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It’s easy for a coach to stand in front of his team and ask for tunnel vision—for the players to block everything out, to put horse blinders on, or to apply whatever cliché you want to eliminate the distractions that everyone from the left tackle to the guy with the Coors Light tall boy in the 300 level knows can see.
To have the fate of your livelihood destabilized is something else entirely.
And that, for players and coaches of certain teams, is what NFL trade deadline week is like. The quarterback might have to hear his receivers are on the block. A corner might know the pass rushers in front of him are being shopped. Sometimes, it’s that quarterback or corner himself having to deal with it.
And no one on the outside cares. But that’s what this past week was like to be a Commander or a Viking, with a season in full swing—starting rife with uncertainty and big-picture questions and ending with, well, tests for everyone.
“First and foremost, Albert, the biggest thing more than anything else was with a couple of really good players for us, guys that help establish who we are trying to become, we obviously made the trades,” Commanders coach Ron Rivera told me late Sunday afternoon. “So we started trying to get across to our guys, . I tried to stress to them just how important it was that they understand that this deal will give other guys opportunities. And you guys have to step up.”
The Commanders’ coaches and players handled the fallout of trading both of the team’s edge rushers—first Montez Sweat, then Chase Young—with a 20–17 win over the Patriots on the road. The victory won’t guarantee Rivera or anyone else job security when new owner Josh Harris makes the bigger decisions in January, no more than any of the veterans who rallied the Vikings to a road win in Atlanta are assured of anything beyond the next few months.
But that doesn’t mean what happened Sunday with these two teams didn’t say something about these two teams—with one team (the Vikings) that’d be in the playoffs if they started today, and another (the Commanders) that’s just a game out of that last spot.
“It cements everything I believe about team culture and overcoming adversity,” Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell told me from the tarmac at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport early Sunday night. “No better example than to do it on the road, and in a game we felt like was pretty important for us moving forward.”
Now all those players and coaches, in both Washington and Minnesota, can move forward, and we’ll tell you how they’re doing it.
