Dan Quinn is known as a culture-builder, so it should come as no surprise that the Washington Commanders’ culture is under constant evaluation. When the team is winning and “the universe is handing out good deals,” Quinn said, that’s a straightforward exercise. Taking a peek under the hood during times of adversity is different.
“When you’re going through a tough spot, it’s really where the culture can reveal itself,” Quinn said in an interview before Sunday’s overtime loss to the Miami Dolphins.
“Tough spot” might be an understatement for the Commanders as they prepare to return from their Week 12 bye. With that 16-13 loss to Miami in Madrid, Washington (3-8) has lost six consecutive games and ranks 30th in the NFL in turnover margin and 31st in yards per game allowed. According to ESPN’s Football Power Index, the Commanders have a 34 percent chance of earning a top-five pick in April’s draft, while their odds of returning to the playoffs have dipped to zero.
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Quinn has previously drawn a distinction between issues of performance and those of culture. But a six-game losing streak is the sort of situation that could expose fissures in the locker room or cracks in the culture that he has been trying to build.
Asked to evaluate his team’s culture in the midst of a trying season, Quinn said before the Dolphins game there have been some aspects with which he’s been pleased and others that have been revelatory. In his view, culture is not just about whether the players get along socially but about a shared standard and accountability.
“If you just walked in, you wouldn’t see people in cliques, you wouldn’t see people turning on one another, you wouldn’t see any of that — which I’m very proud of,” Quinn said. “But I also want to see, in the toughest of times, with new players here, new people who are coming into the team — can we lift them up to say, ‘This is how we [expletive] do things here? You’ve got to [expletive] put out; you’ve got to go hard; you’ve got to do this; you’ve got to do that.’ So that I want to see us go through it.”
“You learn a lot,” he continued. “It sucks. But you do learn a lot.”
Fred Johnson, a leadership expert who has consulted with six NFL organizations, said losing streaks can provide a particularly valuable window into the culture of a team.
Johnson, who bills himself as a “culture architect,” said moments of hardship have a way of exposing the “under-the-table” issues within a locker room — all the amorphous interpersonal legwork that is not easily discernible otherwise. A tough stretch could prompt star players to check out and lead to heated players-only meetings. Or it could provide positive glimpses of key players leaning in, and what Johnson calls “sideways accountability.”
“The great teams don’t need those players-only meetings,” he said, “because they’re having those meetings in little snippets all the time with each other.”
There can be public clues about the cultural health of a team, Johnson said. He cited Arizona Cardinals Coach Jonathan Gannon’s sideline outburst toward running back Emari Demercado after a fumble in October as one negative example. Yet so much of it is happening behind the scenes.
Johnson said the key to maintaining culture amid a difficult stretch often comes down to accountability in small moments. If one player is cutting corners on a drill, does a teammate interject? If a shared standard isn’t being met, will someone speak up?
“Every culture is fragile,” Johnson said. “… If there’s a cultural violation, it has to be addressed immediately. We call it addressing it at a crumb level before it becomes Thanksgiving dinner.”
Quinn acknowledged that part of evaluating the Commanders’ culture during this losing streak has been about focusing on the responses and characteristics of individual players. He referenced a moment late in the team’s blowout loss to Detroit when he pulled safety Jeremy Reaves out of the game.
Though it was a precautionary move because Reaves’s hand had been bothering him, Quinn said the veteran was visibly “crushed” to be taken out, almost to the point of tears. The coach viewed it as a sign of Reaves’s emotional investment.
“It sucks when the hard spaces come — whether it’s in football or in life. But there’s also some purpose that comes behind it, to say we’re going to [expletive] lean into this hard and find out who’s absolutely down,” Quinn said.
“Culturally, I know what [Reaves] stands for. I know who he is and what he is. When you see it the other way, of somebody not putting out the right way or deflecting, that speaks to it, too.”
To that end, veteran linebacker Bobby Wagner said the team’s losing streak is also an opportunity.
“This is a test to see what the culture is made of,” said Wagner, one of the most prominent leaders in the locker room. “Anybody can have culture and it’s good when things are going good, but how well is everything when things are not going your way? That’s kind of where we’re at right now.”
Wagner, Quinn and the rest of the Commanders would prefer to be evaluating their culture amid the happy backdrop of a winning campaign, like the one they enjoyed a season ago. But when asked if miserable stretches can have long-term cultural benefits, Quinn said yes — even if the calluses might not be visible until months or years down the road.
“It’s kind of like when we were growing up and our parents didn’t know anything, and then you got a little older and go ‘yeah, they’re pretty smart, they knew their [expletive],’” Quinn said. “So there’s parts of that where you go through hard things, and you’re like ‘this sucks.’ And then you have a different perspective a year or two later and, ‘You know what, we went through something like this, and this is how we can’t allow it to happen ever again.’”
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