Commanders, Vikings Survive Week of Difficult Tests

More from Albert Breer: Takeaways: Eagles Will Remain a Powerhouse | ​​The Bengals Are Much More Than Just Joe Burrow | Roquan Smith Is Unlocking What It Means to Be a Raven

It’s easy for a coach to stand in front of his team and ask for tunnel vision—for the players to block everything out, to put horse blinders on, or to apply whatever cliché you want to eliminate the distractions that everyone from the left tackle to the guy with the Coors Light tall boy in the 300 level knows can see.

To have the fate of your livelihood destabilized is something else entirely.

And that, for players and coaches of certain teams, is what NFL trade deadline week is like. The quarterback might have to hear his receivers are on the block. A corner might know the pass rushers in front of him are being shopped. Sometimes, it’s that quarterback or corner himself having to deal with it.

And no one on the outside cares. But that’s what this past week was like to be a Commander or a Viking, with a season in full swing—starting rife with uncertainty and big-picture questions and ending with, well, tests for everyone.

“First and foremost, Albert, the biggest thing more than anything else was with a couple of really good players for us, guys that help establish who we are trying to become, we obviously made the trades,” Commanders coach Ron Rivera told me late Sunday afternoon. “So we started trying to get across to our guys, This will be about opportunity more than it will be about anything else. I tried to stress to them just how important it was that they understand that this deal will give other guys opportunities. And you guys have to step up.”

The Commanders’ coaches and players handled the fallout of trading both of the team’s edge rushers—first Montez Sweat, then Chase Young—with a 20–17 win over the Patriots on the road. The victory won’t guarantee Rivera or anyone else job security when new owner Josh Harris makes the bigger decisions in January, no more than any of the veterans who rallied the Vikings to a road win in Atlanta are assured of anything beyond the next few months.

But that doesn’t mean what happened Sunday with these two teams didn’t say something about these two teams—with one team (the Vikings) that’d be in the playoffs if they started today, and another (the Commanders) that’s just a game out of that last spot.

“It cements everything I believe about team culture and overcoming adversity,” Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell told me from the tarmac at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport early Sunday night. “No better example than to do it on the road, and in a game we felt like was pretty important for us moving forward.”

Now all those players and coaches, in both Washington and Minnesota, can really move forward, and we’ll tell you how they’re doing it.

We’re halfway through the season, with Week 9 wrapping up today with Jets-Chargers, and we’ve got a lot for you in The MMQB …

• A look at how Joe Burrow’s injury pushed the Bengals to become more complete—and may have made Cincinnati as dangerous as it’s ever been.

• The story of a linebacker who, a year after his own trade deadline drama, has found new life and a new identity in a place with old ideals.

• Our Week 9 takeaways, starting with the sturdy foundation from which the Eagles keep running off wins.

But we’re starting with how two teams handled a tumultuous few days and showed who they were in the process.

Had the trade deadline come a month earlier, the Vikings’ approach may have looked a little different—at 1–4, and in the midst of a reset year, it looked likely that Minnesota was going to sell off some of its veterans. The team is carrying more than $30 million in dead money on its salary cap. It moved on from veteran cornerstones Eric Kendricks, Adam Thielen and Dalvin Cook in the offseason, and had tough contract negotiations with others, such as safety Harrison Smith and edge rusher Danielle Hunter.

But a funny thing happened on the way to a potential purge.

After a start where the law of averages seemed to catch up with a Vikings team that was 11–0 in one-score games in 2022, the group, somehow, recaptured its moxie on the fly. It scratched out an ugly road win in Chicago. It upset the Niners on a Monday night. It took care of business at struggling Green Bay, getting back to .500 at 4–4, and that complicated the team’s place as the trade deadline approached last weekend.

According to those with other teams, the price tag on trading for Hunter went up. And as a result, the star pass rusher—who was nearly traded to Jacksonville earlier in the year, and who had his contract redone at the start of camp—ultimately wound up staying in Minnesota.

Meanwhile, O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah had to deal with the season-ending Achilles injury to quarterback Kirk Cousins as all this was going on, which prompted them to pivot, and go into buy mode with about 48 hours between the time Cousins went down and when the clock would strike midnight on the trade market.

O’Connell says now the reason Joshua Dobbs’s name “hit my brain” once the Cardinals benched the veteran last Monday was because he knew Dobbs was smart and adaptable, even without knowing him very well personally. Dobbs, he figured, was the rare sort of person who was available and could upgrade the team at that position in the fire-drill situation the Vikings found themselves.

And if the acquisition and decision not to go through with another one to get a return for Hunter was taken as a reward to a group of players that didn’t stop fighting, well, then the coach and GM were all for that, too.

“That can definitely be a conclusion from it,” O’Connell says. “But I wouldn’t overcomplicate it—our belief in this team, our belief in the makeup of our organization right now, it’s about overcoming adversity and challenging yourself regardless of circumstances to be the best version of yourself. And if we continue to try to do that, guy by guy, coach by coach, and then collectively on offense, defense and special teams, in the end, we’re gonna give ourselves a chance to compete.

“We’re all competitors; this team’s full of them.”

What happened Sunday was pretty remarkable. The Vikings’ offensive players were still learning Dobbs’s cadence during pregame warmups because he didn’t get any practice reps with the team preparing rookie Jaren Hall to start. To make matters worse, O’Connell, his staff and his players found out franchise left tackle Christian Darrisaw (groin) was out 90 minutes before kickoff (David Quessenberry started for him), the team lost Cam Akers (Achilles) and K.J. Osborn (concussion) in-game, and T.J. Hockenson played through an oblique injury, too.

“There are so many stories like that,” O’Connell says. “But it all comes back to the locker room and what this team’s made of and hopefully just the fact that we can just keep pushing onward.”

Pushing onward meant leaning on the defense a bunch in the second half—and taking advantage of the short fields created by an Akayleb Evans forced fumble and Byron Murphy Jr. pick that put the offense deep in Falcons territory and led to 10 points. But then it also meant rallying behind Dobbs on an 11-play, 75-yard drive that ended up winning the game for a visiting team that had been through a lot.

That happened through downfield blocking on his 22-yard, fourth-down scramble, the same way it did with O’Connell using every second he had in Dobbs’s ear, right up to the helmet-communication cutoff with 15 seconds left on the play clock (more on that in the takeaways). It happened, mostly, with the Vikings again showing who they are.

“They believe in each other,” O’Connell says. “And just when things get as hard as they could possibly be, that’s when my challenge to these guys is to always look inward and just continue to dig deep, lean on their teammate and let’s just see what happens. And then we’ll move on to the next step from there, and they’ll compete like crazy until they don’t let us anymore.”

Regardless, evidently, of what’s happening around them.

The situation facing the Commanders was challenging in a different way. And Rivera made the decision Tuesday—as he, GM Martin Mayhew and top exec Marty Hurney dealt Sweat and Young hours apart—to be as upfront as he possibly could with his team.

The brass, he wanted his players to know, was not giving up on the 2023 team.

“I said, Guys, we are most certainly not saying the season’s over. ​​We’re just going through a little bit of a paradigm shift as far as where we think we can grow, in how we think we need to grow. And that’s what this is about,” Rivera told me after beating the Patriots. “So giving more people opportunities, and younger guys opportunities, that’s one thing that I tried to stress, and other coaches tried to reiterate it. The attitude was, Hey guys, this is your chance. This is your opportunity. And I thought the players handled that portion of it well because like I said, [Young and Sweat] are two popular guys in our locker room.

“To have them move on, I know it was very tough on a lot of the young guys.”

One person, in particular, that Rivera wanted the changes to empower was Sam Howell—the quarterback he and the front office boldly chose to go with in January, with Howell having only one NFL start under his belt.

And so it was that Rivera stood on the turf at Gillette Stadium with his arm around Howell, after Howell threw an unsightly pick into the Patriots’ end zone with nine seconds left in the first half. Up to that point, Howell, a former fifth-rounder, had outplayed New England’s first-round quarterback, Mac Jones. But the team had blown a 10-point lead, and the coach knew the interception created a critical fork in the road for Howell.

“I think probably the biggest thing was he kept his composure,” Rivera says, recounting the conversation with Howell. “Because he does that in front of everybody—he keeps his composure and his teammates see that, it’s a good sign for him. They see that he’s in control. They see that he can handle it. And because he does that, it means a lot. It means a lot to his teammates.”

Indeed, the next time the Commanders got the ball, Howell promptly drove them 75 yards in seven plays, and dropped a dime to Jahan Dotson for a 33-yard touchdown, and even the score at 17 midway through the third quarter. The possession after that, Howell drove Washington 65 yards in eight plays, with 26- and 36-yarders to Terry McLaurin, to set up the eventual game-winning field goal.

As Rivera said, Howell took advantage of the opportunity the trade deadline gave him to show himself to be the guy for that team, and others followed suit.

KJ Henry, who got on the field as a result of the trades, would’ve had a critical third-down sack in the third quarter were it not for the worst roughing-the-passer call you may have ever seen. Quan Martin’s and Percy Butler’s opportunities came for different reasons than Henry’s—those were because safeties Darrick Forrest and Jeremy Reaves got nicked up, leaving Kam Curl as the only healthy regular rotation player at the position—but they took advantage of them, too, with Martin collecting the game-clinching interception of Jones.

There were even guys such as rookie Emmanuel Forbes Jr., benched a couple of weeks back, who took what Rivera said to heart without some sort of tangible shakeup happening around him, and played really well against New England.

Of course, a satisfying win in Week 9 doesn’t mean any coach or player is definitively going to make it to 2024 with the team. All that, in the end, will be up to Harris—whose new analytics chief, Eugene Shen, is officially starting with the team this week (he did some work with Rivera, Mayhew and Hurney ahead of the trade deadline).

But at least Sunday, it did affirm a lot of things that have been right about the way Rivera and his group have led the franchise through a tumultuous few years, simply in the way they navigated a tumultuous week.

“More than anything else, it’s just control what you can and assess what we’re doing as a football team,” Rivera says. “And something I can control is what’s going on with the football team. And I’ve told the players that. I told the coaches that on Tuesday, this past Tuesday—these are the things that I’m dealing with. And the biggest thing, we just got to control what we can. And that’s what goes on on the football field.”

And that part of it happened to go the Commanders’ way Sunday.

For both of these teams, things will settle down Monday, and their focus will turn to another team right in that cluster of NFC playoff contenders—the Vikings (5–4) will host the Saints (5–4) on Sunday, while the Commanders (4–5) will hit the road again to take on the Seahawks (5–3).

But for a minute Sunday, O’Connell was going to let himself enjoy how his team had rallied over the past month, and dealt with the uncertainty of the last week, to put themselves in position to make games matter from here on out.

“I’m just proud of the guys,” he says.

Rivera intimated the same about his group.

And in both cases, after all the noise each team has dealt with, rightfully so.