Who would’ve imagined? After being freed from the clutches of one of the worst owners in the history of professional sports, the franchise now known as the Washington Commanders is in the NFC divisional playoffs and will square off against a dominant Detroit Lions team Saturday night.
Before last week’s down-to-the-wire 23-20 defeat of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa, Washington hadn’t made the NFL’s divisional playoff round since 2005 — that is, back when George W. Bush was president. Washington is a significant underdog Saturday night, but the team has already notched some improbable victories this season, including scoring 22 fourth-quarter points to beat division rival, the Philadelphia Eagles, on Dec. 22.
Washington is a significant underdog Saturday night, but the team has already notched some improbable victories this season.
The “Commanders” obviously wasn’t what the team was called in 2006, the last time Washington won a playoff game. It still went by a racist moniker tied to ugly stereotypes about Indigenous people. Then-owner Daniel Snyder, comically stubborn and a persistent maker of bad decisions, resisted changing the name until the tail end of his 24 years in charge. The Snyder era, during which his teams were typically awful, was considered among the worst in American pro sports, up there with Marge Schott’s ownership of the Cincinnati Reds and Donald Sterling’s ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers.
Snyder sold the team to a group led by Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris in 2023, and this season, the success of the Commanders is one of the NFL’s best playoff storylines. Washington’s star quarterback, rookie Jayden Daniels, is the favorite for offensive rookie of the year. His eye-popping stats — a 69% completion percentage and 101.1 regular season passer rating on 3,568 yards and a 25:9 touchdown to interception ratio — fueled the resurgence of a squad that hasn’t made a Super Bowl appearance since they won in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president!
Although he’s a rookie, Daniels is playing like he’s been here before, maybe because he was born to play the superhero in the Commanders’ comeback story (keeping in mind he was born almost nine years after the team’s last Super Bowl win). He told The Washington Post in a profile this week that he hadn’t been nervous in a football game since his father yelled at him for erratic play in a flag football game while he was still 6 or 7. Listed at 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds, he’s fast and has the build of a deep-threat wide receiver, but that wouldn’t have taken full advantage of his talented arm. In 2023, he threw for 3,812 yards, 40 touchdowns and only four interceptions at LSU, and left college football with a Heisman Trophy.
Even if the Commanders don’t make it past a very good Lions team Saturday evening, fans (and nonfans alike) should appreciate what the players and the new ownership group are doing.
They are proving beyond any doubt that in sports, winning cleanses the hardest-set stains. And until very recently, Washington’s laundry was filthy.
Winning cleanses the hardest-set stains. And until very recently, Washington’s laundry was filthy.
Besides defending the racist team name, Snyder presided over an awful stadium experience where fans once wondered whether raw sewage was actually leaking onto their heads. He was in charge when there was an investigation into claims that team execs harassed employees, cheerleaders and even a reporter, which led to a $10 million fine from the NFL, and federal investigations into whether the team was cooking its books to hide revenue from other NFL owners.
As I wrote back in 2020 and again in 2022, NFL owners have and will continue to tolerate lots of bad behavior among their own, but what they won’t abide is another owner costing them a slice of the precious shared revenue, which reached a reported $20.24 billion in 2023. Snyder was under tremendous pressure when he finally sold the team to Harris’ group for a $5.25 billion profit. With Snyder gone, Harris set about saving the Commanders, or rather, protecting his $6 billion investment. He cleaned house in the front office, installed Dan Quinn as the team’s new head coach and drafted Daniels. And he set about lobbying for a new federal law, signed by President Joe Biden, that gives Washington, D.C.’s local government control over the site of the old RFK Stadium for the next 99 years. That bill is key to proposals floated for the Commanders to move back into the city and bring with them retail, housing and other amenities. Harris, in a Dec. 21 statement, said the measure will “create an equal playing field so that all potential future locations for the home of the Washington Commanders can be fairly considered.” It’s a massive turnaround in a single year, maybe one of the best in league history considering how far the Commanders have come on the field and off. If they overcome their status as 9.5-point underdogs on Saturday, they’d be one step away from the Super Bowl. Who would’ve imagined? Honestly, probably everybody who wanted to see Snyder gone.
Keith Reed
Keith Reed is an award-winning journalist and a past senior editor at ESPN. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Root, Vibe, Essence and elsewhere. 
