Hope for old DC: The Washington Commanders return to the playoffs ready for a new era
By Kyle Feldscher, CNN
Landover, Maryland (CNN) — Even from the top of section 412 – the standing room area that’s about as far as one can get from the battle taking place between the Washington Commanders and the Atlanta Falcons – Northwest Stadium is a cauldron of noise.
On this rainy, unseasonably warm December night, the Commanders are playing in the weekend’s premier game and aiming to clinch their first NFL playoff berth since the 2020 season. Here in the upper reaches of the stadium, the wind whips the rain into the faces of fans as they roar, creating a din that only gets louder as the Falcons’ offense takes the field for the opening drive – somehow ratcheting up even more when the Commanders force an interception. It’s the kind of atmosphere that marks a big game in a football town that is once again getting used to them.
The scene could not be more different than that Covid-19-afflicted campaign four years ago. The team then had a different name and a losing record, even though it won the NFC East division crown. There were no fans in the stands that season – only cardboard cutouts that made no noise and showed no emotion.
There’s noise in Landover now, and it sounds a lot like hope.
There are many reasons for that hope. From the front office to the field – and even to the halls of Congress – there are signs that football in Washington, DC, is once again being revived. More importantly, there is true belief that this revival can actually stick.
The 12-5 Commanders are coming off their best season since 1991 and take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (10-7) at 8 p.m. ET Sunday in the penultimate game of the Wild Card round of the NFL playoffs. It’s another primetime slot for a franchise looking to advance past the first round of the playoffs since the 2005-06 season.
But regardless of what happens against the Bucs on Sunday, this season already qualifies as a success – and a potential turning point – for the Commanders. Tress Way, the team’s punter and most-tenured member, believes the recipe is simple.
“I feel like even more than just like clinching the playoffs, it’s more of like – winning, I guess,” he told CNN Sport in the locker room after the Commanders beat the Falcons to secure their spot in the postseason.
Way allowed himself a chuckle: “Just – we have so many wins!”
A prolonged fall
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, the then-Washington Redskins were the toast of the NFL.
Three Super Bowl championships in 1982-83, 1987-88 and 1991-92, another appearance in 1983-84 and a slew of playoff berths meant that DC was one of the centers of the football universe.
But after that Super Bowl in 1992, the wheels fell off. The team made the playoffs the year after their Super Bowl triumph but then didn’t play another postseason game until January 2000.
Since that last Super Bowl win in the 1991-92 season, Washington has returned to the playoffs eight times and only advanced out of the first round on three occasions. High-profile and high-priced, players came and went without bringing the kind of success that Washington fans were used to. Mediocrity on the field not only became expected, it became the new normal.
Off the field, more decisions were being made that annoyed the fanbase. The team decided to leave their longtime home at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in southeastern DC for a new stadium in Landover that was initially the largest in the league before tens of thousands of seats were removed over the next two decades. Known for decades as FedEx Field, the stadium developed a reputation as hard to get to, hard to leave thanks to crushing traffic, expensive and not exactly aesthetically pleasing.
After owner Jack Kent Cooke’s death in 1997, longtime fan Daniel Snyder bought the team, beginning a period of frustration and disappointment that eventually metastasized into toxicity on such a level that Congress got involved.
One of Snyder’s nemesis in the Washington mediasphere, Dave McKenna, chronicled many of the fanbase’s frustrations with the franchise for the Washington City Paper in 2010. But no matter what bad press or controversy followed the then owner around, or how many empty seats appeared during games, it seemed like nothing would change – especially given the stubbornness around changing the team’s name.
Known as the Redskins ever since the team arrived in Washington from Boston in 1937, the name’s reference to skin color, as well as its logo depicting a Native American with feathers in his hair, has been criticized at least as far back as 1971-72. Still, the team steadfastly resisted efforts to change its name.
However, the franchise faced renewed pressure to finally do so in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd sparked mass protests seeking to end systemic racism. FedEx, the sponsor of the team’s home stadium at the time, asked the team to change the name in response to growing pressure from investors. Companies including Nike, Amazon, Target and Walmart said they would stop selling the team’s merchandise. Snyder eventually announced the decision to change the name in July 2020.
It’s a decision that still divides Washington football fans. The team competed as the Washington Football Team in 2020 and 2021 before adopting the Commanders moniker in 2022.
Snyder eventually decided to explore a sale of the team in November 2022 and completed the deal in 2023, selling to the current ownership group led by Josh Harris. But on the way out, there was one final embarrassment: a $60 million fine by the NFL against the old owner following the release of an independent investigation, which found workplace misconduct and financial improprieties while Snyder owned the team.
At least 15 women – 13 former staffers and two journalists – accused organization staffers of sexual harassment, leading to a congressional investigation into the organization and Snyder’s ownership group. Snyder was accused by then-House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney in a hearing that he “himself fostered” the football team’s “toxic workplace” and then “conducted a shadow investigation to target his accusers, pin the blame on others, and influence the NFL’s own internal review.”
Maloney said that Snyder “fired women but not men who engaged in relationships with other employees, while defending male executives accused of sexual harassment,” according to testimony from former top team executives during the panel’s eight-month probe of the Commanders’ culture and the NFL’s response.
In April 2022, the NFL hired former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairwoman Mary Jo White to investigate an allegation of sexual harassment against Snyder by former employee Tiffani Johnston, a former cheerleader and marketing manager for the team. Johnston told a congressional committee that the Commanders owner had put his hand on her leg under the table at a work dinner and tried to persuade her to get into his limousine. The investigation corroborated the complaints.
Snyder has in the past denied the allegations.
A sharp rise
Under Harris, the Commanders have done their best to move on from the Snyder era. The best way to do that, Way said, is winning.
“When Mr. Harris bought the team, he had lunch with a lot of us veterans, and he had said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna come in, we’re gonna make changes. We’re gonna do some fun stuff and special stuff,’” Way told CNN. “He said the biggest catalyst to getting the city back is if we win games, and he’s like, ‘I’m gonna get the people in here that I believe can get us there.’
“Everything’s just so intentional and on purpose, and it’s no accident. … It’s just, it’s fun to be a part of.”
After a 4-13 season in 2023, the Commanders fired head coach Ron Rivera and brought in Dan Quinn, a defensive mastermind who came over from the rival Dallas Cowboys. With him, Way said, was a change in mentality that has made this season’s Commanders tough to beat.
“We just fight and we just try to win,” he said. “We don’t know who’s going to need to make the play. … And it’s not, it may not be cookie cutter, it may not look the same every time, but like the way DQ empowers us, you just always feel like we’re in the fight like and so it’s a very special thing to be a part of.”
After a season-opening loss to the Bucs, the Commanders won seven of their next eight games and won five straight to close the regular season. The run brought a surge of sights not seen in the DC metro area in quite a few years: burgundy and gold being worn in public, flying on flags from cars and the block W logo showing up on hats and shirts around the area.
“Oh yeah, big time. I think, I think that there’s just so much excitement,” Way said when asked if he’d noticed a change around the area this season.
Other players, including ones who’ve played against the Commanders for years and are new to the team, noticed the change too.
“Every day since the moment I got here, this place has exceeded every expectation,” said veteran tight end Zach Ertz, who spent nine years on the in-division rival Philadelphia Eagles and is in his first season in the capital. “I had been in this division for a long time, you just kind of heard things that rumblings here and there, and from the moment I got here, it just felt like all those stories were just not any part of the experience that I’ve had.”
He added: “I feel like that stems from everything that Josh (Harris) has done, (general manager Adam Peters) has done, with everything DQ has done, and this is honestly some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing football. And just being able to be a part of this team, be a part of this group of guys, has been really, really enjoyable.”
An inevitable comparison between the past and future
Walking around the exterior of Northwest Stadium and the concourses inside, it’s clear to see that the main reason why hope is suddenly surging through this reawakened fanbase is one player: rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels.
No. 5 jerseys are everywhere, and his heroics this season have already made him the most popular player in Washington since the last young quarterback who walked onto the field in Landover and made the impossible seem probable.
Daniels’ emergence as a playmaking leader appear to have helped inspire a quick turn in fortunes for the Commanders and mean the comparisons with Robert Griffin III, the second-overall pick in the 2012 draft who became a sensation before injuries derailed his career, are perhaps inevitable. It’s not hard to see why – both Griffin and Daniels were drafted at No. 2 and entered the league after winning the Heisman Trophy, the prize for the best player in college football.
Griffin, popularly known by his nickname RGIII, embraced the comparisons earlier this season by posting a photo of himself and Daniels side by side on Instagram and writing, “Jayden Daniels will finish what we started and be the Franchise QB the city deserves.”
Griffin set the NFL alight in the fall of 2012, making incredible plays with both his arms and his legs. It looked for all the world like Washington had found a franchise quarterback who was going to bring the team back to the heights it had known in the 1980s and 1990s – but all of that came crashing down when the young quarterback blew out his knee at the end of his rookie year.
The injuries were themselves a controversy that provided an example of what the team had become – reports circulated that Griffin was rushed back from an injury suffered earlier in the year and was playing in the playoffs before he was cleared. The team also faced embarrassing questions about the quality of the turf at what was then FedEx Field, and whether the torn-up playing surface played a role in Griffin’s injuries.
The game against Seattle in the Wild Card round in January 2013 marked the beginning of the end for Griffin in Washington. A player who was once Washington’s great hope instead became part of a painful, extended quarterback controversy that took years to unravel.
The pain of seeing RGIII lying on the field, writhing in pain, is never far from Commanders’ fans minds. When Daniels was sacked by the Falcons’ JD Bertrand in the first quarter of that clinching game last month, he was twisted to the turf and his legs buckled awkwardly. The air went out of Northwest Stadium as the crowd gasped and someone in the south end zone seats yelled, “Get up! Get up! Get up!”
It all starts with No. 5
Daniels did get up and proceeded to show exactly why he’s become the symbol of the franchise’s resurgence this year.
Like Griffin, he makes plays with his arms and legs. He’s got a cannon for an arm, as evidenced by the Hail Mary pass to beat the Chicago Bears in late October that traveled more than 60 yards in the air. And, as the Falcons found out in the fourth quarter and overtime, he can boss the game on the ground as well.
The overtime drive to beat Atlanta showcased exactly how the rookie sensation can simply take over at the most critical moment. In a methodical drive that won the game, Daniels ran for 42 yards and passed for 32, with the last two yards coming on a short touchdown pass to Ertz that ended the game and sent the burgundy-and-gold-clad fans into hysterics. Daniels ended the game, his last full contest of his debut regular season, throwing 24-of-36 for 227 yards and three touchdowns and adding 16 carries for 127 yards on the ground for good measure.
It was enough for Daniels to break Griffin’s record for most rushing yards by a rookie quarterback – something that RGIII welcomed: “I wanted Jayden Daniels to break my rookie rushing record because I’m not about rooting against the next generation. He EARNED IT. He is the FUTURE,” he wrote on X.
Quinn said he told Raheem Morris, his counterpart on the Atlanta sideline, after the game: “Man, there’s some things that 5 does that you can’t put on a card.”
The Hail Mary to beat the Bears, the final drive and comeback win over the Philadelphia Eagles, the final drive that led to a field goal to beat the New York Giants, the comeback win over the Falcons that sent the Commanders the playoffs – all those moments together have inspired cynical fans to believe that Daniels is the catalyst for a brighter future.
“I don’t really have any words,” Daniels told CNN Sport about the fans’ embrace. “You know, it’s kind of crazy just to see my grandfather’s last name around this stadium, and the legacy that he set, and, you know, I’m able to go out there and continue this legacy at even a bigger stage. So, I mean, that’s kind of was a real moment for my family, just seeing Daniels in the NFL, everybody wanting jersey too. … I’m extremely grateful for that.”
Fight for old DC
From the concourse on Northwest Stadium’s west side, one can just barely make out the dome of the US Capitol and the Washington Monument. Between those landmarks and the Commanders’ home field is the ruin that is now RFK Stadium.
The franchise played their home games at the stadium from 1961 to 1996 and there’s been a movement to bring the team back to the district almost since the day they left. Kept in regular use until 2017 when DC United finally moved out, it has been left to rot as the federal government and the DC City Council tried to figure out what to do with the site. After five years, the National Park Service finally said in May 2024 that the stadium could be demolished with no significant impact to the environment.
That was a flash of good news for advocates who wanted to bring the team back to DC. But the biggest surge of joy came late last month when lawmakers in Congress passed a bill in the dying hours of the congressional session to transfer ownership of the RFK site from the federal government to the district’s government.
“We are extremely grateful that our elected officials have come together on a bipartisan basis to give Washington DC the opportunity to decide the future on the RFK stadium site,” Harris said in a statement. “This bill will create an equal playing field so that all potential future locations for the home of the Washington Commanders can be fairly considered and give our franchise the opportunity to provide the best experience for all our fans.”
The lease on Northwest Stadium ends in 2027 and Harris has set 2030 as the target for a new stadium. DC, Maryland and Virginia are all making plays to be the home of a new stadium, but for many here, the RFK site is the sentimental favorite.
A return to the site of the team’s greatest glories has long been on the agenda for DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, who wore a Commanders’ beanie at a ribbon cutting for a new recreation center just days after Congress passed the bill transferring the RFK site.
“I’m just really happy,” she said as she wrapped up her speech on the new rec center, rubbing the block W on her hat to cheers from the crowd. “I’m happy for a lot of reasons this morning.”
Bowser’s look as she celebrated the legislative win was emblematic of the feeling around the Commanders during this turnaround season. Washington fans will hope there are many more satisfied smiles to come as the postseason – and, they hope, a new era – begins to dawn.
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CNN’s David Close, Eric Levenson and Jack Bantock contributed to this report.
