Washington Football Team: Breaking down the decision to bench Dwayne Haskins, start Kyle Allen

2. The shortened offseason hurt Haskins badly

The shortened offseason hurt a lot of young players across the league, but Haskins was probably the player most impacted by it for Washington. He was transitioning to his third head coach in less than a year after the firing of Jay Gruden and after Rivera replaced interim head coach Bill Callahan.

As if that wasn’t hard enough, then came the pandemic. There were no offseason activities and most meetings in the early offseason were virtual. Training camp was shortened, so there weren’t as many reps in the new offense. And there was no preseason, so Haskins would have to learn on the fly in actual game action.

That’s an unenviable situation for any player to be in. Picking up so many new systems in just a year-plus takes a lot out of a young player, especially one with as little starting experience as Haskins, who started for only a single season during his college days.

Even though reports coming out from camp were that Haskins was picking up the offense well and fitting into Turner’s scheme, there had to be some understanding that Haskins was going to have some hiccups in the early stages of the season. There was, but evidently, Haskins didn’t show enough growth between starts for Rivera to want to trust him.

And that was one of the biggest reasons that Haskins was yanked so early. The lack of growth. It also didn’t help Haskins’ cause that Allen is another young quarterback (24) with two full years of experience in the Norv/Scott Turner offense with the Panthers.

Now, it’s probably not fair to Haskins to only give him four games to prove himself given these circumstances, but it appears that Rivera may have been swayed to make a move by one of Haskins’ most recent performances.