Let’s call it bittersweet. Daniel Snyder is gone, and so we can love and appreciate the work being done by active war-torn members of the Commanders’ franchise. Ron Rivera and Eric Bieniemy got the most out of this roster and the entirety of this sordid situation and were rewarded with a gentle nudge off the cliff as trade deadline time approached.
Both Chase Young and Montez Sweat are gone, and now Rivera will have to field questions about his potential demise for the rest of the year and about why he wasn’t allowed to keep players who could help him win. Obviously he would prefer not to part with a pair of talented edge rushers he himself drafted. Such is life when a new boss rolls into town.
Here’s the good part, though: As bad as we should feel for Rivera, for Bieniemy, for Sam Howell, for all the players who made the best of a terrible situation, we should be excited for the fans who have loyally suffered alongside this franchise for decades.
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Tuesday’s trade deadline shows that the Commanders are no longer interested in simply fielding a team good enough to accidentally make the playoffs every few years and lose in the first round. Dealing Young and Sweat for mid-round capital shows designs for a rebuild of greater scale and scope than we’ve seen from Washington. All around the NFL, teams have cared enough to rip their rosters down to the studs—some more maniacally than others—in an effort to one day produce something better than average.
With new ownership came that promise. It feels like Washington can dream bigger and may finally do so.
It’s not just about the picks. Young’s return was a third-round pick from the 49ers, and Sweat generated a second-round pick from the Bears. As the draft currently stands right now, Washington will have seven picks in the top 150. It’s about flexibility.
Dealing Sweat and Young shows a willingness to be financially unburdened. It also forecasts an intention to be intellectually unburdened. This personnel setup in Washington found and developed some good players, but if Sweat and Young, both first-round picks, were so unquestionably good, then they would have been locked up long-term already or they would have commanded higher draft capital. If the thought processes that led to putting this defense together and coordinating this defense and calling plays for this defense was so good, then Washington would have had more than two O.K.-to-pretty-good seasons on that side of the ball over the past four years.
And so, it’s time to move on.
Again, this is not an insult to Rivera, to Jack Del Rio, to Marty Hurney, to Martin Mayhew. All of them inherited an unfathomable mess. All of them won a lot of games they shouldn’t have won. All of them answered for the difficulties they didn’t create while Snyder floated around the Mediterranean.
So we can tip a cap while also, for the first time, looking longingly into the future. Washington has a different kind of hands-on ownership now. That much had to be evident Tuesday.
Moving forward, the goal for new Commanders ownership should be to make the current product look as unfamiliar as possible. To act differently. To lead differently. Hopefully, they will cull some lessons on grace from Rivera, but it’s not hard to understand why this version of the roster cannot be the starting point, the foundation. It’s both incredible that the Commanders nearly beat the Eagles twice this year given what we know of their past and not good enough given what we believe is possible for the future.
In that way, the Young and Sweat trades are as symbolic as they are calculated.
