Dan Quinn takes blame for Commanders’ clock management meltdown vs. Giants, but Jayden Daniels’ answer exposes a bigger problem
Washington’s tie with New York has the head coach, the quarterback, and even one of the team’s owners weighing in on what went wrong.
The Washington Commanders found a way to lose without actually losing. An all-time end-of-game clock management meltdown left Washington with a 27-27 tie against the New York Giants, and head coach Dan Quinn spent his postgame press conference trying to explain how it happened.
The debate started the second the clock hit zero. With a chance to set up a game-winning field goal, the Commanders ran a play that kept the clock moving. Washington had no way to stop it after that, & the game ended in a tie.
One snap turned a winnable divisional game into a result nobody in burgundy and gold can feel good about.
Dan Quinn puts it on himself
Quinn didn’t dodge it. He walked through the sequence and pinned the outcome on his own call.
“You know, with the team, I thought this was a hard-fought game to the wire, leaving tonight with a tie feels like a loss,” Quinn said postgame. “And the last sequence, you know, we throw it out of bounds, we clock it, you give yourself a chance to kick it. And we pride ourselves on those moments at the end of the game. And after the first down run, still trying to gain more for the kick. Right call is honestly, we can go clock it early and don’t put ourselves in that spot. And that is, that’s my responsibility, nobody else’s.”
Owning it at the podium is the right move. That said, the image of Quinn right after the final whistle tells a different story than the calm explanation. He threw his headset & stood stoically at the 25-yard line, visibly shaken by what had just transpired.
That’s not a coach who had a plan go sideways. That’s a coach who couldn’t believe what he was watching either.
Even Magic Johnson saw the obvious
The frustration went all the way up the ownership chain. Magic Johnson, one of the team’s owners, took to X after the game.
“I’m in total disbelief my Commanders had such poor clock management in today’s overtime game against the Giants. All we had to do was kick the field goal and we would have won the game!”
Johnson is 100% correct, and it’s always a concern when a former basketball player can so clearly identify issues happening in professional football. The NBA legend shouldn’t be the one diagnosing your two-minute operation, and he shouldn’t be able to do it this cleanly.
The NFC East standings make the tie sting even more. Washington stays at the bottom of the division at 1-3-1. The New York Giants remain atop at 3-1-1, with the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys stuck in the middle at 2-3.
A win would have pulled the Commanders right into the thick of it. Instead, they’re still looking up at everybody.
Jayden Daniels and Quinn aren’t on the same page
Quarterback Jayden Daniels pointed to communication at the end of the game as the reason Washington walked away with a tie. When asked whether anything was said in the huddle about stopping the clock, Daniels kept it short.
“We gotta stop the clock,” Daniels admitted. “We got to relay that as an offense. It starts from everybody, top down. But ultimately, you know, it’s on me. Just got to be better. Just got to be better overall.”
Look at what both leaders are saying. Quinn says the responsibility is his and nobody else’s. Daniels says communication broke down and he has to be better.
Both of them want to put it on themselves, which sounds noble until you realize it means the head coach and the franchise quarterback walked off the field with two different explanations for how the game should have ended.
That’s the real problem. Bad clock management is fixable. A disconnect between the guy calling the shots and the guy running the huddle in the most important moments of a game is a much bigger issue.
Washington needs it solved before the next close finish.
