Reason for hope despite the playoff loss
Signs of what’s to come in matchup vs. Brady and Bucs
In the end, TomBrady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would be too much. The miracle of the Washington Football Team died whenthe quarterback with an injured shoulder, whowas replacing the quarterback with only one good leg, threw a desperate last pass that the tight end who used to be a quarterback almost managed to catch over two defenders only to have the ball fall to the turf.
Somehow it was a fitting finish to a season that surprised everyone. The team with no name, with only a couple of big names, nearly beat the game’s biggest name Saturday night. That is why there were no tears, no slumped shoulders and none of the melodramatic weeping that usually comes with a playoff defeat.
The 31-23 defeat that burned in the FedEx Field scoreboard felt less like a bitter loss than a hopeful beacon that the dysfunction that has buried this franchise for more than two decades might finally change.
Noone would, of course, say this as Saturday turned to Sunday and everyone emerged from the locker roomwith something resembling smiles on their faces.
“In no way are we happy with what we did, because there are no participation trophies,” wide receiver Terry McLaurin said.
But there was a word he used, one that was repeated by every player who stopped to sit for postgame video news conferences, a word uttered often by their coach, Ron Rivera, as well: “Fight.”
“We fought, man,” McLaurin said.
In a season in which the team was surrounded by mayhem, in which four quarterbacks started games, in which it appeared — sometimes — that there might not be enough running backs, wide receivers or tight ends to form a competent NFL offense, it wonthe most unlikely of NFCEast titles with nothing so much as a weekly willingness to battle. And that has to stand for something in the seasons to come.
There’s no doubt that in a season thrown upside-down by the coronavirus pandemic, this team was the NFL’s best tale. Nobody, not even the most preposterous movie writer, could have conceived of something as absurd as an iconic football franchise stripped of its name somehow winning the
NFC East with a coach fighting cancer and led by a quarterback who almost lost his leg. Such things never happen.
Rivera still has a hole in his neck where the cancerous tumor once grew. He often is tired. It sometimes hurts to eat. Most nights he falls asleep at 8:30 and has to steal naps just to get through most days. Alex Smith, the quarterback, was supposed to be done after an infection following a horrific 2018 leg injury led to 17 surgeries and nearly amputation. Yet he managed to return, leading the team to five victories in the six games he started, until finally an injured calf kept him on the sideline Saturday.
Nonetheless, these were the examples that pulled a ragtag team through weeks of calamity, a 2-7 start and then four straight November and December wins.
“Look at our coach,” cornerback Kendall Fuller said. “Look at the way we fought and competed all year.”
Saturday night was supposed to be the logical end of this ridiculous tumbling ride. Teams that went 7-9 don’t beat Tom Brady in the postseason. This time the rule seemed especially true, given the way Brady had torn opposing defenses apart in the season’s final weeks.
But Washington kept fighting. It went down 9-0 and then 18-7.
“Grit,” Fuller said later.