Commanders players struggle to make sense of disastrous overtime blunder

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The call came through the headset with the clock ticking down under 30 seconds in overtime.

The Commanders had no timeouts left, the ball on the 26-yard-line and a tie game. Washington just needed a field goal to win.

Offensive coordinator David Blough barked out the call: a pass play. Going for it all.

Players waited for any further directions. Would they discuss spiking the ball to stop the clock? Would they throw the ball away if it wasn’t there, allowing time for a game-winning field goal?

But that was it, tight end Ben Sinnott said.

“We get the play call. We execute the play,” he said. That’s “exactly how it went. Right as I said.”

So nothing on the clock?

“No comment,” he added.

What came next was a disaster.

Quarterback Jayden Daniels snapped the ball with 13 seconds left and dropped back to pass. Seeing everyone covered, he elected to scramble instead of stopping the clock by chucking the ball away. He fell to the ground with seven seconds left and time ran out.

No field goal attempted. No divisional win. As head coach Dan Quinn said, a “scar that has to be permanent.”

When Sinnott digested it, he said, “We execute the play and score a touchdown, nobody is saying anything.”

But they didn’t. And now everyone is saying something about this shocking coaching meltdown.

How could that have been the play call when Washington didn’t have a timeout? Why wasn’t it communicated to Daniels to spike the ball or get out of bounds? Why didn’t they just kick the field goal in the first place instead of going for a touchdown?

Quinn knows these are the type of questions that stain a coaching tenure — especially one as tenuous as his as Washington sits at 1-3-1 and winless in the division. But as he ran through the sequence, he didn’t have any answers. The only one he could come up with: Washington should never have been in that position.

“We were just trying to gain more yards and we don’t need to,” Quinn said, almost thinking out loud. “Like it’s easy enough to say, ‘Hey man, let’s clock it right here. Go get [a field goal].”

Instead, Quinn let his offensive coordinator call a shot. And now his team is left to dig out of another mess.

“You run the play that’s called,” wide receiver Treylon Burks said, trying to understand. “I’m not gonna get into all that. I’m just going to do my job.”

Others were less diplomatic.

“That’s a bad lesson to learn,” wide receiver Terry McLaurin said. “You got to be better at the NFL level. Better isn’t the word. It just can’t happen.”

But “better” is the only word Washington kept coming back to, including Daniels.

Washington’s franchise quarterback refused to say whether he knew if the Commanders had no timeouts left, or if it was communicated to him. “We got to be better,” he deflected.

“We have to stop the clock. We have to know the situation. We have to relay that as an offense,” he said. “It started with everyone, top down. Ultimately, it’s on me.”

But Quinn said that should have been communicated. And it shouldn’t have been an option to do anything but spike the ball or throw it away, certainly not scramble.

“The sequencing of plays does not fall on [Daniels]. It’s an out of bounds throw or a clock,” Quinn said. “That has to come from me. I didn’t even have to put him into that spot.”

More than any of their explanations, though, their reactions to the final seconds said it all. As Daniels tried to get his offense set while the seconds ticked away, Quinn smashed his headset on the ground. His offensive lineman Sam Cosmi kicked the grass in disgust.

It was too late for anything to matter. The Commanders had already made the mistake they could not afford.

And now Quinn is left to live with that — the type of error never goes away.

“10 out of 10 [frustration]. 10 out of 10,” Quinn said. “You don’t get those moments back.”