The old cliche about defining insanity doesn’t necessarily apply here, as Ron Rivera didn’t work in Indianapolis last season. He has eyes, though, and from his perch in DC he saw how things ended for Carson Wentz and the Colts, and for reasons that will be hard to explain for years to come, he liked what he saw. He loved her enough to create a trade for Wentz in the offseasonand he liked it enough to – against the advice of virtually everyone who watched a single Commanders game this season –ask Wentz to do what he couldn’t one year ago.
Last season, it was the lowly Jacksonville Jaguars that kept Wentz and the Colts from making the playoffs. “Lowly” is probably too nice a word to describe this particular Jags team, as it was the team that was flushed down the toilet by Urban Meyer and entered the final week of the season with a 2-point record. -14. All Wentz had to do was beat these guys (this horrible, putrid team with nothing to play for) and he’d be playoff-bound. Wentz threw for 185 yards, a touchdown and an interception in that Week 18 game, and the Colts lost 26-11.
Sunday was a 6-9 Browns team with no playoff hopes that Wentz and the Commanders had to overcome to keep their playoff hopes alive. There was, however, a big difference between the situation the commanders found themselves in yesterday and where the Colts found themselves a year ago: Rivera had another option. Right there on his depth chart was Taylor Heinicke, the guy who took over at quarterback when Wentz was injured earlier in the season and guided Commanders to a 5-3-1 record during his streak. as a starter. Heinicke isn’t anyone’s idea of a great quarterback, but you don’t need him to beat a Browns team whose season is already over. You just need a guy who’s not going to throw three horrible interceptions and give no hope of winning the game.
Wentz completed just 16 of 28 pass attempts on Sunday, was intercepted three times and finished with 143 passing yards. He did it all while his home fans booed him and begged Heinicke to be put in the game, permeating the 24-10 loss, which eliminated playoff commanders thanks to the Packers’ victory over the Vikings, with a dark spirit more appropriate than a 56-0 blowout. There are many levels of sucking a starting quarterback can sink into in any given game, but I don’t know if there’s a worse outcome than being openly mocked by opposing defenders after the game is over.
“If you know football, you know [Wentz] has a slow release, and you know Heinicke gets the ball out fast,” said Browns linebacker Reggie Ragland, who played on the same varsity team as some of the current captains. Like some of the guys I know in the team, they would have preferred Heinicke because they know he gets the ball out. You can see it on film too, though. They play differently with every quarterback.
Here’s Browns defensive end Jadeveon Clowney: “Once we shake it in the pocket, it’s over.”
You might expect some humility from a guy who just set his team’s season on fire by returning the ball to a quarterback, the opposing defense was thrilled to receive a chance to get away with it. take, but Rivera held his head high after the game. “I thought he had his moments”, Rivera said of her handpicked disasterbefore answering any questions about Wentz by bringing up the Commanders’ 21-play, 96-yard touchdown before the end of halftime. Hey, he played well for about 10 minutes. What do you want from me? It’s entirely possible that Rivera’s post-game nonchalance was due to the fact that he had no idea about COs. in danger of being eliminated from the playoffs on Sunday. Oops!
Commanders fans must now wallow in the aftermath of another losing season and wonder what the hell their head coach sees in Carson Wentz. It may not be a question of what Rivera actually saw, but what he imagined. The problem with a quarterback who looks like Wentz is that he will always be drunk for a certain type of NFL coach. A 6-foot-5 slab of a guy who can throw the ball almost the entire length of the pitch is precisely the kind of player some coaches dream of when they imagine what their perfect attacking scheme might look like. When Rivera urged his team to trade for Wentz this offseason, he had to do so with visions of the big quarterback tugging his hips and dropping balls deep down the field dancing in his head, right next to thoughts of game-action passes, deep post routes and tight ends that flow freely along the seams. Rivera’s mistake was not seeing all that was in Wentz, the years of steady decline that transformed him from a siege weapon into a rickety tower just waiting to be toppled. The proof that Wentz isn’t even able to do the one thing he’s still supposed to be good at – passing deep downfield – is there in the interceptions he threw yesterday.
Sometimes coaches make mistakes. This one only cost the commanders their season.
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