Two overtime losses in which the Commanders looked competitivre have done a lot to ameliorate the lack of fan confidence that blossomed in the wake of four consecutive ugly losses that occurred between Weeks 7 and 10 — a sting of games in which the Commanders were out-scored 154-65. Losing by an average of more than 22 points per game for a quarter of the season will take the heart out of most any fan base. The surprise, if there is any, is that anyone at all still expressed confidence in the Commanders by mid-November.

And yet, many Washington fans did. At its lowest point in Week 11 (following the 44-22 loss to the Lions at Landover) fan confidence still stood at 32%. In other words, nearly 1 in every 3 Hogs Haven readers that responded to our survey still said ‘yes’ when asked if they were confident in the direction of the team.

That number has now more than doubled following two overtime losses, the second of which was a 1-point loss to the Broncos, one of the NFL’s best teams at the moment, in which the Commanders showed that they continue to fight and that the quality of the team’s play is getting better.

In this week’s Reacts survey, 66% of survey respondents expressed confidence in the direction of the team. In a season where the playoffs are no longer something we can talk about with a straight face, confidence needs to be focused on the longer term prospects for the team, which have been hard to discount ever since the day Jayden Daniels was drafted to give the Commanders the franchise quarterback for whom they’d been searching for many, many years.

That said, there is a lot of confidence even in the team’s most immediate prospects.

Asked to pick the winner of Sunday’s game against the Vikings in Minnesota, three-quarters of the Hogs Haven readers who responded to this week’s survey picked Washington to win.

This is consistent with oddsmakers and NFL fans across the country. According to FanDuel, the Commanders are 1.5-point road favorites, and in SB Nation’s nationwide email survey, the Commanders were picked to win by a majority of NFL fans.

Enthusiasm for picking the reinvigorated Commanders to keep on winning, however, is limited.

In our final question of this week’s survey, we asked Hogs Haven readers to predict the team’s record at the end of the year by saying how many total wins Washington would have.

A record of 5-12 was the most popular prediction, and, at 43% of the vote, it was more than twice as popular as predictions of 6-11 (19%) or 4-13 (18%).

Interestingly, there is a stubbornly faithful 2% of readers who are predicting that Washington will sweep its remaining five games to finish 8-9, though that group is heavily outnumbered by the 12% who expect Washington to go winless from this point forward, ending the year at 3-17 with a 12-game losing streak.

Factors in the rising short- and long-term confidence

There are several factors that emerged in the comments section of the survey article that account for the level of qualified confidence that fans in our survey seem to feel.

I’ve already mentioned the fight and improved play on display by the team as a whole in each of its last two games. Despite losing both, the Commanders were not embarrassed like they had been in the prior 4 games, and it was clear that they have not quit on the season, the coaches, or themselves.

The general expectation for two more wins, including a road victory this Sunday, has a lot to do with the opponents. The Vikings actually have one more “W” than the Commanders heading into Week 14, but are considered by most to be in greater disarray at this point than the rallying Washington team. Next week’s opponent, the New York Giants, were the first team eliminated from playoff contention this season and they are on a 7-game losing streak of their own. Most fans who expect to add a pair of wins before the end of the season seem to be pointing at those two games as the source of the added victories.

A lot of the confidence is contextual. Expectations for this season were, for the most part, tempered by the belief that the Commanders had over-achieved in 2024 and that the ‘25 season would present more challenges in the form of a tougher schedule, greater travel, and the pressure of playing a schedule littered with prime time games. While few observers predicted the travesty that we’ve seen at times this season, most Washington fans expected a lot of tough sledding on the way to a less impressive record than last year’s 12-win campaign.

When you layer in the incredible injury issues faced by the Commanders this season, with clusters of injuries testing an already-thin roster, it is not overly challenging to write off part of this season’s failures to that bad injury luck. With a number of players like Terry McLaurin and Will Harris already back, and others like Jayden Daniels and Noah Brown expected to return to the field soon, there is hope that the team can build on the return of talented players to finish the season strong, with at least a couple more wins.

Of course, the problems cause by the injury bug ware exacerbated by the thinness of that roster, but another offseason in 2026 should give Adam Peters the opportunity to add the kind of talent and depth to the defense that was still missing at the start of this season. Peters has managed to build better depth on the offensive side of the ball already — especially on the OL — but he’ll need to continuee building up the offensive skill position pool ahead of the ‘26 season.

A huge factor in the minds of many Commanders fans was the decision by Dan Quinn to take over the defensive coordinator and play-calling duties from Joe Whitt in Week 11. It feels like more than a coincidence that the Commanders’ best defensive performances since the Chargers game in Week 5 have come in the past two weeks. DQ’s willingness to finally take action with respect to the team’s ongoing defensive issues and Whitt’s clear inability to solve them offers the strong likelihood that the head coach will be looking for a permanent solution between the end of this season and the start of the next.

The most fundamental reason for confidence for most fans, of course, is the fact that the team’s quarterback is Jayden Daniels. Disquiet has been injected into that confidence, however, because of the three injuries he has suffered this season. As a rookie, Daniels suffered a significant rib injury against the Panthers, but he never missed a start. This year, by contrast, he has started only 6 of 11 games, and he was knocked out of the games in Weeks 5 and 7. Some fans are worried that Jayden doesn’t protect himself; others worry that the coaches expose him to to much risk with game planning and play-calling. Many worry about both.

Washington fans recognize that Jayden Daniels provides a huge competitive advantage when he plays because of his skill and demeanor. They know that he can’t be as effective unless allowed to “play his game”, which involves both passing and running, but they also know that the health of any NFL player is a perishable resource that must be valued and managed wisely by the player and the team.

In general then, fan confidence about team direction is based on the idea that the Commanders still have a flawed roster that was stressed beyond the breaking point by injuries in 2025, but that the coaches are responding to the situation and the team is still playing with pride and energy, making it possible to finish strong despite the season’s guaranteed losing record. With Jayden Daniels, the future seems brighter. His return to play inspires hope that the Commanders can play better and add wins in the final five weeks, and over the long term, he is seen as the type of quarterback that acts as a force multiplier for the talent on the roster. He should add wins to the season records for years to come. In the bigger picture, there seems to be a general belief that Josh Harris and his partners are committed to doing things the right way and running a quality franchise that is on the rise. At this point, most fans seem to be ready to accept 2025 as an outlier — a mere bump in the road on the path to long-term excellence as an organization. No doubt, the big-picture background of the new stadium, the NFL Draft being held in DC, and other positive trends reinforce the feeling that the organization is on an arc of success after more than two decades of the opposite.

The full slate of Week 14 games

Each week, SB Nation polls fans of all 32 fan bases by email; in that survey, NFL fans from across the breadth of the league predict winners and losers.

That email fan poll, as usual, correctly predicted the outcome of the Thursday night game. This week, the Detroit Lions did a lot to strangle the life out of any hope the Dallas Cowboys had of reaching the playoffs.

The Giants are on a late bye week, but fans in the nationwide email survey have picked both the Commanders to win on Sunday in Minnesota and the Eagles to dispatch the Chargers in a west-coast game on Monday night.

I feel pretty good about Jayden Daniels and Terry McLaurin against the Vikings and the likely starter, JJ McCarthy.

I’m a lot more skeptical about the Eagles, who have scored an average of 15.5 points per game over the past four weeks, beating the 8-4 Chargers in prime time. You can be sure that I’ll be a Commanders fan on Sunday, and a Chargers fan on Monday night.