Hogs Haven
Three forced fumbles doomed the Commanders; Eagles score 7 rushing touchdowns
Last week, the Commanders buried the top-scoring offense in the NFL in the divisional round playoff in Detroit, with the Jayden Daniels-led offense unaffected by deafening crowd noise or the ‘bigness’ of the moment.
Today, Washington goes to another tough environment, but one with which they are intimately familiar, as the Commanders travel to Philadelphia to face the league’s 2nd-ranked scoring defense and the NFL’s 2024 rushing champion, Saquon Barkley.
Like last week, the Commanders will be relying on their rookie phenom quarterback, Jayden Daniels, who threw 5 touchdown passes and led Washington to score 36-points in a victory over the Eagles just five weeks ago.
While the Eagles are the betting favorites today, that is most probably because NFL fans still haven’t figured out what this team in Washington is all about in 2024.
This is a new team, but not a young team. In fact, the Commanders roster is studded with super bowl champions like LB Bobby Wagner, LG Nick Allegretti, and the guy who caught a key TD pass in Philly’s only super bowl win, TE Zach Ertz. In putting together Washington’s 14-5 roster, GM Adam Peters clearly wanted to have key veteran leaders in every position group. Some, like S Jeremy Chinn, C Tyler Biadasz, RB Austin Ekeler, and QB Marcus Mariota, were added in free agency. Others, like WR Terry McLauri, DT Jonathan Allen, and All Pro punter Tress Way had been here a while and lived through the travails of Washington football over a number of years.
Head coach Dan Quinn never worried for a moment about that history. He focused on building a single high-performance team from the collection of old & new. Last week, Quinn described the “joyful intensity” with which this team now plays winning football.
The Commanders are in the midst of a 7-game winning streak — the longest in the NFL at the moment — that includes victories over the top 3 seeds in NFC playoffs, Detroit, Philadelphia and Tampa Bay. That winning streak and the quality of these three playoff teams bolster team confidence and offer a vision of how 2024 is different from the quarter-century of frustration that preceded it.
In other words, this isn’t the Washington team that fans have known throughout the current century. This team harkens back to the glory years of Redskins football under George Allen and Joe Gibbs when the team won five NFC championship games and three Lombardi trophies.
Some will say that a rookie quarterback has never reached a Super Bowl, and that is true, but one rookie quarterback did win the NFL’s championship game. That rookie was the Washington Redskins own Sammy Baugh, who led the team, fresh off its move from Boston to DC, to a victory over the Chicago Bears in a game played in Chicago in 1937. In that championship game, Baugh passed for 335 yards, setting a record for an NFL playoff game that...
