With the football season over (well, on Sunday), Clinton Yates’ weekly visit with Craig Hoffman is back on Fridays – and since there was still one more game left to go in the season, Craig and Clinton got to chop it up about the Commanders’ finale on his return to the end of the week.
And it’s the finale of the Ron Rivera all but certainly, and when Craig asked for a eulogy of the last four years and handful of days, Yates gave him one word and a whole lot of fun allegories.
“Milquetoast is a word that comes to mind, and when you think about the coaches in the history of the franchise, they all had something that people either liked or people either hated or people thought was really cool, but Ron was just so boring,” Yates said. “It felt like nothing was ever truly happening. It was always, ‘we gotta take a look at this, we gotta take a look at that,’ and it’s like, Grandpa, alright already, can we go to the carnival? It felt like sitting on the porch the entire time, never really wanting to mix it up in the streets or even have fun with the rest of the family in the backyard.”
Yates also described it as ‘a holding pattern,’ perhaps, as Ron used to say about quarterbacks, a bridge to the next era.
“It just felt like a holding pattern where the goal was to try to get somebody that was a proven NFL guy and a name folks recognized, but it felt like a little bit of a retirement plan for Ron Rivera,” Yates said. “I'm not mad at him for that, but it's got to be one of the least exciting coaching eras that fans of that team have seen in a really, really long time. Personality goes a long way, bro, and this guy didn't have much of it, in my opinion.”
“Millquetoast is both correct and crazy, because it also was four years of non-stop chaos,” Craig replied. “Like, there was always something; some of it was really serious and sad, like Ron having cancer was a real thing and the way guys battled for him and rallied around him, and that was during peak COVID – but so much was happening that in a weird way, Ron was brought in to kind of settle down the Bruce Allen, Jay Gruden, whatever era that was, and it feels like in so many ways it just never stopped, it just kept on going.”
“That's true, but that's also part of the reason why, when I think of Ron Rivera, I actually think about football. I don't really ascribe all that other stuff to him,” Yates replied. “Sure, he was the head coach, sure he was the one that was sort of assigned to kind of keep it under wraps whilst things changed, but they didn't – and also, the product didn't get a ton better or worse as well. And so, I'm willing to say, ‘okay, Ron, you walked into a franchise that needed you, I'm not going to say that you're the person I think of when I think of the lawsuits or the sale of the team.’ I don't know necessarily that really was going to change no matter who that coach was, so I try to keep it to football – and when I do that, you're just kind of like, ho hum. You might have had a couple of good wins here and there, there might have been a couple of quarterback controversies here and there, but that's nothing new in DC.”
So what comes next?
“At some point, this franchise has to commit to somebody who either is in alignment, vision- wise, with whoever the GM and the owner is – none of these power struggles any longer – or somebody that plain, people just like,” Yates said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. The idea of a sexy hire, I don’t find that unattractive for a team that otherwise you don't know where they're going. The question is what is attractive to one person versus another, but you gotta get somebody that people want to show up to see, as opposed to someone they’re just willing to deal with because they care about football that much. I think the fan base deserves that. Personally, I think the GM hire is probably a little bit more important to the larger goal, but I do think that the head coach of this team is a very important next hire from an optics standpoint, for sure, for the Commanders.”
Take a listen to the entire segment above!
