Leadership truly was the important thing for the Commanders in looking for a head coach, and that was reiterated during Dan Quinn’s introductory press conference Monday.
“We told you we were going to go find the best leader for Washington football, and Dan, we’re so happy to welcome you to Washington. Thank you for choosing to be on this mission with us,” owner Josh Harris said to open the proceedings.
“As we said all along, we wanted to hire the best leader for our team. We went through a very thorough process, and that led us to the decision that Coach Quinn, one of the best leaders in the NFL, was the right man for the job,” GM Adam Peters added.
For Quinn, he lives by the mantra ‘be where your feet are,’ ostensibly meaning stay in the moment and where you are. But, as he revealed, there were five other words he was living by from the day he was fired by the Falcons until the day he was hired by Harris and Peters: ‘If I get another chance.’
Those five words are why the Commanders had coordinators within 72 hours of hiring a head coach and why he knew exactly what he was looking for as he went through this head coaching cycle, revealing that even though he was the last one hired to fill the final vacancy, that juice was worth the squeeze.
“Coming in as someone who has done this process before, I knew what I was looking for,” Quinn said. “When you go through it the first time, you kind of have to go take it where it comes, but when you’ve been through the experience, you know how to align it so you could come in and kick ass right away. If the markers weren’t aligned, I wouldn’t have done it – but when this one was here, it was please call, because this one is different.”
And, for those who want to speculate on Ben Johnson or the delays or anything else, well, the brass felt the same way.
“Dan came in with a great vision on how to build a cohesive staff where everyone could work together. It’s not just one person, but he had a plan in his head, and that was really impressive,” Harris said, with Peters adding: “Every time we spoke with Dan it became more and more clear he was the guy. We met with him twice, and both times it was like we were speaking he same language. I knew almost right away he’d be the right coach for us.”
They wanted to go through the full process to make sure, but in the end, Quinn was the guy and is the guy – and while he’s coming in with a No. 2 pick, two second-rounders, a ton of cap space, and a whole lot of questions, there’s one word he will never say.
“You’ll never hear me say rebuild – this is a recalibrate, finding our true north again,” Quinn said. “I was looking to be part of a team like this, and to start all together, I think that’s a really cool thing – and I hope we can look back on it years from now and say that’s how you do it. But that starts with the identity of our club; this is about assessing what we have, seeing how we can add to that, and finding the best group to go play as well as we can as fast as we can. It takes trust between personnel, staff, and ownership; there’s a lot to get done, but the more we can build, the faster we can get there.”
Quinn says his Commanders will be ‘explosive and physical,’ and he and Peters are indeed in lockstep.
“I want to be collaborative with the head coach on every decision we make,” the GM said. “We have a door connecting our offices, and we’re not going to make a decision without talking to each other – we will come out with the same answer in mind.”
And the same goal: bring the Commanders back to the NFL prominence Quinn remembers while watching the NFC East in the 1980s and 1990s, growing up as a kid in New Jersey.
“We know who you are what this franchise means to you, and what it will take to get it back to where it deserves to be,” Quinn said to the fan base. “It will take time to build trust, but I can’t wait to start earning it. We will hit the ground running, and I am ready to run and prove it.”
Just don’t, Quinn cautioned, put a time frame on it.
“I want to make sure above all things that our identity takes place in how we play football, and everyone knows when they watch the Commanders what that will look like,” Quinn said. “If we do that right, success will follow, but you can’t put a prediction on how long that will take or how it looks. How quickly the team and staff connects, success will derive from that. We will try to accelerate as fast as we can, but there’s a lot of work to do.”
