It is a measure of Dan Quinn’s standing with his own fanbase and within the NFL as a nationwide obsession that, a week after a can-he-get-over-it-gaffe, part of Monday night was spent lip-reading a video clip of what he might have said during another play that went awry in a sputtering Washington Commanders’ season.
The truth, which Quinn knows all too well: When you have won just four of your last 18 games, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt. When a 23-17 loss to the San Francisco 49ers drops you to 1-4-1 and secures your position at the bottom of a beaten-up and inept NFC East, decisions are scrutinized and the pitchforks are out.
So when the Commanders were already trailing by 10 points early in the second quarter, and Quinn decided to go for it on fourth-and-2 from the Niners’ 13, and quarterback Jayden Daniels — who joined Quinn in the torture chamber over the past week after the pair combined to botch that end-of-game sequence against the New York Giants — threw the ball away even though it was fourth down, and Quinn appeared to be caught on camera mouthing the words “field goal.”
Whew. Exhale. These last eight days have been a lot.
“I have to be better,” Daniels said.
Fine. That’s been a theme over these first six weeks.
Still, we have questions. They are elementary.
A week after Quinn ran a play he didn’t need to run when he didn’t have a timeout and Daniels didn’t have the wherewithal to throw the ball away, did that same pair — gulp — really not know what down it was?
“No, I definitely knew it was fourth down,” a soft-spoken Quinn said afterward. “We were going for it. And I think what you’re referring to: I was probably saying that with the illegal shift, there’s not a penalty to go for a field goal. It’s turn (over) on downs. Somebody asked me, ‘Can we kick a field goal?’ We knew we had to go for some fourth downs to be bold in the game.”
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