MORE MMQB: How the Bills Dug Out of the Snow and Got Their Season Back on Track | Takeaways: How the Raiders Finally Closed a Game; the Lions Are Winning | Six From Saturday: USC Quarterback Caleb Williams Is Positioning Himself as a Prospect for the 2024 NFL Draft
A big shift is underway at the game’s most important position for the Commanders—and we’ll get to that in a second—but, interestingly enough, with that going on, Ron Rivera’s leading Washington out of the wilderness is more about staying the course everywhere else than anything else.
Confused? Well, we’ll let Rivera explain why—through a 1–4 start—he wouldn’t waver.
“Even though we got beat, you watched them play and then when you broke the tape down, you went to that little finite mentality that we have as coaches, and we watch certain plays and we say, ,” Rivera says. “If we can sustain that block a half a step longer, if the quarterback has a half a second more, it’s those types of things. And you sit there and go, . Or on defense, .
“I mean, we were so, so close, Albert. I mean, we really were.”
That the Commanders were right on the doorstep kept Rivera from overreacting—in any way to everything around him—even with pitchforks alternately pointed at each of his coordinators over the past couple of months.
“You don’t make changes to make changes—to show people you’re doing something—if you believe in the people that you have,” he continues. “I mean, I’ve always felt the things that we did with Jack [Del Rio on defense] our first year [2020], we can continue to do, and then obviously we had the down year last year and for specific reasons. But at the end of the day, you gotta keep plugging away. You gotta keep showing people you believe in them.
“It’s the same thing with Scott [Turner] and the offense. Our first four games, everybody wanted to get rid of our offense because, ‘Oh, it doesn’t …’ Well, our running back, he gets shot and we don’t have him for the first four games, and then it took him a couple more before he got his footing back. And now he’s just starting to come into his own.”
Even better, as Turner’s unit and Del Rio’s unit have come together, the bounces and close calls have started to go Washington’s way—and there was a prime example off the top of the Commanders’ 23–10 win in Houston. On the second play of the game, Taylor Heinicke threw one up, trying to give Terry McLaurin a chance to come down with a big gainer. The problem? He overthrew McLaurin, and Texans rookie Jalen Pitre was deeper than McLaurin and in position for the easy interception.
Only in this case, Pitre dropped the pick, and Washington never looked back.
“In the past,” Rivera continued, “maybe somebody catches it. And next thing you know, we’re in a dogfight all the way through.”
Instead, four plays later, the Commanders responded with Kendall Fuller picking off Davis Mills at the Houston 37 and scoring to give Washington a lead it would never give back.
That ignited a 20–0 first half in which Washington outgained Houston 246–5 and had 14 first downs to the Texans’ one. By the time the half was over, so was the game. And you might have to consider Caron Wentz’s time as an NFL starter over, too, at least for the time being.
Now, Heinicke, to be sure, was no superstar Sunday, throwing for 164 yards and a 78.6 rating on 12-of-22 passing. But he was steady, again, and we’ve seen flashes of brilliance and the belief of his teammates and Rivera in him. Which is why, as we spoke Sunday night, Rivera was ready to declare it Heinicke’s team. He talked with the quarterbacks last week, and now he’s landed there on who gets the keys to the offense.
“Yes, Taylor’s our starter,” Rivera told me. “And the big thing is, it’ll always be about one game at a time. This is not, . No, we’ll talk only one game at a time. I don’t want people to get us ahead of anything. I want to stay focused on one game at a time, not,
“No. No. We have to play Atlanta first, and then we play New York and we’ll see what happens. This is not about predicting or anything like that. This is staying focused on one at a time, one at a time.”
That said, Rivera reiterated his main point here: If Heinicke keeps playing well, the job is his.
“That’s the fair way to put it, because that’s the way I’ll judge it,” he continues. “And that is, and this is, about one week at a time. I don’t want anybody to be looking over their shoulder.”
Which, really, is how it’s worked everywhere else on the field for the Commanders for quite a while.
