As the offense refocused after a shaky first half, so did Washington’s defense. Edge rusher Dante Fowler Jr. played a significant role in righting the ship for the Commanders in the back half of the game.<\/p>\n
With about five and a half minutes left in the third, Fowler broke through Atlanta’s offensive line and managed to get a hand out in the process, dislodging the ball from Penix’s hands. The play on third-and-5 forced Atlanta to punt.<\/p>\n
It wouldn’t be the last time Fowler was right in Penix’s face. In the fourth quarter drive, just after Washington took the lead, the 30-year-old edge helped to snuff out the immediate response Atlanta was looking for. He charged through the line, threw in a spin move, and got both arms on top of Penix mid-throw, causing an incomplete pass.<\/p>\n
With two tackles, one sack, one quarterback hit, one tackle for loss and one force fumble, the Sunday Night Football win was another very strong performance in a really impressive season for Fowler. He is now the first Washington player with 10-plus sacks in a single season since Daron Payne in 2022, and the first Washington edge rusher with 10-plus sacks in a single season since Ryan Kerrigan in 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the offense refocused after a shaky first half, so did Washington’s defense. Edge rusher Dante Fowler Jr.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2074],"tags":[223,254,43345,2554,224,7,1806,12186,6,1805],"class_list":{"0":"post-204552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-falcons","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-falcons","10":"tag-atlanta-falcons-at-washington-commanders-2024-reg-17","11":"tag-atlantafalcons","12":"tag-falcons","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-football-news","15":"tag-gameday","16":"tag-nfl","17":"tag-subsection-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114847380118074789","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}