Hogs Haven
Dan Quinn’s Commanders suffer their first back to back losses
The banged up Commanders travelled to Philadelphia for their second game in four days and came up short against the division-leading Philadelphia Eagles. The Commanders led the game through three quarters, before giving up three rushing TDs in the fourth quarter.
Through 11 games, the Commanders have established that they can defeat losing teams and play tough against good teams. But they have yet to show that they can beat a real championship contender. Even so, with 7 wins in the bag, and only 2 teams with winning records on the remaining schedule, they have a very good chance of making a playoff appearance just one season after last year’s 4-13 tank.
Some fans have taken the back-to-back losses to division leaders particularly hard. There have been suggestions that the league has figured out Jayden Daniels and Kliff Kingsbury’s offense. Doubts have been raised about Dan Quinn’s coaching and Adam Peters’ first draft class.
But the fact that we are even talking about playoff appearances in Week 12 shows how far the Commanders have come after one offseason under new management. The Commanders have their best chance for a get right game this Sunday, when the 3-7 Dallas Cowboys come to town.
But before moving on to brighter days ahead, let’s take a look at who got playing time, what went wrong and who bucked the trend with strong performances in the Commanders’ 18-26 road loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.
Jayden Daniels completed 22/32 passes (68.75%) against the Eagles for 191 yds, 1 TD and 1 INT. Ordinarily, that completion rate would indicate a productive afternoon. But not when the Average Depth of Target is a season low 3.8 yds. Daniels only attempted 7 passes (22% of total) over 10 yards. That might have to do with the Eagles’ secondary doing an excellent job of blanketing his primary and secondary receivers.
Daniels faced 11 pressures, according to PFF (3 according to Pro Football Reference), including 3 sacks for 20 yds. Going with the PFF figures, he has faced higher numbers of pressures on 5 occasions and the same number 3 times. He has taken 3 sacks in 4 games and 5 sacks once. The amount of pressures he faced in Philadelphia was not out of the ordinary.
What has been different in the last two games is that his Pressure to Sack Rate of 27.3% (each game) is the highest it has been since the Week 2 match against the Giants. While he hasn’t been facing unusually high numbers of pressures, he has been uncharacteristically poor at evading them.
A major reason for that might be that the Commanders’ last two opponents were good at containing his running ability. Against the Eagles, Daniels ran 7 times for 18 yds (2.57 Y/A), better than his season low of 1.67 Y/A last week, but well below his season average of 5.24 Y/A and his 5.60 Y/A average from Weeks...
