Divisional round – Commanders at Lions precap

The Commanders travel to Detroit for a Saturday night playoff game in which the winner advances to the NFC Championship game

I want to continue the series of game previews that we began a few weeks ago.

Since the start of the ‘24 season, I’ve published a game recap within five minutes of the end of each game. Each of the more recent of these recap articles has started with a “precap”, providing a bit of pre-game context. The rest of the recap article includes a detailed summary of each quarter, along with halftime and full-game team statistics and partial box scores.

Today, this “precap” is being published on Saturday morning, with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarter summaries to be published as each quarter ends Saturday night, with the idea that anyone who is unable to watch or listen to the game live can at least read the quarterly summaries as they are posted to get a sense of how the game is going.

The full recap, with every section included, will be published as usual within minutes of the end of the game.

What follows here, then, is not really an ‘article’, and it likely doesn’t cover anything unfamiliar to you; it’s just the introduction to the full game recap, intended to establish the ‘context’ for the game before kickoff. It will be included in the published recap of today’s game.

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The Commanders are the biggest underdogs of the divisional round playoff games. It’s not hard to understand the respect being given to the 15-2 Detroit Lions, who have certainly played like champions for most of the season. It is, however, harder to fathom the disrespect for the 13-5 Commanders.

Of Washington’s five losses, one came in Week 1 when rookie QB Jayden Daniels was playing his first-ever NFL game. That loss was avenged against the same team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in the same stadium last Sunday in a game with much bigger stakes — the wildcard round of the NFC playoffs.

Two other losses came in back-to-back weeks mid-season against the Steelers and Eagles when Jayden Daniels was hobbled by a rib injury that is now fully healed. The Commanders have been a very different team since the Week 14 bye, after which it was clear that Daniels had returned to full health.

The Commanders enter tonight’s game riding a 6-game winning streak — the longest in the NFL, ahead of the Bengals, who are done for the year. The current winning streak includes victories over two divisional champions (the Eagles and Buccaneers) and another win that knocked the Falcons out of playoff contention in Week 17.

Washington boasts the #5 scoring offense in the league, meaning that it has the horsepower needed to challenge Detroit’s league-leading offense in points scoring.

The winning strategy for the Lions would seem to be to score early and often in an attempt to boat-race the Commanders or get into a shootout, in which the Lions would be most likely to prevail.

The winning strategy for the Commanders, on the other hand, would seem to be to use a similar strategy to the one employed on Sunday in Tampa; that is, to keep the clock running, limiting the number of possessions per team, eliminating explosive plays by the Lions, and protecting the ball when in possession of the Commanders.

The ‘clutch’ Commanders have proven adept at walk-off wins this season. They have won eight games in which they trailed at some point during the 4th quarter. In 7 of those games, Washington sealed the win on the final play from scrimmage of the game (Giants, Bears, Saints, Eagles, Falcons, Cowboys, Buccaneers). If they can follow a similar script to last week’s wild card game, then I can’t think of a single Washington fan that would bet against their chances of adding an eighth walk-off win to the resume of the Dan Quinn and Jayden Daniels-led Commanders.

If the Lions have a chink in their metaphorical armor, it may be the team’s defense against mobile quarterbacks.

I’ve seen comments from a lot of Lions fans this week who are concerned about Jayden Daniels’ elusiveness and mobility because of the difficulties Detroit had with Baker Mayfield and Josh Allen this year.

JD5 has been the Commanders’ not-so-secret weapon through 18 games, and — regardless of the outcome of the game — there is little reason to believe that the Lions will have more success against him than the rest of the league.

Daniels leads his team in rushing with 927 yards in 18 games. As a runner, he had a 63% success rate in the regular season, accounting for 55 first downs and 6 touchdowns. More impressive than simple stats, however, has been Daniels’ ability to deliver when his team has needed it most, with drive-extending 3rd & 4th down plays as both a runner and a passer.

The Lions made it to the NFC championship game last year, where they lost 34-31 to the 49ers in their bid to reach the team’s first-ever Super Bowl (the Lions won 4 NFL championships prior to 1958, but have not won an NFC championship game since the merger).

Washington hasn’t been to the NFC Championship game since its last Super Bowl winning season (1991).

The Lions are trying to finish a journey they feel was interrupted a year ago, while the Commanders are trying to get back on course after losing their way more than 30 years ago.

Both franchises are enjoying success after long periods of struggle, and each is led by a coach cut from a slightly unorthodox mold. Both are charismatic “players” coaches who nonetheless run tight programs. Each is a CEO-type leader that gives freedom and responsibility to coordinators, and each has an aggressive (I daresay Dan Quinn would call it “bold”) mindset with respect to game management.

Washington is 3-0 against the Lions in the NFL playoffs, but this will be the first time in that playoff history that the Lions are the home team.

Get ready for a battle worthy of a rivalry that dates back to November 20, 1932, when the Portsmouth Spartans (today’s Lions) beat the Boston Braves (today’s Commanders) 10-0 in their first-ever regular season meeting.

The Lions didn’t play the Redskins in 1937, the season that the burgundy & gold, in their first-ever season in Washington DC and led by rookie sensation Sammy Baugh, won their first NFL championship after compiling an 8-3 record and winning the Eastern division title.

In fact, the Lions and Redskins didn’t meet in the playoffs until 1982, when Detroit lost to Washington 31-7. The Redskins beat them again at the end of the ‘91 season, 41-10 in the NFC title game, and again in 1999, by a score of 27-13.

Tonight, the Commanders will look to extend the playoff win streak over the Lions to 4-0.

In the NFL playoffs, where the winner advances and the loser goes home, anything is possible, and what we know for certain is that both teams will show up tonight intent on continuing their seasons, each secure in the belief that it has what it takes to win.

Detroit head coach Dan Campbell gives great speeches. He’s worth the price of admission every time. He had one speech this year that utilized some graphic imaging in which he said that the Lions would play “in a landfill” if that’s what it took. A little later in that speech, he had this to say:

You just got to get a hold of [your opponent]. If you can just get a hold of them and you start dragging their ass out to the deep dark abyss, you can drown them, and that’s what we got to be; that’s who we have to be because that’s our domain. That is our domain because we’ll tread water as long as it takes to bury you. We’ll go as long as it tastes because we can and we choose to; that’s who we are that’s who we have to be.

I have to admit that Dan Campbell’s team has had a lot of success this season implementing that philosophy.

But Dan Quinn’s team has had success too, and has been showing up for a “five quarter fight” on the regular for quite a while now. The Commanders are battle-tested and hardened, and aren’t likely to be easy to bury.

I don’t know who will win tonight’s game, but I’m confident that it will be a hard fought contest between two teams that have had long stretches of failure in their recent histories, but success written in their futures.