In our final question of this week’s survey, we asked Hogs Haven readers to predict the team’s record at the end of the year by saying how many total wins Washington would have.
A record of 5-12 was the most popular prediction, and, at 43% of the vote, it was more than twice as popular as predictions of 6-11 (19%) or 4-13 (18%).
Interestingly, there is a stubbornly faithful 2% of readers who are predicting that Washington will sweep its remaining five games to finish 8-9, though that group is heavily outnumbered by the 12% who expect Washington to go winless from this point forward, ending the year at 3-17 with a 12-game losing...
