The Washington Commanders have a lot to prove to people this season and there’s not going to be a whole lot of patience despite the team coming off a four-win 2023 and head coach Dan Quinn being in his first season at the controls.
Part of making the Commanders successful is putting the right people in the right places, not just on the roster, but in the coaching staff as well. Afterall, as we all know, coaching decisions can weigh just as heavily on a player’s performance as the player himself does.
Take Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Mazi Smith, whose struggles in his rookie season are being laid at the feet of decisions Quinn either made or went along with before taking the head coaching job in Washington.
“Dallas drafted Smith — decried as a reach by some at the time — in the first round to finally solve the weak underbelly the team’s defense had against the run over the past few years,” Sam Monson of Pro Football Focus wrote when identifying the Cowboys lineman as a player under pressure to perform in 2024. “Smith weighed 323 pounds at the NFL Combine, and the one thing he excelled at in college was stuffing the run and anchoring the middle of the line.
“The Cowboys inexplicably then asked him to drop a ton of weight and seemed confused when he made little impact as a rookie.”
Monson doesn’t directly cast a stone at Quinn here, but without a doubt as the defensive coordinator he has a hand in making a decision that potentially derailed his own first round pick’s potential.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen Quinn directly or indirectly criticized for the lack of run defense in Dallas. And considering that Smith was a first round pick brought in to fix a run defense Quinn hadn’t in the two years prior may lend some credibility to those criticisms.
Regardless, the past is the past and Quinn has two new defensive tackles in Jonathan Allen and Daron Payne who have not been asked to shed weight to our knowledge and should provide this Commanders defense with a better midde line duo than the one he had with the Cowboys.
READ MORE: Daniels’ Rank as ‘Most Important’ Rookie
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