Dan Quinn took the extra two weeks the NFL affords to new coaches at the start of the offseason program, kicking off his first one in Washington on April 2. Over the years, those have generally been used to get a jump on players lifting together, meeting with new coaches, and getting a jumpstart on installing new schemes.
And all of that has been mixed into the Washington Commanders’ past two weeks in Ashburn.
But the more important stuff, as Quinn sees it, had nothing to do with X’s and O’s.
To kick off the offseason program, he gave his assistant coaches and players a homework assignment, asking them to put together their version of “My Story.” Each would be a PowerPoint presentation, with pictures, to show teammates and colleagues their .
“In the first couple weeks, I really just want the connection—player to player, coaches with players,” Quinn says. “That’s at the top of the pile. I’ve always felt like you can coach people to the depth of that relationship. The better you know somebody, the harder and deeper that coaching can go. If it’s just surface level, it’ll be surface-level coaching. As we’re building these relationships from coaches to coaches and players to players, and there's a lot of new players in the locker room, we’ll get good, but we have to get good in the locker rooms and the meeting rooms first.
“That connection and the way we talk, and past that, the spirit of competition, whether it’s in the weight room, doing workouts, talking s–t, having fun, pushing each other to see where it can get to, that’s where the real competition is. It’s you and me going out to train or run and pushing one another to see how good we can get.”
That ties the two baseline tentpoles of Quinn’s new program—connection and competition.
Truth is that’s not much different than what he’d emphasized in Atlanta over five-plus seasons, including three trips to the playoffs and a Super Bowl appearance. The competition piece is, in part, borrowed from the Pete Carroll program that Quinn worked in twice. The connection element is something that’s always been Quinn’s own. So, the Commanders aren’t getting a totally different guy that the Falcons got nine years ago.
That said, if the bones are the same, the body around them has changed. Quinn was fired about a month after his 50th birthday—back in October 2020—and rather than wallow, the ever-positive coach took the spot he was in and turned it into a pivot point. He learned more about himself, and what he did well and didn’t in his first shot at being an NFL head coach, to prepare himself to be better, and especially if a second chance came along.
That second chance is here. He’s arrived with a new owner, and, alongside new GM Adam Peters, has been armed with the No. 2 pick in the NFL draft to address his new franchise’s decades-long quarterback need. As such, he’ll attack this one a bit differently—and with lessons learned informing the differences in who he is now as a coach.
