Blog

Full Volume: 24-20, Weird Al, and Five Hamstrings

Thu, Oct 8

On Sunday I promised you a new number for the Giants, and I promised you'd hear it at full volume. So here it is, with the caps lock on: COMMANDERS 24, GIANTS 20. We keep it close, per usual, and then we pull away. Write it down. I already did.

The week starts tonight. Weird Al is at John Paul Jones Arena, and I'm going to be honest with you, because that's the deal around here: it's kind of an obligation. Nicole has to work it, and I'd rather not do a late night with Syracuse on Saturday and the Giants on Sunday. My entire Weird Al catalog is "Amish Paradise" and "Fat." That's the whole set list I'm bringing. If he plays both, I'm leaving happy. If he plays neither, I'm still clapping, because I was raised right.

Saturday, Syracuse comes to Scott Stadium for a 7:30 kickoff. Are we going? We're going. Duh. Then Sunday the forecast says pouring rain again, possibly the leftovers of a hurricane, so the plan is either Buffalo Wild Wings or, more likely after a late one, a lazy day on the couch with the volume up.

The Injury Report

Now. I need to talk about the injury report, because I've been holding this in since Wednesday. Jason dropped it in our group chat with the caption "That's nearly half the team lol." The next morning, after a full night's sleep and a chance to process it like an adult, my official response was "jeezus tapdancing christ."

Twenty-three players were on Wednesday's report. That's not counting the five guys already on injured reserve: Laremy Tunsil, Leo Chenal, Jaylin Lane, Jer'Zhan Newton and Jordan Magee. Six of the 23 didn't practice at all, eleven were limited, and six were a full go, which is the football version of "fine, thanks for asking." I'm going through all of them, because if I had to read it, so do you.

Five hamstrings. Terry McLaurin, Stefon Diggs, Chig Okonkwo, Percy Butler and Tyler Owens. That's our top two receivers, a tight end and two safeties, all grabbing the backs of their legs at the same time like a very sad dance troupe.

Four groins. Charles Omenihu, who also has an ankle, as a treat. Jacory Croskey-Merritt. Frankie Luvu. And Sonny Styles, who was just named NFC Defensive Player of the Week. He's a rookie. Leave him alone.

Then the specialists. Ben Sinnott has a new rib injury. Rachaad White has a shoulder. Nick Allegretti has a hip. Marcus Mariota, the salt-and-pepper fox himself, has the MCL, although Dan Quinn says he's not going on IR and should be back sooner than later. And Sam Cosmi is in the concussion protocol and is also listed with a throat injury. A throat. I've been watching this team for more than thirty years and I did not know the throat was in play.

Even the full-go guys aren't spotless: Javon Kinlaw's shoulder, Treylon Burks's shoulder, Jeremy Reaves's knee and elbow, Fabian Moreau's knee. Nick Cross is back practicing in full after a hospital stay in Dallas, and Nick, I mean this: welcome back.

The good news, and there is some: Trey Amos and Jeremy McNichols are practicing again on their way back from injured reserve, and Deatrich Wise Jr. is working back from a torn quad. The cavalry is coming. It's just coming on crutches.

Honestly, at this point I just want to see us field fifty percent of a football team. It's gone past unlucky and all the way to stupid. Jason said last week we should have just become the Owls, and I'm coming around on it, because as far as I know an owl has never pulled a hamstring.

Meanwhile, the group chat drifted into grills this week, and I did some math. I still have the Weber Q from my first apartment. It comes to every UVA home game tailgate, and it has grilled through a lot of Washington football. It is 23 years old. I have replaced nothing. It fires up the first time, every time. Twenty-three years, zero names on its injury report. Twenty-three names on ours. Somebody get Dan Quinn a Weber.

Jayden's Back

The best news of the week: Jayden Daniels practiced in full, and he's a go for Sunday with a brace on that left elbow. Somebody on r/Commanders wrote him a letter this week that I think about roughly once an hour: "If you throw a pick, don't try to tackle the dude. Sincerely, Your elbow." Jayden, buddy. Listen to your elbow.

The Giants

The Giants come in at 3-1 and sitting on top of the NFC East, which is a sentence I'm choosing not to think about for very long. Their quarterback is Jameis Winston, at least until they decide it's J.J. McCarthy, and Jameis is a Florida State man, which these days is just a nice footnote. We're favored by three and a half, which is a lot of faith in a team that spent the week in the trainer's room.

And the ref, for the record, is Clete Blakeman. According to the brand-new ref card on this site, he's about the most average referee in America: 13.1 flags a game for his crews, against a league average of 13.2. After London, I'll take average. I'll take average and send a thank-you note.

Jason, who called London right, also called this one for us. Two for two, buddy. Don't let me down.

Full Volume

So here's the call one more time, loud: COMMANDERS 24, GIANTS 20. Close for three quarters, then Jayden does something in that brace that gets a soaked stadium on its feet, and we pull away. Got your own number? There's a "Call your shot" box on the homepage now. Put it in, and on Monday we'll see how the crowd did against me.

One More Thing

A little housekeeping. The Burgundy Wire has stickers. Five of them are on a truck headed to my house right now, due Saturday, and if they look half as good in person as they do on my screen, you'll be able to get one soon. A few bucks each, just enough to keep the lights on around here.

Hail.

Blog

Just Quieter: The Commanders Lose in London, and It Felt Like a Win

Sun, Oct 4

On Friday I wrote it down: Commanders 20, Colts 17. I also promised that if I was wrong, you'd hear about it Monday, just quieter. It's still Sunday. I couldn't wait. So here it is, at a respectable indoor volume: Colts 30, Commanders 13. And here's a sentence I never expected to type about a 17-point loss on another continent before lunch: it kind of felt like a win.

The morning went exactly as planned, which almost never happens in this house. It rained. Friends came over. The "something fatty involving eggs, sausage, and biscuits" turned out to be a casserole, a fantastic one, with sausage and enough cheese to concern Wilford Brimley. And for the first stretch of the game, the Commanders were winning in London, 6-0. I'd like that entered into the record next to the last one.

Next Man Up, and Then the Next One

Then Marcus Mariota went down on a sack on the second drive and didn't come back. Dan Quinn said afterward it looks like an MCL. The room didn't panic, which tells you how far this fanbase has come. It was next man up, said out loud, by several people, with casserole in their mouths. Mariota has been that guy all season. That salt-and-pepper fox has done everything this team has asked of him since Dallas, and I hope this is the short version of that injury.

In came Athan Kaliakmanis, the third-string rookie, whose last name I have now typed four different ways. For the rest of this post he's Athan, because I refuse to fight the keyboard again. He went 15 for 33 with a pick, which is a rookie line. But in the third quarter he hung one up for Treylon Burks for 47 yards and a touchdown, and it was 17-13, and an entire living room full of cheese-filled adults was on its feet before noon. Athan did everything he could. That kid has a lovely backup job waiting for him somewhere in this league, and I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give a quarterback.

About the Flags

I don't usually go here. I'm going here. Washington was flagged 10 times for 84 yards. Indianapolis was flagged once, for five. Ten to one is a cocktail recipe, not a football game. Two first-quarter trips inside the 20 that ended in field goals did plenty of damage on their own, and I'll own those. But a game doesn't come out ten to one by accident. When the penalty sheet looks like a typo, a fanbase gets one paragraph. This was mine.

I know I said one paragraph. Ten to one. That doesn't happen like that. Okay. Done.

Although. It's possible I've been blaming the wrong people. Shout out to my dad and my brother Josh: last Sunday the three of us were in the building together, and Washington beat the reigning Super Bowl champs. This week we watched apart, and look what happened. I'm not saying it's our fault. I'm saying the three of us together are undefeated this season, and I'm not saying it isn't.

Why It Felt Like a Win

Because a rookie nobody had heard of made it a game with the backup's backup. Because Jayden is closer to coming back than he was a week ago. And because the early kickoff delivered exactly what I promised it would. Somewhere around the second half, somebody broke out a card-based drinking game called the Longest Yard, and by the final whistle everyone in the house was feeling a little bit special. The game ended around one, our friends saw themselves out, and the nap that followed was the best thing anyone in a burgundy jersey accomplished all day. Good times were had by all.

The Group Chat

Shout out to Jason and Chris, the other two-thirds of my Commanders group chat, who suffered through every snap of this one with me. The night before, Jason said he was pretty sure we'd lose, and also pretty confident we'd beat the Giants next week, and called the whole thing "mental jujitsu." Chris picked us to win because "it'll be a home game." Three minutes after kickoff, Chris filed an amendment: he'd forgotten about Daniel "Mike Vick when he plays the Redskins" Jones. Jason, this one's yours. Enjoy it. You also put the Giants in writing, so I'll see you next Sunday.

But the best thing anybody said all weekend happened the night before, when Chris found a YouTube video asking why no culture on earth eats owls. His summary: they're apex predators, and by the time you work your way up the food chain, there just isn't much owl. That turned into a full debate about the best bird. Jason disqualified eagles because "the football team makes me hate them," then told a true story about a bird that caught a fish out of his backyard pond, got jumped by an eagle, and dropped the fish right back in the water, "so everyone won." Chris, speaking for the fish: "Honey, you would not believe my day." Nicole and I woke up around four in the morning, read the whole thing in bed, and it absolutely cracked us up. By breakfast, Jason was suggesting we should've just become the Owls. Washington Owls. I'd buy the hat.

During the game, Chris also pointed out that the Colts' head coach looks like Andrew Luck in a Scooby-Doo costume, and I'm sorry, but now you can't unsee it either. And by the end, all three of us landed in the same place: the kid wasn't the reason we lost.

The Rest of the Weekend

We have a lot of friends with a lot of different allegiances, and this was a rough week to have any of them. Florida went to Missouri and lost 45-17. Virginia went to Tallahassee and lost 38-7, with Florida State sacking us 10 times and its quarterback running for five touchdowns. On Friday I said I don't have feelings about Florida State anymore. Florida State, it turns out, has feelings about us.

The bright spots, such as they are: Jason's Buckeyes went to Iowa and won 31-14, so of course the one guy having a nice weekend is the one guy who'll remind us about it. And our Browns friends, Sarah and Daniel and the LAW, are 3-1 and sitting on top of the AFC North, and they've earned every minute of it. As I type this, the Raiders and Chiefs are playing, and at this point somebody in our orbit deserves a win today.

And Then, Next Week

Three things in four days: Weird Al on Thursday, Syracuse under the lights on Saturday, the Giants and their brand-new J.J. McCarthy at home on Sunday. We're 1-3, the quarterback room is held together with tape and casserole, and I'm weirdly optimistic. Twenty to seventeen was wrong. I'll have a new number for the Giants, and you'll hear it at full volume. Hail.

Blog

London Calling: The Commanders, a Biscuit, and a Mandatory Nap

Fri, Oct 2

This week I typed "tickmaster" into a web browser. On purpose. I was trying to get to Ticketmaster to find the parking pass for the Weird Al show, and I want to be clear that I did it with my whole chest and full confidence, and only afterward did it occur to me that tickmaster is probably not a great website. Nicole had already texted me the ticket. I could not find the parking pass. After a few rounds of this she canceled the transfer and put it in her own wallet, with a sentence that should be engraved somewhere in our house: "fine...ill just do everything." Regular readers know the arrangement. She does everything. I help out.

It got worse. Same week, I asked Claude to find a copycat Taco Bell meat recipe, the kind where you boil the ground beef and mash it with a potato masher until it reaches drive-thru texture, and I pasted the answer straight to my wife without reading it, typo and all. I don't even copy and paste anymore. Well, I do, but that's the only thing I do. I am a meatbag now. I provide nothing of value.

So it means something when I tell you that, for one week only, somebody in a position of power looked at my household and did us a favor.

Somebody Up There Likes Us

Monday, Nicole got the news that next week's UVA game against Syracuse is a 7:30 kickoff. If you've read this site before, you know she runs the President's Box, which means a night game isn't really a game. It's a shift that ends whenever the parking lots empty out. Her review of the situation, in full: "they hate me."

Two minutes later I texted her the one cool thing. The Commanders play at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday. London. Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. For one week, the National Football League has our family's best interests at heart, and I would like that entered into the record.

Saturday, the Footnote

First, UVA plays at Florida State. You may remember that I loved FSU as a kid for reasons that had everything to do with a logo and nothing to do with Florida. I've made my peace with that. I don't have feelings about Florida State anymore. It's a lovely little footnote in my life, the kind you'd skip if you were reading quickly.

I'll be watching at home, or possibly at BWW, because the London game may have bumped the bar crew's weekly summit up to Saturday. Nobody has confirmed this. Everyone is acting like it's confirmed.

Sunday, the Brunch

It's supposed to rain, which is perfect, because we were never going anywhere. A few close friends are coming over for brunch, and the menu will be something fatty involving eggs, sausage, and biscuits. I'm keeping the details vague because the details are going to be "more."

Whether a PBR is appropriate at 9:30 in the morning is a question for people whose team has won something recently.

The game should be over around one. At that point I'll be taking a nap, immediately, and our friends can see themselves out. I love these people. I will love them even more from the couch, alone, with my eyes closed.

The Actual Football

The Colts are solid. In August I called this game a 51% win, "the kind of win that needs a coin flip to feel good about itself," and I'm not going to pretend I know much more now. But their defense has been underperforming, and if we take care of the ball and shut down the run like we've been doing, we're in it. They have Daniel Jones, and Danny Dimes has been a pain in our collective backside since his Giants days. He's just doing it in a different color now.

Write it down: Commanders 20, Colts 17. Another close one. If I'm right, you'll hear about it Monday. If I'm wrong, you'll also hear about it Monday, just quieter.

Marcus Mariota keeps doing the job, and I don't think enough people appreciate how hard it is to walk into a starting role in September and beat the defending champs. Meanwhile Jayden is practicing, traveling with the team, and reportedly told his teammates he won't have surgery because he owes it to them to get back on the field. Jayden is a good dude, and that is exactly what a good dude says, which is the part that worries me a little. I'm no doctor. It's his non-throwing arm, and I honestly don't know what it means to come back on an elbow that's gone out twice. I'd just rather have him in November than for one extra series in October.

Leo Chenal had surgery on his neck this week. He has feeling in all his extremities, and they expect a full recovery. His season is over. The rest of him isn't, and that's what matters.

And Then, Next Week

"Two things in two days" is back, except now it's three things in four days, which is either growth or a cry for help. Weird Al on Thursday, assuming Nicole lets me hold my own ticket. Syracuse under the lights on Saturday. The Giants on Sunday.

About the Giants. Jaxson Dart is out for the year after knee surgery, and since I spent August making fun of his face on this very website, let the record show that I wanted him healthy so I could keep doing it. Get well, young man. In the meantime the Giants traded a fifth-round pick for J.J. McCarthy, which means they bought a quarterback specifically to play us. That's either a desperate franchise or a dangerous one. With the Giants it has always been both.

Nicole's schedule hates her. My browser hates me. But for one rainy Sunday in October, the NFL looked at a man in Charlottesville and decided he deserved biscuits and a nap. Twenty to seventeen. Hail.

Blog

4:38 A.M., Sonny Jurgensen, and Pure Mojo

Sun, Sep 27

It is 4:38 in the morning. I am awake on purpose. Not because anything is wrong, not because of a baby or a flight or a crisis, but because this is the hour you get up when you're about to do it all over again. There's a particular quality to being conscious at 4:38. The house has opinions about the noises you make. The coffee maker sounds like a construction project. And somewhere out there in the dark is a run I have agreed to go on, with myself, apparently voluntarily.

Last night I was back in the box. Nicole's job at UVA puts us in the President's Box at Scott Stadium, and I want to be precise about the division of labor here: she works incredibly hard, at a job that is genuinely demanding, and I help out. That's the arrangement. She earns the catered seats and the roof and the view, and I arrive with her and eat things. I am aware of how this looks. I have made peace with it.

Virginia took Delaware to the woodshed, 42 to 3. Now, let's not get carried away, Delaware is Delaware. But in fairness to the Blue Hens they came in 3-0 against the spread this season, which is more than most teams can say about anything, so beating them by 39 counts as a genuinely massive Saturday. I'll take it. In a September like this one you take what's offered.

But here's the actual reason last night mattered, and it wasn't the football. Sarah and Daniel were there, and so was the LAW. That's what we call their son, because it cracks us up every single time, and there is no better reason to call someone anything. It was his first tailgate. He was, and I say this with the full weight of my judgment, an absolute delight. We ate, we drank, we stood around, and the whole thing had that quality where you pick up mid-sentence from a conversation you started months ago and it doesn't feel like any time passed at all.

And since this is my website and I make the rules, a proper shout-out to the crew: that's Sarah on the left holding the man of the hour, then Nicole, my love, second from the left, then Sarah #2 (yes, we have two, no, we are not renaming either of them), then Ann Marie, then Gracelyn. A genuinely excellent group of people to stand in a parking lot with.

Which brings me to the part that nags. It had been months. It shouldn't have been. Nobody schedules the drift, it just happens, a week at a time, until you look up and it's been way too long and somebody's kid has learned to sit up on his own. Sarah, Daniel, the LAW: we are not doing that again. I'm putting it in writing on the internet so it's binding.

And now, bleary-eyed and about to head out into the dark, we come to the Commanders.

We are 0-2 and staring straight down the barrel of 0-3 against the reigning Super Bowl champions. If you put "Commanders start 0-3" on your bingo card back in August, congratulations, go ahead and call it. I genuinely thought we'd have snuck one by now. I said as much before Dallas and I was wrong in a way that got worse as the afternoon went on. Instead the injuries have stacked up like cordwood. Five guys are out today: Jayden, Sam Cosmi, Chig Okonkwo, Frankie Luvu, Nick Cross. Jayden dislocated that left elbow again, the second time now for the same joint, and watching it happen was its own particular kind of sick feeling.

Two things I'm holding onto, though. The first is that they did not put him on injured reserve, and it's his non-throwing arm, which means the door is open rather than closed. The second is smaller and I like it more: the five guys who were voted captains before the season got together and decided Marcus Mariota should be a captain too. Not just while he's starting. When Jayden comes back and Mariota goes back to being the backup, they want him to keep it. That is a locker room deciding something about itself, and a team that does that in the middle of an 0-2 September has not quit on anything.

So here's what today actually is. My dad, my brother and I are making our yearly pilgrimage to Northwest Stadium. Same as the friends thing, we do not do this nearly as often as we should, and I have exactly zero interest in examining why. What I know is that we'll be in that building together, and that by pure mojo, by force of will, by whatever it is three related men can generate in a stadium on a Sunday afternoon, we are going to take this game. I have decided. The reigning champs can file a complaint.

Oh, and Jon Bernthal is supposed to be there. Jon Bernthal. The goddamn Punisher. A DC guy, a real one, not a celebrity who got handed a jersey at a photo op but an actual lifelong sufferer of this football team like the rest of us. I don't know what he's doing there or in what capacity and I truly do not care. All I know is that if we're going to summon enough collective force of will to beat the reigning Super Bowl champions while starting our backup quarterback, I would like Frank Castle in the building for it. That is the correct energy. That is a man who understands a revenge arc, and friends, we are 0-2.

And then I found out what else is happening today, and it stopped me. They're honoring Sonny Jurgensen and Monte Coleman at the home opener. Sonny Jurgensen. Number 9. My dad is the reason I care about this team at all, the whole thing traces back to him, and today of all days I get to stand next to him while that building says thank you to a man he actually watched play. I don't have a joke for that one. I'm just glad we picked this week.

Nicole will still be asleep when we roll into DC, and she has earned every minute of it. The sun isn't up. I'm going for a run. It's the home opener, we're 0-2, our quarterback is hurt, we're getting the champs, and I have never been more sure of anything in my life. Hail.

Blog

Friends in Low Places, Enemies in Dallas

Sun, Sep 20

Let me set the scene. Four adults board an 11am Amtrak to Washington with the stated intention of seeing Garth Brooks, and a second, unstated intention that reveals itself somewhere around Manassas. Me, Nicole, and our good friends Sam and Jason. I will not be describing the contents of the bags we carried aboard. I will note only that we did not trouble the café car a single time, and that an 11am departure gives four adults a genuinely generous runway in which to prepare themselves for an evening of country music.

The show absolutely ripped. I don't care how you feel about country music, that man is 60-something years old and he worked harder for three hours than I have worked for anything in my entire life. He was sprinting. He was sweating. He knew every word, which you'd hope, but so did twenty thousand other people, and there's a specific kind of joy in a room that size all screaming the same chorus at a guy who has clearly decided he's going to die on that stage before he gives you a half-effort show.

And then reality arrived, as it does now that we are all this age. We got home around 11pm and it felt like 4am. There was a time in my life when 11pm was the beginning of the evening. That time has passed and it is not coming back. I'd like to file a formal complaint with whoever is in charge.

Casualty report: Sam did not quite make it. She gave everything she had to that concert and then gave a little extra to a hotel room, which is the honorable place to do it. A real trooper, start to finish. Somebody has to go over the top first and she took that hill for the rest of us.

Now, the 7:30am train back to Charlottesville. I want to be clear that there was no single point of failure here. Four grown adults, four phones, four clocks, one departure time, and somehow a unanimous collective misreading of it. That one belongs to all of us in equal measure and I will not be taking questions. What followed was me, on roughly four hours of sleep, sprinting through Union Station. Not jogging. Sprinting. I covered something close to half a mile going the wrong way, then the right way, then the wrong way again, in what I can only describe as a full-body apology to my own cardiovascular system.

Which brings me to Greg. Greg works for Amtrak and Greg held the entire train. The whole train. For us. He watched a clearly unwell man in a Commanders hat come barreling around a corner at a dead run and he made a judgment call, and that judgment call was mercy. Greg, if you ever read this, I am writing your supervisor a letter so complimentary it will be entered into your permanent file. You are the best of us.

And to everyone else on the 7:30 from Washington to Charlottesville this morning: that delay was us. That was our fault. I saw some of you look up from your coffee. I felt your eyes. You were owed a smooth morning and instead you got four hungover adults and a small track and field event. We are genuinely sorry.

And while I'm apologizing to strangers, let me get one more in, because I owe it. Ethan wrote to me on the 15th with a completely fair criticism: the beat reporter posts on this site don't refresh in real time, and when you're watching a game you want to know what JP Finlay or John Keim are saying right now, not what they said at some point earlier in the day. He's right. This whole site is a pile of static pages that rebuild on a schedule, which is the thing that keeps it free and ad-free, but it also means the ticker can be hours stale at the exact moment you most want it live. Ethan, I'm sorry it took me five days to find your message, and I'm sorrier that you were correct. He signed off with "Great job on the site!", which somehow makes the five days worse. I'm working on it.

So that's the state of the household heading into Week 2, and honestly it's the correct energy, because the Commanders are also arriving somewhere important in questionable condition. Both we and Dallas are 0-1, and since 2015 only 14.7 percent of teams that started 0-2 made the playoffs, 14 out of 95. There is already a Dan Quinn hot seat meter in circulation, in September, which is rude. JP Finlay said it best this week: "In the NFL, nobody cares. Go win the game." Correct. Go get one.

Here's my actual optimism. We lost 24-22 in Philadelphia as 5.5-point underdogs, and the defense held the best team in our division to 24 points and 318 total yards on the road in the first live game for two new coordinators. Antonio Williams caught four balls for 64 yards with a fourth-quarter touchdown on ten routes run, which is a preposterous rate of return, and they gave him rookie of the week and a Pepsi belt for it. Terry McLaurin is off to another slow start, and the fanbase has filed its formal request in the form of a subreddit post titled "Maybe this week we will GET TERRY THE BALL." Seconded, with feeling.

Sunday gets harder, though. Frankie Luvu is out with a groin injury and Chig Okonkwo is out with a hamstring, so we lose our defensive signal-caller and a tight end in the same week. Sonny Styles, a rookie, wears the green dot in AT&T Stadium. Leo Chenal steps into the starting lineup, John Bates moves up to TE1, and Javon Kinlaw is questionable with a back issue. Daron Payne is the game-day captain, which feels right.

Then there's the secondary, which the fanbase has been processing in public all week. Mike Sainristil had a hard Week 1 on the boundary and r/Commanders convened what I'd generously call a town hall. (Fair warning, I'm about to quote strangers. None of these are my words. The good people of the internet have already censored themselves, which somehow makes it funnier, and complaints can be forwarded directly to them.) The prosecution's case was two words: "He fkn stinks." The defense was longer and, I think, correct: "we don't have any other options, fam... No, we can't just bench him." Washington signed Isaac Yiadom off the practice squad and waived Ricky Barber to make room, and with Trey Amos out until Week 5, that's the group. It's Mike. Let's go win with Mike.

The backfield has its own open file, with Jacory Croskey-Merritt getting publicly put on notice about ball security after a late fumble and Kaytron Allen standing conveniently nearby. The most devastating scouting report I read all week was a fan describing Rachaad White's pass protection as "like a folding chair." Dallas, for their part, is not well either. They gave up more points than anyone in the league in Week 1, hired a new coordinator, started five new guys, and somehow the tape looked exactly like last year. The Giants beat them 28-20 and it wasn't that close. The part I can't spin: Dak is 13-2 against us and the all-time series is 81-49-2. That's not a stat, that's a family curse.

Rookie edge Joshua Josephs said out loud this week that this is going to be a dominant defense and we saw a glimpse in Week 1. The sub's reply was the only acceptable one: "Well, walk the talk. How about shutting down Dallas this Sunday?" So here we are. Burgundy jerseys, white pants, a rookie calling the defense in Jerry's building, four people in Charlottesville running on fumes and Greg's goodwill, and a football team that owes us one. It's pregame. Let's get it. Hail.

A direct appeal to Sweden and Australia. You two show up in my analytics every single week and I have so many questions. Hej Sverige! Hur i hela friden blev ni Commanders-fans? Skriv till mig, jag måste veta. Jag bjuder på en öl. I am reliably informed that every Swede speaks better English than I do, so feel free to ignore all of that and just tell me the story. And Australia: a Sunday afternoon game in Dallas lands on Monday morning for you, which makes you the only people on earth getting a literal case of the Mondays out of this team. Good on ya. I need to know what possessed you. Both of you, please write in to Wire Taps and I will run the best answers, unedited, with full honors.

Blog

Wire Taps Is Open, and My Weekend Is a Logistical Crime Scene

Thu, Sep 17

Let me tell you what the next 48 hours look like in the Burgundy Wire household, because I want you to understand the state of mind in which I am asking you for a favor. The favor is at the top of this post instead of buried at the bottom, because I would rather you actually see it than scroll past it.

Saturday, early, I get on a train in Charlottesville and go to Washington to see Garth Brooks. Saturday night, that happens, and I make a series of decisions whose consequences are Sunday's problem. Sunday, early, painfully early, I get on another train back to Charlottesville, running on fumes and pure enthusiasm. Sunday at 4:25, Commanders at Dallas, which is the load-bearing event of the entire weekend and the only reason the train home is early instead of sensible. Sunday night, immediately after, Mumford and Sons here in Charlottesville.

Garth Brooks on Saturday and Mumford and Sons on Sunday is a genuinely deranged 24 hours of music. One night I am in an arena screaming about thunder rolling, the next I am watching men in waistcoats assault a banjo. Two trains, two concerts, one division game, and roughly one night of sleep to cover all of it. I am going to do every bit of it and I am going to feel it on Monday.

A sincere apology to Högwaller Brewing: I am not making it in this weekend, and I am not making it next weekend either. The excuse for next weekend is a good one, though. I will be at Northwest Stadium, in person, for the Seahawks game. So it is not you, it is the calendar, and I will make it up in wings.

I will also be sending UVA good vibes from somewhere in DC as they play West Virginia down in Charlotte. Splitting my attention across this many teams in this many states is not a skill, it is a condition.

And unprompted: I am still watching the Tyler Owens special teams clip. Repeatedly. Voluntarily. Our safety stiff-armed two separate blockers out of his way on the way down the field and then erased the returner from the face of the earth. A message has been delivered to the descendants of all three. A punt coverage snap has no business being the best thing about a Week 1 loss, and yet here we are.

Now the actual football

I was pleased, in the way you are pleased when the weather cooperates, to watch the Giants beat the Cowboys 28-20. That is a given. Dallas losing is the baseline setting of a good week and I refuse to be sophisticated about it.

That result also tells me something useful. The Cowboys defense is marginally better than it was last year, which is a real sentence and not a compliment, and they still gave up 28 points at home. I think we can put up points on them. Their offense genuinely still scares me and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but this is a winnable road game.

The problem is not Dallas. The problem is us, specifically the self-inflicted part. Last week we lost by two, and we gave away more than two.

Diggs caught the touchdown that made it a game and then took an unsportsmanlike penalty for using the goalpost as a prop on the celebration. That penalty wiped out the two-point attempt. Jayden said afterward they probably would have gone for two right there. We lost by two.

Sainristil got beaten on the Wicks touchdown, and Dan Quinn said flatly that it is something he has to get corrected. John Keim had it as a miscommunication with Nick Cross. Either way, points we handed over.

Stevens went 1 for 2 on field goals, and the one he made was from 55 yards. Here I owe him a correction, because I had him down for the blocked extra point too and that one was not his. The snap from Tyler Ott came in high and inside, which both Nicki Jhabvala and Keim flagged in real time. So our kicker owes us one field goal, not the entire special teams catastrophe.

Cut that stuff out and we win this one. That is not optimism, that is arithmetic.

Wire Taps is open

I built a mailbag. It is called Wire Taps, it has been sitting quietly at the bottom of this website, and it currently contains zero questions, which is a lonely condition for a mailbag to be in.

Ask me anything. Commanders or otherwise. The offensive line, the Owens clip, whether Jayden takes another step this year, what to order at Högwaller, how to survive Garth Brooks and Mumford and Sons on either side of a road game, or how one person ends up rooting for this many football teams at once. There is a name field if you want the credit, and you can leave it blank, because anonymous is completely fine.

I will answer them in a post. If nobody sends anything, I will answer questions I invented myself, and we will both have to live with that.

Two trains, two concerts, one road game. See you on the other side.

Hail.

Direct link, no scrolling required: theburgundywire.com/wiretaps.

Blog

Pickle Backs at Högwaller

Sun, Sep 13

I did not go to a bar today to watch a football game. I went to meet a guy.

You may remember from the last post that Evan, who owns Högwaller Brewing over on East High Street, turns out to be a reader of this website, which we found out a few comments deep in a Reddit thread like two people bumping into each other in a grocery store three states from home. We had never met. Kickoff in Philadelphia was 4:25. The plan was simple: go be in a room with a stranger who likes the same broken football team.

We had been there maybe ninety seconds before Nicole, who does not wait around for social momentum to build on its own, walked up and bought the table pickle backs. Whiskey, then brine, before anybody had even confirmed which seats were ours. My wife has never once needed an icebreaker explained to her. She just is one.

And Evan is a great dude. That is the whole review, and you can stop reading here if that is all you came for. Within about ten minutes it stopped feeling like being a customer at a bar and started feeling like standing in somebody's kitchen during a party, the kind where the host keeps drifting past and topping things off until you lose track of what you owe anyone. If we had been at my house we would have done shots. We were not at my house, so we did shots there instead. Same energy, better beer.

Let me describe the place, because it deserves it. The beer garden out back sits under a metal roof strung with lights, the Oktoberfest bunting is still up in blue and white diamonds, the projector was going, and out front in the parking lot stands Scary Terry, the wacky waving inflatable arm tube man, flailing away at East High Street for the benefit of anyone driving past who needed to know what kind of establishment this is. I have never felt more understood by a piece of lawn equipment.

And then the Commanders went out and played the best two point loss I have watched in years.

I need you to understand how completely this game defied the entire week of panic. That offensive line, the one with Laremy Tunsil on injured reserve and D.J. Humphries released four days before kickoff and Brandon Coleman sliding over to left tackle, gave up one sack. One. Against that Philadelphia front, in that building. Our own defense got three, from Sonny Styles, Frankie Luvu, and Odafe Oweh, who I spent the entire last post insisting was going to matter.

The rest of it reads like a win. Twenty first downs to their ten. Thirty three minutes of possession to their twenty six. Zero turnovers, from a team that spent all summer getting lectured about ball security. Jayden Daniels went 18 of 34 for 164 with two touchdowns and no interceptions. Stefon Diggs caught four for 55 and scored in his Commanders debut, which is precisely what a man who called himself the engine is supposed to do. Antonio Williams led the team in receiving and caught the touchdown that made it a game with a minute left. Bill Croskey-Merritt punched one in from a yard out.

And we lost by two, because of course we did. Down 16 to 17 with ten minutes left, the whole beer garden leaning forward at the same angle, and then Jalen Hurts found Dallas Goedert for 43 yards and the air went out of the room all at once. Williams scored again with 1:01 on the clock, the two point try failed, and that was the season opener. Also, and I would like this carved somewhere permanent: the extra point after Croskey-Merritt's touchdown was blocked. In a two point loss. Drew Stevens hit a 55 yarder earlier in the day and I am choosing to remember him for that one instead.

Here is the thing, though. I have lost by two points on my own couch before. There is a specific kind of quiet that follows. Losing by two in a beer garden full of people who all groaned on the exact same beat, standing next to a guy I had known for three hours and a wife who bought the first round before anyone asked, is not the same experience. It is barely the same sport. I got home a couple of hours ago and I still am not telling this as a loss.

So: Högwaller Brewing, 1518 East High Street, open 11am to 10pm every day. House brewed beer, grass fed smash burgers, and a hot dog named after the place. Tomorrow is Monday, which means they run something called the Riff Raff, Mondays only, all day, twenty dollars for a shot, a house beer, a burger and fries. I am told that is what the locals do. I intend to become extremely regular about it.

Thank you, Evan. We will be back next Sunday, and the Sunday after that.

Hail.

Sunday on East High Street

Charlottesville, late afternoon, roughly two hours before a blocked extra point became the defining event of my week.

Blog

Three Thousand

Sun, Sep 13

Sometime yesterday, while I was refreshing an injury report for the fourth time, this site quietly rolled past three thousand pageviews. I launched it on August 19th. That is twenty five days. By internet standards this is not a number. Nobody is writing a case study about three thousand of anything. I have been looking at it like a hospital photo.

Let me be honest about what that number is, because I built the analytics myself and I know exactly how the sausage gets made. Three thousand pageviews is not three thousand people. Some of it is Nicole, loyally clicking whatever I ask her to look at. Some of it is my dad, checking whether I fixed the thing he mentioned on the phone. Plenty of it is somebody who landed here once, went huh, and left forever, which is completely fair. But more than seventeen hundred of those came from somebody who had already been here before. That is the number I actually care about. That is not traffic. That is people coming back.

Twenty two countries now. I wrote about this six days ago and it was twenty one then. Somewhere there is a person in Morocco, and a person in Panama, and a person in Taiwan, who has read something I wrote about the Washington Commanders offensive line. I do not know who you are. I do not know how you found this. You are all invited to Thanksgiving.

Here is the stat I am quietly proudest of: four hundred and sixty six outbound clicks. Four hundred and sixty six times, somebody read a headline here and then went and read the real article at Hogs Haven or Riggo's Rag or The Athletic. That is the entire point of this place. I do not host anybody's writing and I do not rewrite anybody's reporting. I put it all on one page so you do not have to open eleven tabs before coffee. Every one of those clicks went to the people who actually did the work.

Thank you to the Warpath guys, who have been reading my nonsense for twenty years and were the first ones here. Thank you to the folks on r/Commanders, who have been unreasonably kind about a website some stranger built. Thank you to everybody who signed up for Hail Mail knowing full well it might just be me yelling. And thank you to my wife, who has watched me disappear into a laptop for a month to build a free website about a football team and has not once suggested I find a different hobby.

So here is the only way I know how to say it properly. These are the languages of the places you have all shown up from. I am guessing at a few of these, because a country is not a language and I know it, so if I got yours wrong, write in and correct me.

• Thank youUnited States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia
• GraciasSpain, Mexico, Panama
• MerciFrance, and the French speakers in Canada, Switzerland and Morocco
• DankeGermany, Switzerland
• GrazieItalian speaking Switzerland
• BedanktThe Netherlands
• Ευχαριστώ (efharistó)Greece
• TakkNorway
• TackSweden
• Спасибо (spasibo)Russia
• 谢谢 (xièxie)China
• 謝謝 (xièxie)Taiwan
• ありがとうございます (arigatō gozaimasu)Japan
• 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida)South Korea
• ขอบคุณครับ (khop khun khrap)Thailand
• شكرًا (shukran)Morocco, United Arab Emirates

And then there is today, which is not a small day. We open at Lincoln Financial Field this afternoon as six point road underdogs, over under 44.5, moneyline sitting at plus two hundred. Laremy Tunsil is on injured reserve with a torn triceps. D.J. Humphries got released four days before kickoff, having been signed specifically to help with that exact problem. Brandon Coleman is the left tackle now, Andrew Wylie is the swing option if that goes sideways, and Julian Good-Jones got elevated off the practice squad so there would be enough bodies to hold a huddle. Vegas has looked at all of that and made its feelings known.

The good news is real, though. Dan Quinn says all fifty three are medically cleared. Odafe Oweh, K'Lavon Chaisson, Daron Payne and Bill Croskey-Merritt were all limited in practice this week and all four are going. Philadelphia will be without Jonathan Greenard. And Tress Way, thirteen years and three Pro Bowls into this, said he is pretty sure this is his last season, which is the kind of quiet thing that turns an ordinary Week 1 road game into one you want to hold onto.

And that NFC Championship game still stings. Not in a dull, historical, well-that-happened way either. It was January 26th, 2025, at Lincoln Financial Field, which is the exact building we walk into this afternoon. Two seasons have come and gone since. They have won this division in both of them. Time was supposed to help with this. Time has done nothing.

So today, for the first and possibly only time on this website, I am suspending the usual manners: fuck the Eagles.

Here is my favorite part of all of it, though. I am watching this one at Högwaller Brewing here in Charlottesville, because it turns out Evan, who owns the place, already reads this site. We ran into each other a few comments deep in a Reddit thread, both of us realizing partway through that we were talking to somebody we sort of already knew. Small world, and getting smaller. He is turning his beer garden into a Commanders bar, projector and all, with a wacky waving inflatable arm tube man named Scary Terry presiding over the whole thing, and today I get to meet him in person for the first time. A website I built in my spare room turned into somewhere to actually go, with actual people. That was never the plan, and it is somehow the best thing that has come out of any of it. First of many, I hope.

Four twenty five, Philadelphia. The number going around this week is that this defense has not pitched a shutout in thirty four years, which would be the longest drought in the league, and I want it on the record that I looked that up voluntarily. Three thousand of you have shown up here. Let's go take something from them.

Hail.

Blog

Crab Cakes, a Censored Head Coach, and the Week Everyone's Cold Finally Left the Building

Fri, Sep 11

It is 9:04 AM on a Friday as I write this, which means the actual football is still many hours away, but I already dropped Nicole off for what is shaping up to be a genuinely brutal 14 hour day at the President's Box. I don't know how she does it. I really don't. I get to show up for the fun part, eat crab cakes, and pretend I understand the concept of a Cover 2, while she's been grinding since sunrise. Yes, girl. Crab cakes are on the menu tonight, and I fully intend to treat that as breaking news. My plan is simple: cut out of work early enough to beat the Charlottesville traffic before it fully clogs up, then be exactly where I need to be when Norfolk State comes to Scott Stadium. It's not a hard life. I am aware it is not a hard life. I am still going to talk about it every single week.

Speaking of things that have finally, mercifully ended: Nicole and I have been fighting the same lingering cold since basically the start of camp, and as of today, for the first time in what feels like a geological era, we are both 100 percent. If you've been reading this blog since the beginning, you already knew about the cold, because apparently I will find a way to work my own sinuses into a football preview. But we are healthy, the crab cakes are calling, and I am choosing to see this as a good omen heading into Week 1.

Which, buckle up, is nervous energy territory no matter how you slice it. Nick Sirianni is somewhere between "punchable" and "deeply punchable," in the exact same tier as Jaxson Dart's face, and the man is allegedly 5-0 in season openers. Don't fact check me on that, I am reporting a vibe, not a stat sheet, but that record has to break eventually, and I would very much like it to break on a Sunday when the Commanders are standing across from him. I'll save the real breakdown of the Eagles matchup for the actual pregame post, but the short version is: first games are chaos, nobody truly knows anything yet, and I am choosing cautious optimism because the alternative is just dread with extra steps.

On the actual injury and roster front, Daron Payne is questionable with a knee, which is the kind of Week 1 news that makes your stomach drop for exactly four seconds before you remember it's September and everyone in the league is held together with tape right now. He's got company on the limited list, but the real headline belongs to Tress Way, who is reportedly playing what might be his final season. The long-running inside joke in Commanders circles is that Way has quietly been the best player on the roster for years running, and I don't think that's actually a joke anymore, I think it's just accurate. The man is hilarious, beloved in that locker room, and I fully expect to see him in a broadcast booth somewhere in five years being a delight to an entire new audience. Jayden Daniels being named a captain alongside him, Terry McLaurin, Frankie Luvu and Jeremy Reaves feels appropriately symbolic, one era's steady hand passing something to the next.

And then there's Dan Quinn, who is somehow both the most pressure-cooked coach in the building and the calmest man in the building, sometimes in the same sentence. When someone brought up the outside noise about his job security, Quinn's actual response, quoted in full and lightly cleaned up for the blog, was: "What are you going to actually [bleep] do about it?" I don't know if there's a better summary of a man's entire coaching philosophy in nine words. Somebody put that on a shirt. I will personally buy the first one.

Now, the part of this column where I stop guessing about the rest of the league and just tell you what I actually watched, because apparently letting a computer freelance about other teams' games goes about as well as you'd expect: the Seahawks beat the Patriots 13 to 10, which is exactly the kind of tight, unglamorous result I figured going in, nothing shocking there. The actual gut punch of the week was the Rams getting run over by the 49ers, 27 to 7, and it wasn't competitive even at that score. I had the Rams defense pegged as suffocating heading in, and instead Brock Purdy picked them apart with what amounted to a backup squad at receiver, Deebo Samuel being the one guy who actually looked like himself. It's one week, everyone will tell you not to overreact to one week, and yet: that was a genuinely bad outing for a team that was supposed to be a problem for people, not a team having problems.

Back home, Virginia kicks off against Norfolk State tonight, and I've got no idea yet whether it's another laugher I get to enjoy from a catered box or a much more stressful evening than the schedule suggests it should be. I know which one I'm hoping for. Here's to a healthy household, a full plate of crab cakes, and a Sunday in Philadelphia that goes better than Nick Sirianni's career opener stats would suggest it should.

Blog

The Commanders Made Me a Florida State Fan. My Wife Made Me a UVA One.

Fri, Sep 4

Growing up, I did not care about college football. Not even a little. It existed in the background of Saturdays the way lawn care and grocery runs existed, stuff adults did that had nothing to do with me.

Sunday was the day that mattered. Sunday was the only day that mattered. Sunday was when the whole house reorganized itself around one television and one team, and everything else in the week was just the stuff you did while waiting for Sunday to come back around.

With exactly one exception, and the reason for it is so dumb that I have to lead with it: I loved the Florida State Seminoles.

Not because of Bobby Bowden. Not because anyone in my family went there. Not because of geography, since I have never lived in the state of Florida for a single day of my life. I loved Florida State because their logo looked like the Redskins logo. Garnet and gold, burgundy and gold, a profile, a spear, a helmet. My eight year old brain ran the numbers in about a second and a half and concluded these were obviously the same organization, and one of them simply preferred to play on Saturdays.

That is the entire origin story. There is no deeper layer. I have gone looking for one and it is not there. My first college football allegiance was just my Commanders fandom in a slightly different hat, which in hindsight tells you everything you need to know about how my brain is wired. I did not pick a college team. I picked the closest available approximation of the only team I had.

I went to a handful of FSU games as a kid, and here is the part that still gets me. The last game I ever attended as a Florida State fan was at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, Virginia.

My memory of it is that Peter Warrick was on that FSU team and the Barber brothers were still at UVA, which, if you go check a calendar, means my memory has quietly fused two entirely separate games into one composite event. That is what thirty years does to a person, and I have decided not to look it up, because the unreliable version is the one I have been telling for decades and I am not about to let facts get involved now.

What I know for sure is that I was a kid in full garnet and gold, in a stadium full of people who wanted the exact opposite of what I wanted, with no idea whatsoever that I was sitting in a building I would walk into six or seven times a year for the rest of my adult life.

Nobody warns you when you are being foreshadowed at.

And there is one other thing about that day, which will matter more in a minute: that was the last time in my life I have watched a football game at Scott Stadium while exposed to weather.

The part where we moved

Nicole and I came to Charlottesville during COVID, a sentence that sounds perfectly normal now and was completely unhinged at the time.

I said goodbye to people I had worked with for almost twenty years over Zoom. Twenty years. Two decades of inside jokes and shared war stories and knowing exactly who to call when something broke, closed out in a grid of thumbnails with somebody's dog barking in the background. There was no last lunch. There was no walking out to the parking lot one final time. There was a mute button.

Then we packed up, left our hometown, and moved to a city where we knew almost nobody. Nicole kept her old job remotely. I started as an IT manager in a world that had temporarily stopped making sense.

I met my direct supervisor in person maybe a dozen times that entire first stretch, because we were rotating who was physically allowed in the building. Social distancing. That is a phrase I have not said out loud in years, and I did not realize I had been actively avoiding it until I typed it just now.

I will say this for that stretch, though. The Commanders came with us. That is the underrated part of carrying a team around for thirty years. You can move to a city where you know six people and still have somewhere to be on Sunday.

The part where UVA happened to me

Fast forward a few years and a few job interviews, and Nicole now runs the president's suite at Scott Stadium.

Which means I have become a very particular kind of husband. I help out when I can. I haul things. I design lanyards. I have developed genuine opinions about lanyard font weight, which is not a sentence I ever expected to be true about myself. If there is a task and I am available, I am on the task. This is what love looks like at our age and I am completely at peace with it.

Gameday has a choreography now, same as Sundays do. I drop her off. I hang around the tailgate a while. I head inside about an hour before kickoff.

And that tailgate. When we first got here, honestly, it was not good. Was it COVID? Was it complacency? Was it a fanbase that had gotten a little too comfortable expecting nothing? Who knows. Whatever it was, it is gone. That tailgate is hot now. Genuinely hot. Something turned over the last couple of years and you can feel it in the lot before you ever feel it in the stadium.

The tradition is simple and I would not change a thing. We find our closest friends. I make something with a theme, because if I am going to cook I am going to commit to a bit. Last tailgate was tikka masala wings and POG wings, passionfruit orange guava, because apparently I decided the parking lot needed range. Next one is trending southern in my head, maybe smoked beef ribs and collards. I genuinely do not know yet. That is part of the fun.

We eat too much. We drink an amount I would describe as adjacent to reasonable. Then we all walk in together.

And then, because my wife is very good at her job, I go sit somewhere with climate control.

I want to be honest about how funny that is. The last time I sat in the elements at Scott Stadium, I was a kid in Seminoles gear who genuinely believed FSU and the Redskins were the same team. I have not been rained on at a UVA game since. Not once. That kid would not believe a word of this.

What Saturday cannot do

Here is the tell, though. Here is how you know which team actually owns a person.

I watch UVA football in a climate controlled room with catered food and a clean bathroom and reasonable people around me. I watch the Commanders in a bar packed shoulder to shoulder with our people, or at home with a PBR in my hand and no dignity whatsoever, saying things out loud that I would never repeat in mixed company.

Nobody put me in that second situation. I sought it out. I built a Sunday around it and I have been protecting that Sunday for thirty years.

That is the difference. UVA is fun that keeps getting more fun. The Commanders are a thirty year open wound that occasionally does something so good it makes the whole thing worth it. On Saturday I get to just enjoy a football game. On Sunday I am doing emotional math from the opening kickoff, running the odds on every drive, already bracing for the play where it all goes sideways.

One of those is a hobby. The other one is a condition.

A UVA loss on Saturday does not reach into my Sunday. It cannot. It does not have the clearance. But a UVA win sure helps, the way a good Friday helps a Saturday. It does not change a single outcome, it just means I walk into Sunday in a better mood, which for a Commanders fan is not nothing. We take our advantages where we can find them.

And if you want to talk commitment, it is not close. I am one thousand percent more committed to the Commanders. That number is not a typo and I am not rounding. The Commanders have thirty years of my emotional records on file, itemized, notarized, with an appendix. UVA has about five.

Why I ended up caring anyway

But here is what I did not expect. Being this involved in UVA football turned me into an actual fan of it. Not a polite one. Not a guy in the suite one. A real one, the kind who checks a depth chart and has takes nobody asked for. I never sat down and decided that. It got smuggled in through a move, a pandemic, my wife's career, and a truly staggering number of lanyards.

People keep asking me for the moment, the one game where it clicked. I genuinely do not have one, and I have looked. It was not a moment. It was seasons. Every year here has been more fun than the year before, and every year the team has actually gotten better, capped by their best season in a long, long time last year.

Now, I am not going to sit here and take credit for that. I am simply going to point out that Nicole and I arrived, and the program improved every single year afterward, and that the timeline is what it is. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine.

There is something else in it, too. Watching a program climb like that is a genuinely different experience than what I am used to, and I do not think I understood how different until I lived it. UVA has been getting better on a schedule. The Commanders spent two decades getting worse in creative and unpredictable ways, and now we are finally in a stretch where up looks possible again, and I catch myself flinching at it. Because I am not used to good news arriving on time.

Saturdays have been teaching me that sometimes it does.

The part that actually counts

So Friday the 11th is the one. Norfolk State at Scott Stadium, seven o'clock, under the lights. UVA already opened the season with a 34 to 8 win over NC State, so this is not technically the first anything, but the 11th is the first time I get a night at Scott Stadium and then a Sunday that actually counts, with one lonely Saturday sitting in between them doing nothing at all.

A Friday night kickoff is also a straight gift to a tailgate, and everybody in that lot knows it. Nobody has anywhere to be in the morning.

Friday I will cook something with a theme. I will hand out lanyards. I will find our friends in the lot and I will go inside before kickoff and enjoy a football game like a normal, well adjusted adult.

Then Sunday the Eagles happen, and I will stop being that person entirely.

September 13th is where the actual season starts for me. Jayden Daniels on the road in a building that has taken things from us before, an offensive line I am still nervous about, and a division rival I would very much like to see have a bad afternoon. That is the one I will lose sleep over. That is the one where I will be up at 6am for a 1pm kickoff with nothing to do but think about it.

Saturdays are real now. Saturdays matter. Even when one of them turns up on a Friday, they matter. Saturdays are the opening act, and I mean that with total affection, because the opening act is where you get your beer and find your friends and remember why you came at all.

But the headliner is still September 13th.

The headliner is always going to be September 13th.

Blog

Two Weeks Out, One Massive Injury, and a PBR I Haven't Earned Yet

Tue, Sep 1

I want to be honest with you about where my head is right now: it's not great. It's not "giving up on the season" bad, but it's the specific kind of bad that only Commanders fans understand, the kind where something good is happening and you're already bracing for the part where it stops being good.

That's not pessimism. That's decades of earned pattern recognition.

The Tunsil injury is the obvious wound. Brandon Coleman is solid, and I'm not going to disrespect the man by pretending otherwise. But Laremy Tunsil wasn't just a starting left tackle. He was a wall. He was a promise. He was the guy standing between a budding franchise quarterback and the end of something that hasn't even fully started yet. Losing him shifts the entire emotional calculus of this season, not because we can't win without him, but because of what it means for the person behind him.

Jayden Daniels. That's what's actually keeping me up at night.

We have, maybe, the most exciting young quarterback this franchise has ever suited up. I include everyone in that sentence and I'll stand by it. The Stefon Diggs pickup looked like an upgrade to an already-improving receiver room, and Antonio Williams has shown enough in the preseason that I'm paying attention, because something about the way he works against press coverage has a little Terry McLaurin to it, and I don't say that lightly. On paper this offense should be fun. In theory, Jayden Daniels should have real weapons for the first time.

In practice, none of that matters if he doesn't have time to throw the ball.

And this is where I have to be honest about my own psychology, because the dark years did something to me. They made me a different kind of fan than the kid who watched Super Bowl XXVI in a wood-paneled basement. That kid believed things worked out. This guy, the one typing this at his desk in 2026, has seen what happens to quarterbacks on this team who don't have protection. He knows the pattern.

The Dan Snyder curse is still hanging around. I'm not saying Dan Snyder is still doing anything, because he's not here anymore. But that kind of dysfunction doesn't leave a building overnight. It seeps into the walls. And one of the symptoms is this: every team has injuries, every team has bad luck, but we have a gift for losing the exact right person at the exact wrong time. Not a backup safety. Not a depth piece. Laremy Tunsil. Jer'Zhan Newton. The guys that were supposed to be the foundation.

We had RG3. You remember RG3. For one season, he was everything. He was the guy. And then the injuries came, and the dysfunction came, and five years of getting torched in the draft lottery came right behind them. One good year, then half a decade of trying to remember why you care.

I know this team is different now. I believe it. Adam Peters is real. Dan Quinn is real. Jayden Daniels, even on a bad day, is real. My cynicism was earned honestly but that doesn't mean it has to be permanent. It just means I'm watching with both eyes open.

On the bright side, there's always September 13th. And there's always the ritual.

We are a Commanders household first. I want to be clear about that. Everything else in our fall schedule, including the other football team we follow on Saturdays, is the opening act. The Commanders are the headliner. They are also, historically, the band that shows up late, breaks a string mid-set, and somehow still makes you feel like it was worth the ticket price.

Sundays are a production. We meet our bar friends at Buffalo Wild Wings. It is not a fancy situation. It is our group taking up almost every seat in the place, a lot of ranch dressing, and bartenders whose names we know and who know ours, because we have been doing this long enough that nobody has to explain anything to anybody. The first round is Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing for me, some weird cherry limeade concoction for my wife that I have never ordered and never will but that she loves, and I have stopped trying to understand it. We make it home before kickoff. This is the choreography. This has been perfected over years of practice. Second round is always PBR at home. Always. And if someone in the group was feeling ambitious at BWW, a shot may or may not have appeared before we left, because we are who we are and we have made peace with that.

Nicole mostly watches with me. This is a genuine miracle and I want to be clear about that. She cheers now. Real cheers, not polite ones. Whether that's love, twenty years of proximity, or a very slow-acting form of brainwashing, I've stopped asking and started being grateful. But if it has been a particularly brutal Saturday and someone needs a nap, I might quietly slip downstairs to the man cave for the game. We don't talk about this arrangement. It works for everyone.

Two weeks. I'm nervous. I'm hopeful. I'm going to have a Sierra Nevada at BWW because that's what you do, and then I'm going to make it home, crack a PBR, and watch Jayden Daniels do something that makes me forget I was nervous at all.

Or I'm going to have a second PBR and stare at the ceiling.

Probably a little of both.

Blog

The Burgundy Wire's Completely Unqualified 2026 Season Preview

Wed, Aug 26

Ask me right after the draft what I felt about this season, and I'd have sold you 10-7, maybe 11-6, with a straight face and a full chest. Jayden coming back healthy. An offensive line that was going to be a "strength" (quotes very much intended, because even in April, some lizard-brain part of me knew better than to say that sentence without air quotes). A defense that finally had teeth again, anchored by a rookie linebacker everyone was ready to crown early. It was a good speech. I meant it. That guy from April deserves better than the guy writing this in August.

Because here's the present tense: injuries are stacking up like it's a hobby. We've lost our franchise left tackle for possibly the entire year, and I didn't even flinch when I heard. That's how numb this camp has made me. Sonny Styles looks like he needs a handful of live reps before the lights fully come on, which is fine for a rookie and still not the August I ordered. I'm not a preseason panic guy, high or low, but the eye test says this defense is legitimately, noticeably better. If we climb from "one of the league's worst" to "respectably mediocre," that alone papers over a lot of offensive sins. And the offense, bluntly: we go exactly as far as Jayden Daniels can carry us, and he can carry us a long way, if the offensive line doesn't get him murdered first. That's the entire season preview, one sentence, no charge. Everything below is just me finding 17 increasingly unhinged ways to restate it.

Game by game. Buckle up.

Week 1, at Eagles. Philly's still loaded, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But losing AJ Brown is going to sting them a lot harder than the league seems to think, and they bled real talent on defense too. That's a roster trending down, not up, no matter what the preseason hype cycle says. Ripe for an upset. I know it. I still don't trust our pieces to mesh in Week 1 against a division villain on the road. Loss. Sadly, and with feeling.

Week 2, Cowboys. Ugh. Genuinely, physically, ugh. By every account they got better, and, shocker, they drafted the exact player I wanted us to take and did not want anywhere near their building. This is a curse at this point, a documented historical pattern: every time Dallas has a down year, they turn around and land the next DeMarcus Ware, the next Dez Bryant, the next Micah Parsons. It just never stops. Another loss, and it costs me a little bit of my soul to type it out loud.

Week 3, Seahawks. Zero rational basis for this pick. None. I have no film, no stats, no argument. What I have is my dad and my brother sitting next to me in that building, and I am fully prepared to credit our combined, deeply unscientific fan energy for an upset nobody saw coming. Also, real question: was Sam Darnold a one-year mirage? I think he played the season of his life once and gravity finally catches up to him this year. Guys don't just "figure it out" for good this late in a career. Win. We shouldn't win this game. We are winning this game. Starting 0-3 sends my bar tab somewhere my bank account is not equipped to visit.

Week 4, Colts. Total fog of war on this one. Indy's solid everywhere and boring nowhere, but "solid" has a ceiling, and I don't know where it is yet. We'll know a lot more about who we actually are by Week 4, and coming off a home upset of the defending Super Bowl champs, this game is either the start of a real streak or the exact spot we no-show and let it slip. I'm calling it a win. A 51% win. The kind of win that needs a coin flip to feel good about itself.

Week 5, Giants. Unpopular opinion I will die defending: Jaxson Dart has the most punchable face in professional sports, and the Giants have been fielding a rotating cast of punchable quarterback faces going back to Eli "derp" Manning. It's basically a franchise tradition at this point, an assembly line. They'll hang around longer than they should, because the Giants always do, but we SHOULD win this. Capital letters intentional. Win.

Week 6, 49ers. It's my birthday. An away win, ideally the third leg of a winning streak, would be the single best gift anyone's given me since the wife said yes. By this point I'm hoping Sonny Styles has seen enough live snaps to actually lock down George Kittle, who has been quietly cooking rookies for a decade. If he's ready, we've got a real shot on the road. My heart says win. My head says loss, and this time I'm siding with my head, against my own birthday wishes. Loss.

BYE WEEK. Thank every football god available. The timing on this could not possibly be better, and I will not be taking questions on that.

Week 8, Eagles (rematch), primetime. Round two. If we're anywhere close to full health walking into this one, I like us at home, and I like us splitting the season series to make Philly sweat a little on their own way to the playoffs. Win.

Week 9, Rams. Oof, immediately. Is Aaron Donald even active by this point in his career, and if he is, what does our offensive line look like standing across from him? Neither answer makes me feel good. Loss.

Week 10, Giants (rematch). Another date with a man I would take out a second mortgage just to punch squarely in the face. Again, this is Jaxson Dart, a football player, not a personal enemy, though the line has blurred. By now the Giants should be in full, dignified free-fall toward another top-five pick. Win.

Week 11, Bengals. Total wild card, and I'm calling my shot early and loudly: Joe Burrow gets hurt again before we play him. It's not a hope, it's a pattern. Without Burrow, this is a comfortable win. With Burrow, and Ja'Marr Chase still doing whatever he wants to defensive backs, it's a much tighter, uglier win. Either way: win.

Week 12, Cardinals. A team mid-rebuild, and as long as Jeremiah Love doesn't turn into the latest rookie to torch us for 150 yards (we have a long, humiliating history there, a whole highlight reel we don't talk about), this is another win, and a fairly stress-free one.

Week 13, Titans. Possibly the worst roster in the league right now, and I say that with zero joy. We've absolutely no-showed against bad teams before, that's part of our brand too, but I genuinely believe the culture has turned a corner this time. Comfortable win, even on the road, even against my own better instincts to panic about trap games.

Week 14, Texans. Which CJ Stroud are we getting? The one from two seasons ago is a legitimate problem, and that defense is scary regardless of who's throwing the ball. I think we ride a four-game winning streak right into a buzzsaw and drop this one at home. Loss, and an infuriating one.

Week 15, Falcons. I genuinely can't get a read on Atlanta. Bijan Robinson is a nightmare do-everything back, and they've got real juice sprinkled on both sides of the ball, but as a whole team I don't think they have enough to finish. Close win at home, the kind that ages ten years off my life in the fourth quarter.

Week 16, Vikings. Deep in the stretch run against a genuinely dangerous team. I think Kyler Murray has himself a real bounce-back year throwing to Justin Jefferson, who remains one of maybe three people on Earth who make defensive coordinators visibly age in real time. You can't win them all. We play this one tough and still come up just short. Loss.

Week 17, at Jaguars. Loaded roster, chronic inability to put it together. That's the Jaguars, in a nutshell, for years running. We should be fully battle-tested by now, so I genuinely don't know what to expect from either side. Purely on road-game math, and despite Jacksonville's fan base numbering somewhere in the low single digits, I've got this as a tight, annoying loss.

Week 18, Cowboys, at home. Season finale. Win. That's the take. That's the whole take, and I will not be expanding on it further except to say: we are due, deeply and cosmically due, and I want this game to either punch us into the playoffs or slam the door on Dallas's. Ideally both. At the exact same moment. I haven't worked out the mechanism, but I trust the universe to figure out the details.

Add it up and I've got the Commanders at 10-7. Same number I was shouting in April. Wildly different, much more terrifying road to get there.

One last thing: if you haven't listened to the Commanders hype songs created by robots, you should! Five of them, one shared cover, zero shame. Give them a listen.

Blog

How a CRT TV, a Ditch, and the Internet Made Me a Lifer

Mon, Aug 24

I didn't choose this team. This team was installed in me, like factory firmware, before I was old enough to consent to anything.

My first memory of this franchise is Super Bowl XXVI, watching it alone on a television so deep it should've had its own zip code. I was a little kid. My dad was already a lifer by then, the kind of fan who'd call after a big play just to confirm you'd seen it too, like you might have somehow missed the whole thing. I didn't understand football yet. I understood that the game was on, my dad and I were talking about it, and that was apparently how the world was supposed to feel on a Sunday. I've spent the rest of my life chasing that feeling back, mostly unsuccessfully, for three decades running.

Fast forward to 16 years old, and I meet the woman who is now my wife. On our very first in-person game together, she gets us tickets on the 50-yard line, front row. Sixteen-year-old me had no framework for what a reasonable second date looked like, and she set the bar directly into orbit, never to be touched again by any human woman on earth. Every date since has technically been a disappointment by comparison, and she knows it, and she still married me anyway. That's either love or a filing error.

That was right before Gibbs 2.0, when my fandom stopped being a hobby and became a personality disorder. I graduated college, moved out of my parents' house, and landed walking distance from bars in my hometown, which is a sentence that should come with a surgeon general's warning. There was a Redskins-Cowboys game. There was a flood. There was a ditch. I would like to say I remember exactly how I ended up in it, drunk, mid-game, at a bar that had already personally offended me, but I don't, and neither does anyone else who was there, which is honestly for the best for all parties involved. I have grown since then. Some. A little. Enough to know better and still not always do better.

But also: Clinton Portis. That touchdown run in Gibbs 2.0. I still see it when I close my eyes at night, unprompted, like a war flashback except good. Oh, baby.

Somewhere in there I found The Warpath (thewarpath.net, go say hi, tell them I sent you), and became one of those guys who is suspiciously online about a football team. I met people there who are, to this day, some of my closest friends on the planet. We met on a message board about a mediocre-to-good NFL franchise. I understand how that sounds. I have accepted how that sounds.

Here's the story I tell when people ask what that actually means: right around the time I was getting ready to propose to my wife, those guys (internet strangers I'd known for what was, in hindsight, not that long) insisted on all meeting up for one insane overnight in Niagara Falls, barely knowing each other in person. Any one of them could have quietly murdered me in my sleep and no jury in the country could've pieced together the motive. Instead we just had a great, ridiculous night, and then they flew home the next day while I flew to San Diego and proposed on my own. We've talked almost every single day since: AOL Instant Messenger, then Gchat, now Slack, an entire generation's worth of chat platforms held together by one shared, ridiculous football team.

My wife has paid the toll for all of this. Game days are sacred in a way that borders on religious observance. I will not confirm or deny whether, over the course of our marriage, I have slowly and lovingly Jedi-mind-tricked her into caring about this team. What I will say is that she cheers now. Genuinely. Whether that's love, Stockholm syndrome, or just twenty-plus years of proximity to my nonsense, I've stopped asking questions and started being grateful.

That's the fandom. Wood paneling to Slack, a ditch to a proposal, one dad's old CRT to whatever this website turns into. Thanks for being here for it.

Who I actually am, in pictures

These are Virginia Saturdays, not Sundays, which I recognize is a strange thing to hang at the bottom of a post about the Commanders. Same instinct as the ditch and the CRT. Better chairs.