Danny Rouhier is feeling a big Commanders turnaround, starting Sunday in Atlanta!
"They're going to win on Sunday and start playing better," he said Wednesday. "This is not popular right now, everybody's very down. I get that Thursday night happened, I was as mad as everyone – but we're ignoring three years of history here."
Yes, it's the history of slow starts and hot middles that intrigues Danny…about the Commanders, not the Lean Pocket he hammered down while pretending to be healthy during a station break.
"The last four years, they have started 1-4, 2-3, 1-4, and now 2-3…anybody see a pattern there?" Danny asked. "You know what they've done in the middle chunks of the season, 2021 being the exception – but starting in Week 6 in 2020, and again in 2022, they went on a run, and they're about to start this year."
Indeed, last year's 8-8-1 team went from 1-4 to 4-4 by the end of October, and got all the way up to 7-5 before the tie and an end-of-year swoon. The 2021 season was a little later – that 2-3 team fell to 2-6 before the bye, but got back to 6-6 – and in 2020, the team fell to 1-5 on a tough loss to the Giants but beat Dallas before the bye and got all the way back to 6-7 and eventually won the division.
Here we go again?
"They have some sort of transformative moment, whether it's a big speech or an adjustment or a scheme change, and they have played much better, more competitive football, even in losses, where the week before they're getting destroyed by bad teams," Danny said of the past. "This has been Ron Rivera's M.O. – we get down, we get upset, the noise starts pouring in. To his detriment, you're in a toilet every single year, but to his credit, they fight their way out of it to have a competitive season, and they're always in the hunt - and it starts this weekend."
It needs to, because there's another problem: those last three teams went 1-2, 1-4, and 1-3-1 down the stretch.
"When you think this thing is going to go really bad, when you start thinking people are gonna lose jobs and this could end in shambles, they rise from the ashes, and that seems to be Ron's strength," Danny continued.
"They batten down the hatches, backs against the wall, all that, and that's when they've been better. They've always been good for one of those stretches right when you think it's about to bottom out or really get ugly."
Take a listen above to Danny's entire rant, and Grant's responses, about his prediction!
