"Not much on offense. Nothing on defense," that's what former Washington head coach Jay Gruden said about last Thursday's Commanders' 40-20 defeat to the Chicago Bears on The Chris Russell Show this week.
Gruden added that it is really important to rally the troops in these situations and can sometimes create an 'us against the world' mentality to galvanize the players to bounce back from a rough outing.
Switching gears to the defense, Russell asks if this is one bad night at the office - especially for the secondary after seeing Emmanuel Forbes benched and Kendall Fuller struggle as DJ Moore ran roughshod all night long – or if this is just the latest in a series of troubling signs for Jack Del Rio's unit?
"Yeah, it's troubling there's no doubt about it especially after seeing AJ Brown go for 160, you say well, here comes DJ Moore surely there's gonna be a plan in place to limit his targets," Gruden said. "And there really wasn't one. They tried to put [Benjamin] St-Juste on him early, he got beat. Then they put Forbes on him and he got ripped. Then they put Fuller got beat pretty bad."
The former head coach said a lot of the struggles are technique and guys "are not making the tackle."
"They have to get themselves in better position to make tackles, at least," Gruden said, "limit the damage and make teams earn every blade of grass. You can't [let them] throw a 10-yard stop route to AJ Brown or DJ Moore and have them run for 50 time and time again. That happened twice with AJ and twice with DJ."
When it comes to Forbes, the Commanders' first-round draft pick who was expected to increase the number of turnovers the defense forced, his benching due to poor play is likely a result of "gambling a little bit too much."
Gruden said that the young corner has to adjust to NFL caliber quarterbacks being better at fitting passes into tight windows and he must pick his spots better when it comes to going for a turnover or pass breakup.
Switching to the other side of the ball, despite doing nothing in the first half, Gruden said that he thinks quarterback Sam Howell "has done enough throughout the course of the year to feel pretty good about your offense's ability to get some yards."
"They do have to start faster," he said. "And it's important for Washington, you see a lot of these teams, to try to play with a lead so they can be more balanced as well and not put Sam in harm's way and take five, six, seven sacks every week. He's taking way too many sacks, their offensive line has to protect way too long, there's no play-action threat at all because they're down so much and they're playing from behind and they're in third-and-long.
"So it's very tough on the young quarterback. The key is to stay balanced and stay close in games in the fourth quarter like they did against Arizona and like they did against Denver."
Gruden added that he likes the way Brian Robinson is running hard, but Washington has to keep games closer so they don't have to abandon the run in chasing a large deficit.
Russell and Gruden then went around the NFL and took a look at the Atlanta Falcons' offense and how they match up against Washington. Listen to the full conversation on the audio player above!
