Hogs Haven
The Quinn/Peters era gets off to a historic start
Throughout the course of the first season of the Commanders’ rebuild, I wrote two articles on the timelines of NFL team rebuilds.
After the opening day loss to the Buccaneers, and an unconvincing win over the Giants, frustration and disappointment began to take hold in the Hogs Haven discussion threads. To help readers set reasonable expectations for the seasons ahead, I published an in depth look at the most recent comparable rebuilds:
That article identified four teams between 2017 and 2021 that rebuilt to playoff contention starting from similar baselines to the 2024 Commanders ( < 6 wins in Year 0 and/or extended playoff drought, new front office, new coaching staff, > 50% roster turnover). Three of the four teams took three seasons from the franchise reset to record their first playoff win (2021 Lions, 2021 Texans, 2017 49ers). The fourth team took four years (2017 Bills). It could be argued that the Bills’ and Lions’ rebuilds actually took longer, because both teams had false starts before embarking on the successful rebuild.
Among those successful rebuilders, the biggest Year 1 increase in regular season wins was the San Francisco 49ers, who improved by four wins from 2-14 in 2016 to 6-10 in 2017. The 2017 Bills started from the highest baseline and improved their record in Year 1 by 2 wins. The 2021 Texans held steady at four wins; while the Lions went backward, dropping from 5-11 in 2020 to 3-13-1 in 2021. The main takeaway for Commanders’ fans was that any real success from the rebuild was likely to be a few years away.
That conclusion was quickly turned on its head as the team began to gel around an emerging superstar at QB, and embarked on a four-game winning streak. By Week 9, Jayden Daniels had won NFL Rookie of the Week seven times, and the Commanders had nearly doubled their win total from the previous season. The mood of the fanbase was buoyed by the team’s unexpected success and discussion topics turned to the possibility of making the playoffs.
That bubble of enthusiasm burst when the Commanders hit the hard part of their schedule in Week 10 and suffered three consecutive losses to the Steelers (27-28), Eagles (18-26) and Cowboys (26-34). After the loss to the Cowboys, fan confidence took a nosedive and the haters came out in force to dominate Hogs Haven discussion threads. That prompted my second update on NFL rebuilds, in an effort to remind readers of how remarkable the Commanders’ progress had been, and hopefully provide some perspective on the recent setbacks, which turned out to be temporary:
The Week 13 update, looked all the way back to 1994, when the current rules that constrain roster building were first put in place. The extended analysis found that, in the 30 seasons...
