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.