Did the Commanders REALLY Botch Another Red Zone 4th Down Situation???

It took all of 17 minutes. That is how long the Washington Commanders needed on Monday Night Football to drag everyone back into the question that haunted them a week earlier in overtime: does anybody on this team know it's fourth down?

Rich set the scene. Fourth and two, 13-minute mark of the second quarter, Washington down 13-3 to the 49ers. The score was only 13-3 because San Francisco had missed an extra point, so Rich had no problem with the decision to go for it. "The analytics say go," he said. "You see the green go on the screen."

Then Jayden Daniels rolled right, a flag flew, and Daniels threw the ball out of bounds. Rich could not understand it. "How do you not throw it in the end zone and give anybody an opportunity?" he asked. "Maybe you get a pass interference, you get a hold, you get a circus catch."

It got stranger on the sideline. The ESPN cameras caught Dan Quinn saying "field goal" into his headset, and to Rich it looked like he followed that up with something like, "Oh, is it fourth down?" Jason McCourty went all in on the subject at halftime.

Quinn was asked about it after the game. "No, I definitely knew it was fourth down," he said. "We were going for it." He explained that someone on the headset had asked whether they could kick a field goal after the illegal shift, and he was likely commenting that it was a turnover on downs. "We knew we had to go for some fourth downs to be bold in the game," Quinn added. "I didn't think it was going to be a 17-14 game."

Rich took it one piece at a time. The only way a field goal is even on the table there is if the penalties offset and the down is replayed. A defensive penalty means a fresh set of downs. A penalty on the offense, as this was, means the ball goes the other way. "Whoever's on the headset saying can we kick a field goal," Rich said, unless the penalties were offsetting, that person must have thought it wasn't fourth down.

Daniels was asked about it, too. "I just got to execute better in that situation regardless of a flag or not," he said. "I have to be better."

That is what a quarterback needs to say, Rich granted. But he wants more. "Jayden Daniels throwing the ball away is such a lack of awareness of the moment again that you got to wonder, is his head in the game?" Rich said, making clear he loves the kid, wants him to be great for the league, and wants him to be great for the DC fans in his life.

His prescription: get the offensive coordinator, whoever was on the headset, Quinn himself and Daniels in a room for "a situational awareness boot camp." Rich was serious. As a head coach, you have to drill down to the communication problem, because if the quarterback doesn't flip that ball out of bounds, who knows what happens.

The frustrating part is that the rest of the night was encouraging. Washington was without Terry McLaurin and Bill Croskey-Merritt, and Diggs looked to Rich like "half a Diggs" after hurting his hand on the first hit he took. The Commanders still rallied in the second half and damn near won. "They didn't fall completely apart," Rich said.

But moral victories don't matter at 1-4-1. One win through the first six games is tied for the franchise's fewest this century, matching 2020, 2019, 2014 and 2001. And this was a game Washington could have won, just like the week before, in a division Rich called wide open, with Jalen Hurts out for the season and the Giants probably on their third starting quarterback of the year.

The rally, Rich believes, may have saved Quinn's job for now. The crew agreed that a 35-10 loss might have meant a very different Tuesday morning. Rich still had one request for owner Josh Harris. "I want the name of the person who's asking, can we kick a field goal?" he said. "Cuz your head's not in the game."