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LANDOVER, Md. — It was, simply, malpractice, for Jayden Daniels to be playing in the fourth quarter Sunday night.
I do not use that word to go viral, or as a hot take. I don’t do hot takes. That word is used here because it describes, correctly, the decision to allow Daniels to stay on the field, in a game long since lost, in a season spiraling toward oblivion, and to continue running for his life, as he had all night in what became a 38-14 Seahawks win at Northwest Stadium.
With time running down in the fourth quarter and Washington down 38-7, Daniels, for some reason, was allowed to go back on the field. He drove the Commanders down the field, toward a meaningless score that would do nothing to change how thoroughly and completely Seattle had dominated the Commanders all night long, in all three phases.
And then, Jayden Daniels, because it’s how he’s wired, took off running again, this time from the Seattle 2-yard line with seven and a half minutes left in the game, trying to score. And Seahawks linebacker Drake Thomas, because it’s what he does for a living, grabbed Daniels and threw him to the ground. And Daniels, straining for that extra yard, fell awkwardly, on his left elbow. It was … it was awful. Don’t look at a replay of it. Ever.
“It was just gut wrenching,” guard Sam Cosmi said. “You don’t want to see your starting Q (injured). I didn’t see what happened, exactly; I just heard the ahhs (from the crowd), and I just put my head down and prayed for him.”
But Daniels should not have been on the field.
He should have been on the sidelines, with a clipboard in his hand and a headset on his head, watching Marcus Mariota finish up a bad night at the office for the home team, like teams that are getting mauled do all the time. That he wasn’t falls at the feet of the head coach. Dan Quinn is a good man and a good coach, but he made the wrong decision in allowing Daniels to continue.
“I mean, obviously, like, the hindsight, you don’t want to think that way, where an injury could take place,” Quinn said afterward. “You know, obviously, we’re more conservative in that spot, to run it and hand off and not have reads to go. But just the end result, obviously, I’m bummed.”
But, Quinn and Adam Peters and Josh Harris all know how Jayden Daniels is wired. If he puts on a uniform, he’s going to try and ball out. It’s how he won the Heisman, and how he played during an electric rookie season. It’s why Washington took him second overall in the 2024 draft. But the entire organization, now, has to have a serious, sober discussion about how to help Daniels get through the rest of his career.
Last season, the Commanders put a great support system around their young QB. They had a legit No. 1 receiver in Terry McLaurin, who had the best season of his pro career. They had good complementary receivers in Noah Brown, Dyami Brown and Olamide Zaccheaus, and a tight end in Zach Ertz who had a great bounce-back season at age 33. Their defense gave up some big plays, but also forced a lot of turnovers. They sacked opposing quarterbacks. And they had almost no significant injuries to their core players. They had a team able to support Daniels and make enough plays around him to keep him upright.
They do not have that this season.
McLaurin missed OTAs and most of training camp and has been hurt all season. Noah Brown (groin) has played in just two games, and doesn’t seem to be close at all to returning. And the other receivers haven’t produced nearly as much as Dyami Brown or Zaccheaus (or, for that matter, Jamison Crowder, who caught the game-winning pass from Daniels to beat the Eagles in December).
The defense, opportunistic a year ago, has collapsed. Sunday, Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold was unencumbered on just about every pass he threw. His receivers ran open and free, no matter the play call. Seam routes, slants, blitz beaters — everything worked. Jaxon Smith-Njigba is Seattle’s best receiver and he was open all night. But so were wide receivers Tory Horton and Cody White, and tight ends A.J. Barner and Elijah Arroyo.
At the half, Darnold was 16 of 16 for 282 yards and four touchdowns. Not a single one of those 16 passes was to anyone who wasn’t wide open at the time he caught the ball. The Commanders defense can’t stop the run or the pass, can’t rush the passer, and doesn’t create any turnovers. They are not good enough to give Daniels the luxury of playing with a lead, rather than having to try to be Superman because his team is, again, behind. If you want to get rid of defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr. on Monday, sure. But it’s not all on him.
This is why I asked Quinn if the Commanders, as an organization, have to change their approach going forward with Daniels, and keep him in mothballs until the roster is again good enough to support him, and not leave him vulnerable, as he has been much of this season. He has been injured in the last three games he’s played, with a sprained knee, a strained hamstring and, now, this gruesome elbow injury. He was lucky the first two times that he avoided more serious injury. That luck ran out Sunday.
Doesn’t Washington have to rethink everything now?
“I think the answer to that is we will give him the support to do that,” Quinn said. “I am certain of that, to make sure that we do that in every single way. It’s calls, offense, defense, the whole way through. I absolutely feel that way. The hamstring injury (against Dallas two weeks ago), and tonight with an elbow, it’s really important that we get that part right. And we will.”
Commanders coach Dan Quinn said he was “bummed” after Washington lost both the game and its quarterback on Sunday night. (Amber Searls / Imagn Images)
The late Hall of Famer Wes Unseld, when he was coaching the then-Washington Bullets, and when I was covering them, used to say this to me a lot: “You treat ’em all equal, but you don’t treat ’em the same.” Meaning, the rules you put in place for your players were for all of them, not just the star players. But the star players got deference in certain situations that the other players didn’t.
Similarly, Daniels has a lot of pride, and he wanted to finish the game Sunday with his teammates, leading with his amazing competitive bent. But, he’s not like the other guys, all due respect to the other guys. He’s the reason the Commanders are on national TV multiple times this season. He’s the main reason — not the only one, but the most important one by a mile — that the Commanders will, in 2030, return to play in D.C., in a new $3.8 billion stadium paid for in part by the city’s taxpayers. He is a franchise quarterback. Not a starting guard, or middle linebacker, or safety.
Franchise quarterback — the adjective describing, exactly, how important Jayden Daniels is to this team and organization. You can treat him equally with the other players. But you can’t treat him the same.
With Daniels at his best, and with a support system good enough to let him be that, Washington can, in time, be really good again. But this is not that time.
Two weeks ago, as the Commanders were getting pummeled in Texas by the Cowboys, I wrote the following: “There is Jayden Daniels’ future to consider. Which means there’s the future of the franchise to consider, if this is who the Washington Commanders are going to be this season. If it is, and it’s definitely looking that way, Daniels should not go back on the field any time soon.”
Some of y’all castigated me for writing it, and said you can’t keep a warrior like JD5 off the field, that a team needed its franchise QB out on the field when healthy, that football is a violent game, and on and on.
Sunday night is why I wrote that. A Sunday night that ended with Jayden Daniels’ left elbow in an air cast as he walked slowly off the field in a half-empty stadium, the dreams of a whole community replaced with the nightmare scenario everyone dreaded, and didn’t want to contemplate, now a reality.