Week 6 Reality Checks: Washington Football Team vs Kansas City

2. The Reality Is, the culture change is failing in one key point.

Bobby McCain blew up at the media after the Falcons game since he didn’t like getting questioned about why the defense was struggling. Daron Payne was quoted hinting that the defensive line can’t do anything about the back end of the defense struggling. William Jackson III told reporters that they shouldn’t be so negative and there’s been plenty of good for the defense to build on. Taylor Heinicke assessed his game against New Orleans as good…except for the two picks. Ron Rivera reprimanded the media for asking questions about Jack Del Rio’s status as play caller and needed adjustments to the defensive scheme in response to the poor play through three weeks. He also remarked that the defense only really had a couple bad plays against New Orleans.

These are the kinds of comments we’ve become accustomed to under Jay Gruden and Bruce Allen’s leadership. The lack of self-awareness and personal accountability has been a staple of many teams here in Washington in the Dan Snyder era. But there had been hope, based on his tough and old-school rhetoric, that Ron Rivera was going to usher in a new era of personal accountability that eliminated the excuse-making and finger-pointing. But that’s not been the case this season. If that trend doesn’t change, this team will death-spiral just like so many iterations of the Burgundy and Gold before them. And as the losses keep mounting, the tough questions will only get tougher and the finger-pointing will only get more pointed and transparent. Rivera needs to nip that in the bud right now before he loses control of the locker room.