Commanders save Dan Quinn's job with late-game push

Washington football fans have seen this story before. On the road in a prime time game against a superior opponent with the season hanging in the balance, the Commanders have a reputation for folding.

Between 2008 and 2016, Washington was 3-13 in prime-time home games and 5-19 in prime time overall. Between 2017 and the start of this season, the Commanders were 9-17 in prime time, including going 0-5 last season.

In their first prime-time game this year against the 49ers on Monday Night Football in Week 6, it looked like they were going to get boat-raced out of the building after the first two and a half quarters.

Washington fell behind San Francisco 20-3 midway through the third quarter, and, heading into the bye week, with owner Josh Harris sitting in the visiting executive suite, it looked like the team might have wanted to leave head coach Dan Quinn in San Francisco after the game.

But then a switch flipped. The Commanders held the 49ers to just 3 points the rest of the way while scoring two touchdowns themselves. A third touchdown was taken off the board due to a facemask penalty. Otherwise, the Commanders would have put themselves in position for an improbable comeback win on the road against a previously undefeated team.

That late-game push in the second half may have just saved Dan Quinn’s job after a 1-4-1 start.

Dan Quinn gets a reprieve into the bye week

On Wednesday, NFL insider Ian Rapoport reported that Quinn is expected to keep his job at least through the end of the season thanks to the effort the team showed in that second half.

¨The team continued fighting, clearly the team did not lose the locker room. Josh Harris is not someone who likes firing the coach mid-season. It seems like, based on this effort on the field, Dan Quinn is going to stick around for the foreseeable future. The long-term future is still a question,¨Rapoport said, reporting from the NFL owners meeting in New York after speaking with Harris.

His fellow NFL Network colleague Mike Garafolo concurred, saying that the team ¨getting up off the mat,¨ against the 49ers, definitely helped Quinn retain his job, for now.

¨I really got the sense as the week went on last week that it had to be a moral victory. Can they get back off the mat and can they fight? For the first half, it didn’t look like it so much. But for them to claw back from not only last week’s disappointment, but the first half as well was huge for Dan Quinn,¨Garafolo said.

But the moral victory can only go so far. The team will have to be better coming out of the bye week.

¨He has to win some games down the stretch. I think there is no question that we are still going to be looking at this as a potential change, especially because nobody is running away with this division,¨Garafolo said, ¨So Dan Quinn is really approaching this right now like ‘how do I improve the operation in season?’ I expect some tweaks for Dan Quinn as we move forward to try and win some games.¨