A look back in Commanders history: The 2013 season

With the NFL season fast approaching, let’s take a look back on past Washington Commanders seasons and remember the good parts, and the (far more frequent) bad parts. Over the next month or so I will be evaluating each of the past 15 seasons of Commanders football and rank them from worst to best. With Washington collecting a record of 97-143-1 over the last decade and a half, there is going to be a lot of bad seasons to go through, though all these seasons had some bright spots.

A few factors went into my decision of how to rank the poor seasons with the same or similar records. Were they supposed to be good? Did they have the potential to be good? Why did they end up being so bad? Did something good at least come out of the season?

With all of these factors in mind it was clear which season stands out as the worst: 2013.

Coming off a division winning season in 2012 the Commanders and Mike Shanahan had high expectations. They were projected to win eight games, and instead only won three. This was the biggest gap between projected success and actual success the Commanders would have over the entire 15 year stretch. With 2012 ROTY QB Robert Griffin III entering his second season, the sky should have been the limit. Granted, RG3 had just come off his second career ACL surgery, but with the way he had bounced back at Baylor there was an expectation he could bounce back once more. *Spoiler Alert* This did not end up being the case.