The Washington Commanders dropped to 3-9 after losing their seventh consecutive contest on Sunday Night Football to the Denver Broncos. It's the second-straight week they've fallen in overtime.
Despite what's been two months full of doom and gloom in Washington, there was nothing to be ashamed of in this one. The Commanders took it to a team that's tied for the best record in the league and fought like their lives depended on it. With their backs against the wall, they went down swinging.
It's the exact type of fight that's needed out of head coach Dan Quinn's unit, even in a lost season. But the Commanders still can't escape from a cruel reality that has made all the difference between their wildly disappointing campaign and last season's 12-win one.
Commanders have lost their fine-margins edge this season
Week 13 marked the third time this season in which Washington has lost a game that was decided on the final play. They fell to the Chicago Bears in Week 6 on a walk-off field goal and, two weeks ago, to the Miami Dolphins in overtime. They have no such wins in 2025.
It's a stark contrast to last year, when the Commanders won six such games (seven, including the wild-card playoff victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers). They beat the New York Giants, Chicago Bears, New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, Atlanta Falcons, and Dallas Cowboys, all in contests that were decided by the slightest of margins.
They also lost to the Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers in matchups that could be considered virtual coin flips. If you reversed the outcome of all eight of them, Washington would have gone 8-9. If the Commanders won all three of their nail-biter losses this year, they would currently be 6-6.
Add in Washington's dismal injury situation, and a much more demanding schedule, and all of this further validates something that has been an understated truth all year. The Commanders, in the most average of all possible situations, are honestly not that different of a team from what they were last year.
Instead, what we have is an illustration of two absolute extremes in luck variance. In 2024, everything went right. In 2025, everything has gone wrong.
That has applied to big-picture developments such as roster construction and injuries. It has also applied to the little things which determine how games are won and lost — and by extension, how perspective is shaped.
In every close game, there are always one or two moments you can point to in which, had they played out differently, everything changes. The more often a team's results are decided by such occurrences, the less it becomes about execution and the more it becomes about the accumulation of luck in incremental sample sizes.
In 2024, Washington won a game on a Hail Mary. It won a game because the Giants didn't have a kicker. It won a game because DeVonta Smith dropped a routine short pass that would have given the Eagles a game-sealing first down. The Commanders beat the Buccaneers in the playoffs on a doinked field goal, after the turning point was an unforced Tampa Bay fumble deep in its own territory.
Those are the types of breaks a team can be expected to have fall their way some of the time, but not all of the time. Now, Washington is getting them none of the time.
Last season's Commanders were not as close to contention as they appeared. But it's through that same warped perception that they're much better than your average 3-9 team right now.