Taylor Heinicke is probably the biggest reason the Washington Commanders are in the playoff race at all right now. He settled an erratic offense down when he took over for an injured Carson Wentz in Week 7. He energized a sagging locker room. The Commanders, then 1-4, went on a 5-1 run.
Yet none of that ever seemed to completely win over coach Ron Rivera, who seems like he’s about to pull the plug on the Heinicke Era. And if he does, just as he promised it won’t be a “knee-jerk” decision.
It is a decision that has been building for a while.
If Rivera does hand the reins back to Wentz for the final two games of the season — must-win games at home against the Cleveland Browns (1 p.m. ET Sunday on FOX) and the Dallas Cowboys — it won’t just be about Heinicke’s two fourth-quarter turnovers in the 37-20 loss in San Francisco on Saturday. It won’t even just be about the Commanders’ 0-2-1 slide that has them clinging to a playoff berth by just a half-game.
If Rivera makes the switch after meeting with his coaches on Monday, it will be about the “whole picture,” he said. And that picture shows that there has not been one point over the past nine weeks when Rivera has looked or sounded completely comfortable with Heinicke as his starter. It has seemed for a while as if he was just waiting for a chance to remind everyone why Wentz was still his guy.
And make no mistake: The 29-year-old Wentz has always been Rivera’s guy. He made that crystal clear back in mid-October when he angrily called “bulls–t” on reports that he was against the offseason trade with the Colts that brought Wentz to Washington for two third-round picks. Don’t forget, Rivera had 15 games of Heinicke last season when the Commanders went 7-10 and his quarterback and team wilted down the stretch. He wasn’t looking for more.
That’s why the Commanders spent the offseason searching for a new quarterback. They settled on Wentz, and he looked good early. He threw seven touchdown passes in his first two games and averaged 325 passing yards. Yeah, there were mistakes — three interceptions — but the Commanders scored 28 and 27 points and averaged 393 yards. It was the best their offense looked all year.
The next three games under Wentz were terrible. And then there was that day, after a 21-17 loss in Tennessee, when Rivera said “quarterback” was the reason the Commanders had fallen behind the other teams in the NFC East — ironically after Wentz threw for 359 yards and two touchdowns with just one interception. The coach was trying to say that the other teams had been building around a franchise quarterback for several years, while he was only in his fifth game with Wentz. But the soundbite was damning. Rivera even apologized to Wentz and the team.
Yet there was still no real indication Rivera was even contemplating a quarterback switch until Wentz fractured a finger on his throwing hand in Chicago on Oct. 13. Even after Heinicke started rolling and his teammates seemed to love him and the Commanders got back in the playoff race, Rivera’s praise of Heinicke always sounded lukewarm, as if he were just waiting for the bubble to burst.
Maybe he was just being pragmatic, or trying to be fair to Wentz. But there were other issues, too. The offense under Heinicke never seemed to operate on all cylinders like it did during the first two weeks of the season. The Commanders averaged 20.4 points per game and 346.9 yards during Heinicke’s run, prior to the game in San Francisco, and Rivera always felt they could do much better. Heinicke was only throwing for 211.6 yards per game.
The QB also lived a little too close to the edge for Rivera’s tastes. Yes, Wentz had a penchant for making terrible decisions, as he showed with his six interceptions in seven games. But he was still learning a new offense. The 6-foot-5, 237-pounder also had a bigger arm and was more accurate than Heinicke, who seemed to sail two or three passes per game far over his intended receiver’s head.
That’s why the door has always been open to Wentz. Even last week, in the wake of the Commanders’ 20-12 loss to the Giants, which was just Heinicke’s second loss in eight starts, Rivera admitted that a quarterback switch had been “talked about” and was “something that, to be quite frank, I do have to think about at some point.”
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when word leaked out Saturday morning that he had a plan in place to make the quarterback switch in San Francisco if and when Heinicke struggled, nor should it have been a surprise to anyone when he actually did it.
Ironically, Heinicke was actually “pretty good” on Saturday, according to Rivera. He was 8-of-11 for 89 yards and a touchdown in the first half and threw another touchdown pass early in the second. But Heinicke’s fumble and interception on his first two fourth-quarter drives presented “an opportunity for us to see where Carson was,” Rivera said. And after Wentz went 12-of -16 for 123 yards and a touchdown in the final nine minutes, Rivera said, “He did a nice job.”
“He had good command of what we were doing,” Rivera said. “He stood tall in the pocket and got the ball out quickly a couple times and threw some good balls.”
Was it that much better than Heinicke? Not really. But Rivera sure sounded like he was more comfortable with what Wentz did.
Not that any of that is new for Heinicke, an undrafted free agent in 2015 who has had an uphill battle to be a starting quarterback from the start. It took him six years, five NFL teams and a stint in the XFL just to get his first real opportunity. So he meant it when he said, “I get it. I’ve heard things like that my whole life.”
Taylor Heinicke on journey from XFL to NFL
Commanders QB Taylor Heinicke joins Colin Cowherd to discuss his journey from the XFL to the NFL and what it took to get where he is today.
He knows the reality is that performance is never the only thing that matters with a quarterback. He knows Rivera is invested in Wentz. As the coach loudly explained back in October, “I’m the f—ing guy that pulled out the sheets of paper, that looked at the analytics, that watched the tape” on Wentz before the deal was made. And then he was the one who greenlighted the $28.3 million that Commanders owner Dan Snyder has spent on Wentz this season. He’s the one who handed Wentz the keys to the offense and to his team.
So don’t be surprised in the next two days when Rivera does it again and puts his team’s playoff fate back in the hands of the man he wanted at quarterback from the beginning. Wentz is his guy and he was always going to get another shot at running the Commanders. Even Heinicke seemed to understand it was always just a matter of time.
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Ralph Vacchiano is the NFC East reporter for FOX Sports, covering the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.
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