Sam Howell is starting Week 18 for the Commanders, meaning he’ll have started all 17 games this year – the first Washington QB to start every game since Kirk Cousins in 2017.
Great, but here’s the question Grant & Danny had: why?
“I found part of that answer about what he liked about Sam’s game on Sunday really interesting; he said ‘we've been waiting for him to get the ball to Terry,’ and I haven't heard that all year,” Grant said after playing the clip of Ron Rivera explaining his decision. “That’s interesting. He has not said that publicly, but it was part of his game that he liked.”
It was likely the 42-yard completion to McLaurin, the guys think, that Ron was talking about, and as Danny noted, chunk plays ‘are what the league is’ now – and until this past week, Howell was having some serious trouble with that.
But is that enough to bring Howell back after what was a benching rescinded by injury to start the finale, or is something weird going on?
“A week ago at this time, the decision was Sam Howell's not starting against San Francisco, because he’s broken and the 49ers are just great defensively, so that would be a bad position to put him in,” Grant said. “Fast forward, he had to play because of the Brissett injury, and he handled himself okay; it wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t embarrassing, not nearly as bad as his Jets performance or probably even his Rams performance before that. And now they’re going back to him – so why do you think that is?”
Cue a rehash of Rivera’s answers, which, to Grant, means Brissett’s injury is a non-zero factor…but also, the fact that Sam didn’t have a huge meltdown against San Francisco helped assuage that?
“It could just be as simple as maybe your take is if Jacoby was healthy, they would start him, but I also think that they didn't want to play Howell again because they were fearful of how ugly and how awful it could get against San Francisco, and it really didn’t,” Grant said. “They were basically saying ‘we're not going to get out of bed and look underneath the mattress because we're afraid there could be a monster there,’ but they fell out of bed and it just so happened they woke up and there was no monster – so now they can just get back in bed. So, is it Jacoby's health, or it’s one more game and we can say he started all year?”
“It's more the second one and I really do believe it got to the ownership suite,” Danny replied. “Stop with meaningless futile exercises to make yourself look better. You don’t, you look worse. Just play the kid; it’d be the first time in a while we've had someone start all 17 games in a long time, which we don’t do here, so this is a nice stabilizing thing, as much sample as you can get for the next regime – and everyone should get a chance here, participation trophy Sunday against our hated rivals, please and thank you. I really do believe it got to that level, where it's not practical.”
Danny ‘likes’ Jacoby Brissett, and thinks he’ll get good money to go be a ‘quality backup and insurance policy somewhere’ because we know it takes more than one QB to navigate a season most times – but Grant thinks that there’s something more nefarious at play when it comes to Danny’s idea that ownership stepped in.
“I think they're going back to Sam because now you're talking about a start for Brissett going into the off-season. If you could have started him this past week and given him two games, maybe, I think there'd be enough sample where all of a sudden you could kind of save face a little bit and say, ‘look at what we look like in these two games with Brissett,” GP said. “I don't know if there's enough of an opportunity in a one off where you're a 13-point dog necessarily to do that, and I also just think it's weird to not start Howell when he's quite literally run 24-plus miles of this marathon. When you've played 16, there's one left, it’s kind of weird to blow the whistle, have him turn around as he can see the finish line, and say, don't run through the tape.”
And from Brissett’s side?
“I'm not telling you, he's not hurt, he absolutely tweaked his hamstring – I just think that if my hamstring’s barking a little bit, and I'm going to the open market this off-season with the film I had with two masterful performances off the bench where we scored touchdowns on all five of my real drives this season, yeah, I'll just not play in the Week 18 bludgeoning against the rival trying to win the division championship, and I'll watch that game and heal up and I'll tell my agent to start sending that film around from when I was awesome twice,” Grant said. “There’s nothing to be gained for him.”
“Yes, and if he was playing for the Green Bay Packers right now, win and we're in, he'd be going right now,” Danny replied. “There'd be all the treatment of the world, and every wrap and stim machine and cold and hot tub and everything in between would be strapped on there and he'd be good to go. But guys make business decisions, and that’s a very practical business decision.”