Noah Brown and Dan Quinn take us through the play of the week. Plus, teammates have Jameis Winston’s back, the Cardinals deserve your attention and more.
Washington Commanders
The Washington Commanders’ Hail Mary wasn’t all luck. But it is a pretty good symbol of how many things have gone right for D.C.’s once-embattled football franchise over the first eight weeks of the 2024 season—mostly because plenty of things had to for that play to work.
In fact, really, the only thing simple about it was the name OC Kliff Kingsbury gave the call.Hail Mary. Or, as one Commanders coach joked via text Sunday night
It was, to be clear, Washington’s conventional call for such a play. No real tricks. Just rules on where players were to wind up to make this sort of prayer come true. Everyone involved knew it was a long shot, as rookie phenom Jayden Daniels approached the line of scrimmage with two seconds remaining and his team trailing the Chicago Bears, 15–12.
“You have a jumper in the middle, then three guys looking for the tip—one in the front, two in the back,” says veteran receiver Noah Brown, one of the former Cowboys that Dan Quinn brought with him from Dallas in the offseason. “I happened to be in the back.”
It was from there that Brown made a miracle happen for the coach he followed from the Dallas Cowboys in Washington’s 18–15 win. But before all that, a lot of other things had to fall into place, starting with the guy who’d throw the ball to him even being available for the game.
Daniels sustained a rib injury in the Commanders’ Week 7 rout of the Carolina Panthers, and his status for the game against the Bears (and his showdown with the one player taken ahead of him in April’s draft) was up in the air all the way into the hours before kickoff. The quarterback sat out practice Wednesday, then participated in the Thursday walkthrough. On Friday, Daniels felt good enough to go, so Quinn wanted to push him to test his limits with his injured ribs.
“Can he get outside the pocket? Can he throw on the run? Can he throw across his body? We really pushed it,” Quinn told me over the phone after the game. “We pushed him to see how he’d respond.”
Daniels told his coaches on Saturday, ahead of the team’s walkthrough, that he felt fine. So he went through that walkthrough—“just easy moving around,” per Quinn—and everyone had their fingers crossed he’d wake up and feel good again Sunday morning. The final test came during normal warmups at the stadium in the afternoon. But that just confirmed, after Friday’s tests that he was still good.
“Friday wasn’t a scripted-play day, it was, Could he get off track and could he avoid and protect himself?” Quinn says. “Those were the things that we looked at. Went through the whole process and told him, If you don’t look like you, I’m going to pull you. I wanted to make sure he knew that it had to be him. He did a fantastic job.”
Physically, Daniels was there. Performance-wise, though, it wasn’t all the same. The Commanders moved the ball but stalled three times in the red zone in the first half. The only points in the second half, prior to the Hail Mary, came on a long field goal after Washington got the ball on a short field.
Eventually, the Bears started to move the ball. D’Andre Swift ran for a 56-yard touchdown. And after one long drive was short-circuited by the Bears calling the William “the Refrigerator” Perry goal-line run back from the mid-1980s—the exchange between Caleb Williams and backup center Doug Kramer was fumbled and lost at the 1—Williams drove the Bears for the go-ahead points near the end of the fourth quarter.
After a well-placed kickoff forced a return, the Commanders’ offense trotted out with 19 seconds left, the ball at Washington’s own 24 and hope in short supply.
The initial hope was to get a chunk play, call the team’s last timeout, then run a sideline route to set up a game-tying field goal. But Daniels’s first throw, deep over the middle to Zach Ertz, fell incomplete with 12 seconds left. Which shifted the plan to a simpler one—get the ball into range to throw the Hail Mary. So Daniels threw again to Ertz, this time for 11 yards, then called the timeout. After that, he found Terry McLaurin for 13, and McLaurin quickly got out of bounds at Washington’s 48-yard line with those two seconds to spare.
“That’s the one you need,” Quinn says. “If we don’t get that play to him, then we’re out of gas.”