You fought through your post-Halloween hangover, delighting in your extra hour of sleep — until it got dark before dinnertime, and you realized how interminable the wait would feel until the kickoff of “Sunday Night Football.” You nonetheless made it to the Washington Commanders’ primetime game against the Philadelphia Eagles, where you expected to see a clean, redemptive performance befitting a home team coming off its bye week, against a bedraggled opponent that hadn’t won a game since mid-September.
This, decidedly, was not that.
But if the Commanders, with their season teetering and their embattled head coach looking increasingly vulnerable, had any hope of playing meaningful games in December and January, they had to win at Northwest Stadium on the first day of November.
Their 27-10 victory over the moribund Eagles wasn’t always easy on the eyes — with the offense still too prone to senseless penalties and red-zone failures. But it did feature the most complete performance of the season by their defense at a time when that unit was under intense scrutiny and palace intrigue.
Trending
Facing an Eagles offense decimated by injuries, the Commanders defense sacked fill-in quarterback Tanner McKee (starting in place of Jalen Hurts) five times and held perennial nemesis Saquon Barkley to just 30 yards on 13 carries. It forced a pair of turnovers and pitched a shutout across the final three quarters, allowing the offense the time and space to reel off 27 unanswered points.
“We heard all the noise that we weren’t getting sacks,” said veteran edge rusher Odafe Oweh, who had one of Washington’s five sacks. “So we applied that to our preparation. And we were blessed to be able to come out and not only be able to dominate on the D-line, the pass-rush and [against] the run, but also get the W. Wins fix everything.”
No one should read too much into a sometimes sloppy win against an Eagles team that featured a staggering 25 names on its mid-week injury report. But the victory, the first with Jayden Daniels at quarterback in nearly 13 months, nonetheless pushed the Commanders to 2-4-1, two games behind the first-place New York Giants in the NFC East, with the easiest stretch of their schedule on the horizon.
“We needed it,” said veteran safety Jeremy Reaves. “It’s about playing 60 [minutes]. That was the whole message [this week]. We’ve been good at stints of 15 or 30. But putting it all together — I’m just glad we did that tonight.”
The Eagles are two years removed from a Super Bowl championship and one year removed from a second consecutive NFC East title. The Commanders were two years removed from a trip to the NFC Championship Game. And yet one of them would see their 2026 season all but finished with a loss Sunday night, and even the winner would have to squint to see true playoff contention. It was, in other words, not an ideal matchup for the primetime slot on “Sunday Night Football.”
Speculation about Dan Quinn’s status as the Commanders’ head coach has been building since the clock-management fiasco at the end of the Oct. 11 tie game at Northwest Stadium against the Giants, which cost the Commanders an all-but-certain last-second victory. And it was only somewhat muted by the second-half comeback at San Francisco that fell just short in Week 6, which led the Commanders, mercifully, into their bye week.
The 13-day gap between games did little to quiet the intrigue surrounding the Commanders, much of it focusing on the defense. The team managed to lose another key player, defensive tackle Daron Payne to a broken foot, despite not playing a game since Oct. 19.
But the more significant saga involved the coaching staff. First, the team brought on former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks as a defensive consultant, saying the move had been planned since the start of the season but was only implemented in midseason.
Initially, the team indicated Wilks would work with the unit only in early-week practices, but not be part of the game-day staff. Days later, however, it was revealed that Wilks, a popular figure among players, would in fact be on the sideline Sunday night assisting defensive coordinator Daronte Jones — with whom he shares a background as a defensive backs coach — and possibly for additional games.
The team described the Wilks hiring as an additional resource for Jones, and Jones himself said he welcomed it. But the lack of clarity on the part of the team’s brain trust about the specifics of the move left all sorts of room for interpretation, which was soon filled by speculation and gossip. Was Wilks the new heir apparent in the event Quinn was fired? Was he there because Jones was seen as faltering in his first year as a coordinator?
It may have been a mere coincidence, but the Commanders’ best defensive effort of the season came in its first game with Wilks on the sideline.
Asked Sunday night what was different about what that defense was able to do against the Eagles that had been missing all season, Oweh replied, “We just did a good job of communicating.”
It was an interesting answer, given something Oweh said last week, when he told reporter Ben Standig that there had been some “miscommunication” between Jones and the team’s defensive position coaches (most of whom were holdovers from 2025, as opposed to Jones’ own hires). According to Oweh, sometimes those position coaches “didn’t understand the way Daronte saw it.” The implication was that the position coaches were having a hard time implementing Jones’ extremely blitz-heavy scheme within their individual position groups.
From “miscommunication” to “a good job of communicating,” something indeed changed for the Commanders on Sunday night. And while it’s too early to say it saved the team’s season, at the very least it kept it alive for another week.
Author
