Last year around this time, I stopped by the Washington Commanders’ training camp and was met with one question over and over again from local reporters: “Uh, hey, what are you doing here?” The short answer was that I didn’t actually know. I was in the area to visit the Ravens, and with a free day and a pathetic devotion to the sport of football, I’d decided to swing by a Commanders-Panthers preseason game. I told myself I’d maybe talk to former LSU standout and current Panther Terrace Marshall Jr. for a Joe Burrow piece I was working on. But Marshall was hurt, so I just sort of stood awkwardly in Ron Rivera’s press conference and the Commanders locker room after. Nothing football related was worth asking about: Any momentum the team had would be whacked down by a Daniel Snyder ego play or controversy. Any star player seemed destined for some type of mismanagement from the top or to be surrounded by such little talent that theirs wouldn’t matter.
I had been to two Jaguars-Titans Thursday night games in the middle of the previous decade. I have interviewed every Cleveland Browns coach after Eric Mangini—and I’ve separately interviewed Mangini. I covered the 1-15 Cam Cameron Dolphins as a college student. The amount of bad football I have seen in my career would shock you, and even compared to those lows, this was hopelessness. No team defined “nothing to see here” quite like it. What was I doing there?
This year, though, I went to Commanders camp for two days and no one asked me what I was doing there. I was there to watch actual football, something that has not been particularly important in the area in quite a long time. And what I saw was one of the most powerful forces in sports: fresh hope. One person can change a team, even in a sport as complicated as football: Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow, Sean McVay. And add to that list “literally any human being who took over for Dan Snyder”—the fact that Josh Harris is pushing all the right buttons so far is almost incidental. Snyder’s sale to Harris last month is the single most transformational move for one franchise this decade, and maybe this century. Washington was once a football capital—not much different than Philadelphia or Chicago. They won Super Bowls. They sold out one of the loudest stadiums in football. That it was all undone so quickly by one man was shocking to the generation of NFL fans above me, but that it is coming back so quickly should not be a surprise at all.
Over the past few weeks, there have been thousands more fans at practice each day than there were last year—a function of a rejuvenated fan base and a change in how tickets are distributed. Kevin Durant even showed up—a fan just like any other, looking to see what’s next for a team that hasn’t had anything to look forward to in years. There is, for the first time in about a decade, energy. And there’s a lot of it.
“I think the overall feeling [is] that we’re above it. Our heads are above water. Our focus is football,” Rivera told me this week. “I think it’s helped the guys. I think it’s helped the fans, knowing where we are.”
One of the Commanders’ new minority owners, billionaire Mitch Rales, was at practice one of the days I was there. “Mr. Rales, thank you for saving us!” a fan yelled.
“Thank you for coming back!” Rales responded with a smile. Left unsaid in all this is what the fans are coming back from. It’s too much for anyone to say out loud.
This week, Rivera talked to me about an October win over the Bears, when, in the midst of bombshell stories about Snyder, reporters wanted to know only his reaction to the owner’s various misdeeds. Rivera wanted to talk about the guys who made good plays; the media didn’t. If he didn’t know already, he found out then: No one was thinking about the Commanders and football at all anymore. This week, he agreed when I asked him whether the previous ownership problems had been a “distraction.” I asked him whether the part of his tenure that overlapped with Snyder’s hadn’t been what he’d hoped because of how sharply the ownership situation worsened. “It changed very quickly. It was a little bit more than I anticipated,” he said. “I think our guys did some good things and handled the situation the way you’d hope and want. We did the best we could, and we’ll continue to do that because the expectations are high now.”
Throughout the past decade, there haven’t been any serious expectations placed on the team. Nothing was ever particularly thought out; there was just desperate retconning to justify the whims of a bad owner. Letting Kirk Cousins walk. Letting the entire Mike Shanahan coaching tree leave the building. Putrid drafts. A refusal to move on from Bruce Allen. I often say that fewer teams than we think are honestly trying to win the Super Bowl, but only one team seemed to be trying to lose each year. Carson Wentz was on the roster last season, which to any other franchise would have been an apocalyptic-level event. It’s not even in the top 10 of the “addition by subtraction” Commanders items this year.
Everything is ahead of the Commanders now. They can do anything, and that’s the point. Maryland governor Wes Moore showed up at practice on Wednesday in a Chase Young jersey and stumped for his state to remain the home of the team when a new stadium is built. This is notable because politicians, aware of the toxicity of Snyder, would barely even engage with the previous owner on new stadium talks. Now, there’s competition between Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., proper. Only two teams, the Bears and Patriots, have less cap money than the Commanders committed next year. Only three veterans have significant money tied up beyond this season—Daron Payne, Terry McLaurin, and Jonathan Allen.
Harris is working with the closest thing to a blank slate you can possibly have in the NFL. If the team exceeds expectations, it can keep any of the ingredients of that success or move on entirely. There is an old line in Moneyball when Billy Beane says that the day you have to do something, “you’re screwed.” It means you’re going to get into a bad deal or rush something. The Commanders have to do nothing at the moment. They have no obligations, no responsibilities. They can just wait and watch. Pair this with the fact that the fan base will celebrate this patient approach, and you’ve got one of the more luxurious situations in the NFL at the moment. With a stadium and roster still to be built, Harris for now has simply purchased a huge fan base in a town that wants to be wild about football. That’s a good start. Everything else will come next.
On Wednesday, assistant coaches ran a drill in which they threw tennis balls over the shoulders of the running backs—the goal was for them to catch 10 without dropping them. Fans quickly caught on and started to count along in a sort of WWE-style call and response. They just wanted to cheer for something. They’ve waited long enough.
There’s no functional difference between what was on the field last year versus this one. I do not believe the Commanders will be good this year. Their front seven is by far the strength of their team, and there are holes basically everywhere else, save for no. 1 receiver. Sam Howell looks fine but is not destined for stardom. The offensive line doesn’t look much improved. Rivera might have made things weird with new offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy when Rivera said players were a little concerned by the new coach’s intensity, but that’s only a minor flare-up and, in the context of the Synder era, not even on the radar of distractions.
For the first time in many years, the Commanders are talking football at camp. This franchise just needed one guy to go. Everything has changed. I know what I’m doing there now.