Now that he is officially the Commanders head coach, that may seem like an unnecessary thing to write. But after the week the organization had, it’s worth saying—because the team’s search was done with open minds and clean intentions. Once the Commanders got Quinn on the phone to offer him the job, it didn’t take long for the coach to bolster their feelings on the match.
“I’m so f—ing pumped,” he told them. “I wanted to do this so bad.”
And so three years after the Atlanta Falcons fired Quinn, and following consecutive offseasons where he pulled his own name from coaching searches to return to Dallas, the Commanders’ thorough, winding process is complete, four weeks after it started.
Things have changed since Josh Harris took over last summer in place of disgraced ex-owner Dan Snyder. But one thing that stayed the same: There always seems to be a lot of intrigue with this particular franchise. The team’s latest coaching search, which followed an expedited search for a new head of football ops (landing on new GM Adam Peters) was certainly interesting. Here are the details …
• Peters was hired Jan. 12, when Washington was just getting its coaching search off the ground. But because of the rules governing the two bye teams, the Commanders had to get moving on Baltimore Ravens assistants Mike Macdonald and Anthony Weaver, so Peters missed their first cracks at the job—those interviews were on Jan. 11.
• That left Quinn, Detroit Lions coordinators Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn, Houston Texans OC Bobby Slowik, Los Angeles Rams DC Raheem Morris, and internal candidate Eric Bieniemy for the first round of interviews. Those were done over Zoom into the weekend of the division playoffs. Harris, Peters, Martin Mayhew, and consultants Bob Myers and Rick Spielman were part of those (with Myers and Harris in for the first hour of them, and the other three there throughout).
[Super Bowl 2024: Latest news and analysis]
• While those interviews were going on, the five graded each of the candidates in a number of categories: leadership, intelligence, communication, ability to build a staff, honesty and integrity, and consistency of personality.
• Quinn, it seemed, scored highly in every category and was different in that he’d been a head coach before. (Morris was the only other candidate who could say that.) In the first interview, Quinn took the group through the 360-degree review he did of his time as Falcons head coach; he told Washington he’d even hired people to do a deep dive into what he’d done right and wrong. Quinn explained how he’d taken the information he got back to heart and worked on it, showing real self-awareness and humility.
• After the group compared notes, and without a set number of people they planned to invite back as finalists, the five decided they liked all seven external candidates enough to invite them back for second interviews. After some schedule shifting and moving, the team met with Morris and Slowik in Miami before the conference title games and, eventually, had Weaver and Macdonald set for Monday in Baltimore. Quinn was set for Tuesday morning in D.C., while Glenn and the group were set to fly to Detroit to interview Glenn and Johnson that afternoon, to best accommodate the coaches who were working the conference title games.
• The format for the second interviews was also a little different. They’d start with Peters, Spielman and Mayhew, then hit a break, then go two hours with Myers and Harris joining in, before finishing up with Peters getting one-on-one time with the candidate.
• Morris arrived in Florida for his second interview with the Commanders on Jan. 23—knocking that one out of the park—then flew to Atlanta and Carolina for second interviews with the Falcons and Panthers. Just as he got home to Los Angeles, the Falcons offered him their job. Morris’s camp relayed that to Peters, who wound up telling them that, at that point, he wanted to stay true to the process, with five interviews left. Morris took the Atlanta job.
• Over the weekend, Peters went back through his background work. His former Niners colleagues Kyle Shanahan, John Lynch, Paraag Marathe and Jed York had been generous with their time in vetting candidates, and Shanahan and York had seen Quinn up close at opposite ends of the spectrum: York watched Quinn in his first NFL job, as the San Francisco 49ers’ DL coach from 2001–04, and Shanahan worked for him when Quinn was head coach in Atlanta. What struck Peters was the consistency in what everyone said.
• And the polling that Peters, Spielman, and Mayhew did canvassing NFL contacts, from Dallas and Atlanta, and all those people in San Francisco who’d worked for Quinn with the Falcons, was just as consistent. But he wasn’t the only candidate who’d hit for that sort of average, which is why the group went into last week with an open mind—and a still wide-open search. As such, perception that Johnson was the heavy favorite rankled them, especially when it made some candidates leery about staying in the race.
• Quinn’s interview at the Four Seasons in Georgetown kicked off at 7:30 a.m., and Peters, Spielman and Mayhew saw a coach shot of a cannon—feeling Quinn’s passion for his work, his excitement about the Commanders job in particular, and how the mutual connections between the football folks in the room created a natural chemistry. When Peters and Quinn went one-on-one, the GM marked down that this was someone he’d want to work with.
• Washington’s party of five then boarded for Detroit, and found out over the in-flight WiFi on X (formerly known as Twitter) that Johnson had pulled out of their search. Minutes later, a text that the Lions OC sent at 12:45 p.m. to inform the team of his decision came through. So after landing in Michigan, the group had one interview to do at a Detroit-area hotel rather than two. Glenn acquitted himself nicely, and Washington once again had more to think about.
• Spielman, Mayhew and Peters flew from Detroit to Mobile, Ala., for Senior Bowl practices with two candidates in mind: Macdonald and Quinn. They debriefed and resolved to sleep on it. On Wednesday, Macdonald arrived in Seattle for a second interview (that turned out to be more of a coronation) and simplified things for the Commanders.
• On Wednesday night, Peters, who got his start in New England, called former Patriots coach Bill Belichick to touch base. After that call, he reached out to Quinn to offer him the job.
And so now Washington moves forward with Quinn and Peters, new ownership, a new structure, the second pick in the 2024 draft and a of work to do.
