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.