Week 16 was … eh … light on drama, but heavy on revelations, and we’re about to dive into those.  As we’ve been doing all season, we’ll publish the takeaways Sunday and update them live through Monday morning. So come back again if not all 10 are here yet …

Jayden Daniels is really special, and the Washington Commanders’ program around him is showing signs that it can be, too. The rookie quarterback’s season has been excellent, no doubt. But it hasn’t been perfect. Like most first-year guys, Daniels has hit walls and been challenged to break them down as he fights through and adjusts to the grind of an NFL season.

Another one crumbled in Daniels’s presence Sunday.

To set the stage, Washington went down 14–0 almost right away to a Philadelphia Eagles team riding a 10-game win streak. Then, it was 21–7. Then, it was 27–14. And even if the Eagles were playing their backup quarterback after Jalen Hurts was concussed, the Commanders were fighting through a difficult circumstance of their own creation—they had five turnovers.

Yet, there Dan Quinn’s crew was, taking the lead in the final 10 minutes, at 28–27, then losing it again, with the fifth of those turnovers (a Daniels pick), sandwiching two field goals that put the home team down 33–28 at the two-minute warning.

“It just gave me another opportunity to go out there and win the game,” Daniels told me, as he wrapped up his day at the stadium. “There really weren’t any coaching points or anything. We were in four-down territory the whole way. Let’s go win the game.”

And they would, 36–33. Because of their rookie quarterback.

First, Washington covered 41 yards in five plays. From there, the fun started. And, if you get a closer look into what actually was happening in the huddle, Daniels’s mettle showed.

On second-and-3 from the Eagles’ 16 with 27 seconds left, OC Kliff Kingsbury called an RPO to Daniels’s right. Only the receivers to that side didn’t get the quarterback’s signal.

Panic time? Not exactly.

“I didn’t make the signal good enough,” Daniels says. “So I just followed the blocker, to see what I could get.”

Whether or not it was on him is (I’ve heard at least) up for debate, but he willingly took the bullet for it, and the hit—calmly running behind his linemen and falling just short of the first down, at the 14, forcing the Commanders to call their last timeout with 23 seconds left.

From there, Kingsbury called a run to convert third-and-1, Brian Robinson Jr. ground out five yards and Daniels rushed the offense to spike it with 11 seconds to go. The next call Kingsbury sent in was one that assistant quarterbacks coach David Blough added to the playbook at the end of the spring, specifically for end-of-game situations. And the Commanders have repped it in practice a ton since training camp, just for a situation like this.

The thing is, normally, what’s happened has been that coverage would follow Daniels’s first read in the progression, Jamison Crowder, and the quarterback would have to make the throw to the second guy in the pattern, Zach Ertz. But at practice Thursday, during a red zone period, Daniels hit Crowder wide open between levels of the scout team’s coverage.

So there was the call again Sunday. There was Crowder for Daniels, wide open. And there was the Commanders’ franchise quarterback, quick to the trigger with the game-winner.

“It set up perfectly,” Daniels says of Blough’s concept. “We did that same play in practice, same route, right behind the linebacker, in two-high coverage. That was my first read presnap from what I’ve seen—I’m going to go right here and trust in him to make a play.”

In doing so, he and his team did what no one else has been able to do in more than two months, and that’s send the mighty Eagles home with a loss.

But the reality is that they accomplished more than just that Sunday, and really on a lot of Sundays this fall. Plenty of the guys in Commanders uniforms now were around the past few years. Those in the stands watching them know the score, too. For a quarter century in D.C., when something could go wrong, it usually did.

So the challenge for Quinn and his staff has been to flip that psychology on its head. And this situation unfolding was more evidence that that’s exactly what’s happening.

“One hundred percent,” Daniels affirms. “We believe that we can be in every game. We’re confident going in that we have an opportunity to win. It’s how we prepare, how our coaches bring confidence to us.”

Now, it’s how they’re playing, too, and Daniels is a big part of it as well.

Because, again, as good as he’s been, the bumps have been there. In mid-November, Washington lost three straight, and he didn’t play particularly well—with passer ratings of 68.5, 81.6 and 82.7 in those games. That was after he suffered a rib injury that was probably a little more serious than anyone let on.

But this is a 24-year-old who saw a lot, both football-wise and otherwise, through a five-year college career that encompassed 55 starts, and multiyear starting runs at two different historic programs in two different power conferences. He was there for an NCAA scandal at Arizona State. He had to transfer, and improve to win and keep the starting job at LSU. It takes a lot to shake him.

“The best teacher in life is experience,” Daniels says. “To be able to go out there and play as many snaps as I did in college, I knew it would translate to the league.”

And now he and the remade franchise he’s leading are full speed ahead, with a win that typified the growth the Commanders have undergone. Washington is 10–5. Quinn is the first coach in franchise history to win 10 games in his first season. Daniels is closing in on Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. They’re all on the verge of the playoffs.

Everything, seemingly, has changed.

“It means a lot for us, playing a team that’s been on a win streak and fighting for a No. 1 seed, that’s going to be in the playoffs,” Daniels says. “It means a lot to go compete and know that we can put up big-time wins against these guys.”

After Sunday, it’s fair to say that everyone else knows, too.

It’s going to be hard for the New York Giants to stick with the status quo in two weeks. New York is now at a franchise record 10 consecutive losses. Daniel Jones has been wearing a ballcap on the Minnesota Vikings’ sideline. Saquon Barkley has a legit shot at Eric Dickerson’s single-season record in Philly. And some form of change seems inevitable, especially when you dig deeper into the ugly streak’s details.

Sunday’s noncompetitive 34–7 loss to the Atlanta Falcons was just the latest hit in two-plus months full of them …

• Five of the 10 losses have come by double digits.

• In six of the 10 losses, the Giants have scored 14 or fewer points.

• There have been losses to a backup quarterback (Dallas Cowboys) and interim coach (New Orleans Saints).

• The benching and subsequent release of Jones, $82 million later, was at the midway point of the streak.

• There was a home no-show coming out of a bye (they were down 23–0 to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the half).

• There have been Fire everyone banners overhead, and scores of empty seats.

Now, I still believe Brian Daboll has a high ceiling as a coach, and the same goes for Joe Schoen as a GM. But the team I saw Sunday looked disengaged and lifeless, and it’s been that way far too often since the Giants last won a game. And while I know John Mara doesn’t want to blow it up again—if he fired those two guys, he’d be into his fifth head coach and third GM in less than a decade, which is unbecoming of the NFL’s Tiffany franchise—the facts are the facts, and narratives have slowly become reality.

If Daboll and Schoen make it to next season, they’d very clearly go in fighting for their jobs, and in a market where the environment has already gotten toxic. You saw what that looked like with Matt Rhule (Carolina Panthers) in 2022, and Dan Quinn (Falcons) and Doug Marrone (Jacksonville Jaguars) in 2020. It rarely works out.

Of course, one example of a stay-of-execution bringing results happened in New York. Tom Coughlin was given another year after his 2006 team collapsed, finishing 2–6 after a 6–2 start, and he won a Super Bowl the next year. So it’s not always a disaster.

More often than not, it goes the other way. Pressure’s on. Every other story from January to Week 1 is about job security. The coach struggles to get through September intact.

So these are the tough conversations that Mara has to have: Realistically, what’s the upshot of staying the course? And if you do stay the course, what sort of changes can you make to give the current regime some semblance of a shot at breaking through in 2025?

I may be in the minority in thinking a decent core for next year is in place (Andrew Thomas, Malik Nabers, Dexter Lawrence, Brian Burns, Kayvon Thibodeaux). The question is whether the guys in charge now are the right ones to augment it, and find the quarterback to get it back off the mat, after backsliding from 9-7-1 in 2022 to 6–11 last season to this year’s abject disaster.

I think they can be. But it most certainly won’t be easy.

The Baltimore Ravens are rounding into form, and that’s a credit, again, to John Harbaugh’s people development pipeline. Obviously, and rightfully so, a big part of the story coming out of Saturday’s 34–17 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers will center on the Baltimore offense. Lamar Jackson kept pace with Josh Allen in the MVP race with a tidy 207-yard effort that bore out three touchdown passes and a 115.4 passer rating. The Ravens churned out 220 yards on the ground, at a 5.8-per-carry clip. And, yes, all of that is impressive.

But what I continue to see here is how this year’s Ravens, rather than just running back last year’s AFC finalist, turned the page in 2024 and did it with belief in their own farm system.

We’ve been over this before. They said goodbye to three starting linemen, and have leaned on younger developmental guys such as Daniel Faalele and Roger Rosengarten. Ditto at linebacker, where they let Patrick Queen go, with the idea Trenton Simpson would, in time, be just as good—and when they had to sit him down, they had Malik Harrison (similar to Patrick Mekari on the line) as a young, homegrown vet who was ready to go.

And it’s also apparent in an area where the Ravens really didn’t have a choice. Part of the price of winning can be coaching attrition, and Baltimore felt that in January with the loss of its outstanding young defensive coordinator, with Mike Macdonald off to Seattle to become the Seahawks’ head coach. Harbaugh picked 31-year-old Zach Orr to replace him, even with guys such as Dennard Wilson and Anthony Weaver, who become coordinators for the Tennessee Titans and Miami Dolphins, respectively, on hand.

It didn’t look great out of the gate for Orr, the same way Macdonald’s defense stumbled a bit at first. Of late, though, that’s flipped. Sandwiching their bye, the Ravens held three straight opponents under 300 yards, something they did only once in their first 11 games, to help get the team to 9–5 heading into Saturday’s showdown.

Things in that showdown were by no means perfect. The defense gave up a field goal inside two minutes at the end of the first half that kept the Steelers in the game, then yielded a 44-yard back-shoulder throw from Russell Wilson to Calvin Austin III that keyed an 88-yard drive to tie it with 20 minutes to go. And from that point forward, you saw the fast, nasty, edgy defense Orr has been trying to get a handle on deploying the past three months.

So the Ravens secured a fourth-down stop on the first play of the fourth quarter. Then, when Jackson was picked off two plays later, the defense’s old stalwart, Marlon Humphrey, responded with a 37-yard pick-six—the first of his career.

When it mattered most, the defense was at its best.

In the fourth quarter, Orr’s unit stood tall, allowing just 34 yards, three first downs and one third-down conversion, suffocating the Steelers to make the idea of a second consecutive AFC North title and a home playoff game real. And perhaps serving notice to the rest of the conference what a tough out this team will be, come January.

While we’re on defensive coordinators, John Harbaugh’s brother, Jim, has a really good one. On the Amazon Thursday night broadcast (which I’m a part of), we kept showing a statistic on the Los Angeles Chargers’ defense—and how a collapse in the second half against the Buccaneers in Week 15 seemed to bleed over into the start of Thursday’s game against the Denver Broncos.

The numbers, in case you missed them, weren’t flattering. Over that four-quarter stretch, first-year Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter’s unit gave up 48 points, 534 yards and 7.7 yards per play. Heading into the second half, there was a ton on the line for everyone wearing powder blue. With a loss, Denver would be in the playoffs, and the Chargers’ once-solid postseason position would be shaken.

Thanks to Minter’s group, they don’t have to worry about that anymore. They allowed just 119 yards and six first downs after halftime. Denver’s five second-half possessions ended with three punts and two field goals.

The difference, really, wasn’t anyone waving a magic wand. Khalil Mack and Derwin James’s leadership was felt—Mack by example, and James both in that way and through a message he gave his teammates at the half, that the defense hadn’t been good enough and they had to pull together to dig out of the rut. And then, the Chargers started winning on first down, which put the Broncos and rookie Bo Nix in more long-yardage situations, which led to better pressure.

On the Broncos’ first four possessions, they were in first-down situations seven times and compiled a total of minus-2 yards on those seven plays. A big part of it was defending the run better (the Broncos rushed for 89 yards in the first half and 21 yards in the second half), which led to similar improvement on third down (Denver was 3-of-5 in the first half, and 2-of-8 in the second half).

All that sounds simple. But it’s not, and not after a unit might be at risk of losing its confidence.

Minter’s done a fantastic job on balance all year—the Chargers, with an aging front and a lot of youth playing at corner and inside linebacker, are near the top of the NFL in a lot of defensive categories. His vision to have a defense that would play a complementary style, highlighting its rush ability while hiding its lack of elite cover guys, has come to life with a group that stops the run, plays zone, rushes its butt off and changes the picture on passers.

But, to me, regardless of what a guy’s vision is for his group, this was the sort of spot where a young coach gets challenged in a serious way. Minter passed the test with flying colors.

Maybe, in a month, we’ll see teams take notice, if anyone’s interested in going the route Seattle did in hiring Mike Macdonald.