Commanders' star QB takes the blame for 'costly' Monday night loss

'You Don't Deserve to Win'

"Turnovers. One late, all three phases dug the hole and all three phases helped get out, but we didn't create enough takeaways to finish minus three," head coach Dan Quinn said after the game. "You really don't deserve to win many games when you're in that space.”

Quinn couldn’t be more honest, and he couldn’t be more correct. No team has any business winning a game with three turnovers, especially when they don’t get any takeaways to balance those out. 

But we’ve seen the Commanders team do it. And that’s what stands out about this one, because for the first time in his career, really, not only was quarterback Jayden Daniels part of a disappointing outing, he was a direct contributor to it.

A 'Lack of Focus' at the Worst Moment

On the final offensive play of the game for Washington, Daniels received a shotgun snap and turned to hand the ball off to running back Jacory Croskey-Merritt, who was lined up directly behind him in a Pistol formation. As the quarterback went to give the ball to his back, however, it came loose and slipped out of his hands.

As a result, it was much less a handoff than a lateral that hit Croskey-Merritt in the midsection and ricocheted to the Northwest Stadium surface, where a Bears defender waited to pounce on it.

Daniels would cite a “lack of focus” as the reason the play happened, after the game, admitting that he gets paid to not have those mistakes, and has to be better.

"I just lost the ball, completely my fault," he said. "I had a lack of focus right there, and it cost us the game.” 

It certainly cost the Commanders the chance to secure their fourth win of the season, that much is for sure. But like Quinn said, this loss is about a lot more than one fumble, or even two lost and an interception on a late-thrown pass by Daniels on the team’s first drive of the game.

A Three-Phase Failure

It was, as he said, a three-phase loss. Missed field goals, missed tackles, blown assignments, dropped balls, and ill-timed penalties doomed Washington. Even as the team took control of the game in the middle quarter (halfway through the second quarter to halfway through the third), there was a looming concern that another big mistake was waiting around the corner to jump out and grab them.

The Defense Owns Its Part

Team leader and defensive star linebacker Bobby Wagner addressed the all-encompassing method of defeat standing in his locker after the game. “It's tough to win a game when you have that many turnovers," he said. "As a defense, we got to do our part in creating turnovers. We could have done that better; we could have done a better job helping the offense out.”

"On defense, we gotta find a way to hunt the ball better,” defensive tackle Daron Payne added. “And just get the ball back to our offense.”

Where does a team go after losing a game like this? And in front of a sold-out home crowd?

That is what Quinn and his staff have to figure out, and they have less time to do it with a trip to Dallas coming Saturday for their next game on Sunday afternoon against the Cowboys.

"This one stings," Quinn says. And if they can’t find a way to soothe the burn of it all soon, it isn’t the last one they’ll get.