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The Commanders Culture Is Damn Good
WJFK-FM / 106.7 The Fan
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2/26/2025
The NFLPA conducted their report card, and this time around it reflects the work of Josh Harris, Adam Peters, and Dan Quinn.
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00:00
The other big development NFL news wise today, Danny, the NFL PA survey dropped.
00:05
So this is year three of this NFL PA survey, and this is normally a dreaded day
00:12
around these parts. The last two years, Washington has graded 32nd of 32 teams
00:21
in the NFL PA team report cards. So the way this works for those of you that don't remember,
00:27
there are right around 10 categories that players are pulled on secret ballot style,
00:34
where they get to grade their employer. You might do this in your own workplace, by the way.
00:38
Absolutely. We get a little email like this, where it's like, what's good? What is it about
00:42
working where you work? And so the NFL PA, the union for the players, then compiles all of the
00:49
grading from every single player. It's like a one to 10 scale. They grade based on the numbers,
00:54
letter grades for every team in every category. And then they assign one to 32, the overall
01:00
report card. And for lack of a better phrase, I just say the best to the worst team to work for.
01:06
These are things like, how do you treat the family of the players, food and dining area?
01:11
Does it taste good? Is it fresh? And do I have a nice cafeteria to eat in? Nutritionist,
01:15
dietician. Do I have someone coaching me up? Well, the locker room, which a lot of the teams
01:21
with the dated and antiquated facilities like Washington get a really bad grade in that
01:26
training room, training staff, the weight room, strength coaches, team travel.
01:30
What kind of plane are we flying on? Do we have enough space? Is our schedule when we travel
01:34
efficient? Am I having to sleep in the same room as someone in a hotel like the Dallas Cowboys
01:40
make their players do the night before a game, which is comical and then head coach and ownership.
01:45
And that's my favorite categories when being honest, because it's just like
01:49
secret. How much do you like your boss? Which coaches are popular, which are not,
01:53
which owners are popular, which are hated. Well, Danny, after two years of being dead last 32 out
02:01
of 32 based on players, not liking working for the commanders. And before that the football team
02:10
this year, they ranked 11th, just outside of the top 10. What a turnaround.
02:16
You're pretty clear. The turnaround is there and it's obvious they're limited mainly by the
02:21
facilities, right? Outdated. You can do as much lipstick as you want on nubs field to dash burn.
02:29
It's not a good setup. So I don't think you can get much harder than that, to be honest with you.
02:33
What you can do is everything else. You can be first class in everything from training staff,
02:39
strength and conditioning treatment of families, whether it's travel, just doing everything
02:45
possible to be kind and to be thoughtful and be generous and not worry about how much something
02:51
costs. You just do the right thing and know that it'll come back to you in the end.
02:54
Know that it'll come out in the wash. I mean, we heard these stories. I don't know if this is
02:57
unique to the NFL or, you know, to this team rather than other places. I have no idea. I've
03:02
never experienced it though. A guy gets hurt and Adam Peters immediately, you know, goes down to
03:08
the locker room where the family member or somebody else can't go. And he's texting the
03:12
spouse. He's texting the dad who he knew happened to be in the stadium at that point. Or he's texting,
03:17
you know, somebody's younger brother who was there. Hey, this is what's going on. We're taking
03:22
him to the emergency room or not a big deal. It's a sprained ankle. He'll be back in a couple of
03:26
weeks, whatever that is. That's first class, man. It just is. That is the understanding that somebody
03:32
is going through it, understanding that there's anxiety from loved ones and you're doing everything
03:36
you possibly can. That's above and beyond. Now, it may not seem like that big a deal,
03:40
but you do that in all walks all the time. Yeah. It's better because some skeptics going to tell
03:45
you it's because they want a bunch of games. Yeah. That helps. It's not worth 21 spots though.
03:50
A lot of teams that want a bunch of games didn't necessarily do that.
03:53
Well, they're just controlling the controllables. The things that they can actually positively
03:58
change and affect and influence without having a new stadium and a new facility, all we're on a
04:05
rocket ship toward not just better grades, but A's and a pluses. Uh, they have the highest
04:11
rated head coach in Dan Quinn, according to player polling this year, one out of 32,
04:18
in terms of the score that was given to Dan Quinn by his players, they have a top 10 owner.
04:22
Now in terms of popularity among players, they got an A grade there. Josh Harris,
04:26
eight out of 32 owners. They got an A for team travel. They got an A for their strength coaches.
04:33
Again, this is just player graded, right? A lot of these guys, and especially this year,
04:37
two dozen of their players came from outside the building. They've been in other buildings.
04:41
They've been at other stops. They came here and we're so impressed this year by how Washington
04:46
was doing it. It's not like you're a career, uh, commander who's been here four years.
04:50
And just the improvement year over year was so big. Oh, these are guys like Wagner has been with
04:54
the Rams and the Seahawks or, uh, Austin Eckler has been with the chargers who came here and said,
04:59
I really, really liked this B plus for the training staff B plus for the food and dining.
05:05
After they got F grades in that category over the last couple of years, B plus for how they
05:10
treated families, a B minus for their weight room. Now you said it a lot of the issue that they have
05:17
is just going to be facilities. C plus in the training room for basically where they get their
05:23
work done. And then an F in the locker room, because the guy said they don't have enough
05:26
space. It's not nice enough, whatever until you get your new stadium. And that also means you're
05:32
going to get your new training facility, wherever that is. There's only so much you can do there.
05:37
Maybe you could put some blush on that pig, but for the most part, Danny, you're, you're basically
05:43
looking at what a D hopefully a C minus grade, but to go from 32 to 11, I still remember the quote
05:51
at the end of last season. I think it was when Josh Harris did a press conference and he was
05:55
asked about the NFL PA scores that came out. And he said, I'm not an F minus guy.
06:03
We're not going to do F minus work. We won't stand for that. Well, he put his money where his mouth
06:08
is. We saw it literally with the stadium, 70 million bucks. And you're seeing it in this
06:12
polling with the stuff that we don't get to see that the players get to see. But I think a big
06:16
part of this is Adam Peters, who's just a human being with human skills and high EQ and treats
06:21
people really well, who sets the front office culture. I think a huge part of this is Dan Quinn,
06:26
same thing. You have good human being with good people to people skills. They had some of that,
06:32
like Ron Rivera was a beloved guy and a liked coach. I think it would be remiss if we didn't
06:37
suggest that some of this was the fact that they want a bunch of games and it was a lot more fun
06:40
to come to work when you're winning 14 games instead of four the previous season, but there
06:45
is a chicken or the egg. We'll debate later in the show, you know, conversation to be had here
06:50
where the 14 wins were made possible by guys wanting to be in the building for longer than
06:54
they wanted to be there last year. But look at some of the big differences. Treatment of families
06:58
last year, F minus this year, F plus food and dining last year was up from an F to a D plus
07:04
this year, B plus. Let's see where some of the other biggest training staff went from an F to
07:11
a B plus an area where they invested a lot of time and money. Team travel went from an F to an A.
07:16
I bet you go from an F to an A in a year. You try, you work at it, you spend, you ask a lot
07:21
of questions. Harrison rails and these owners sit down with players and ask them, what do you need?
07:27
Head coach Rivera went C to Quinn, a plus ownership. You're one of the ownership group of B.
07:33
They listened, they made changes. Now they're in a almost unilaterally across the board.
07:38
Everything went up. And there's, listen, there's no guarantee. Like if you finish one or two in
07:42
this doesn't mean that you're winning 15 games. And you know, there are gripes with every
07:45
organization. I like the bills, for example, have been a buzzsaw had been as good as anybody
07:49
in the sport. I think had like an F when it came to travel on F minus, or, you know, you look at
07:53
some of the different, different things. Some of it isn't necessarily a guarantee one way or the
07:57
other. You can, you can have strengths and weaknesses. I mean, Atlanta finished really
08:00
high and they've been the definition of mediocre. So it's not always one-to-one, but the point is
08:05
you've gone from this old way of doing it previously, where for everybody used to defend
08:12
Snyder or say, well, he wants to win or, or, or whatever. You had a funny way of showing it.
08:16
You can do the prize that everybody gets to see the unsexy thing, the, the winning thing,
08:22
the good behavior thing, which is you treat people. Well, every once in a while, you may stumble into
08:27
that. They never could find a way to do so. Whether it was, you know, training table, whether
08:32
it was, you know, food, whether it was the facility. I mean, again, can you imagine how
08:37
embarrassed you would be? I'm talking to you, Grant, and then you, everyone else out there
08:40
listening. If part of your NFL facility, guys had to walk around an unusable turf field that
08:46
had basically been condemned. Basically like it's not safe to have people on this field as part of
08:51
an NFL practice facility. You can't go on it because it'll, it'll, you know, it's like going
08:56
on the concrete at veteran stadium after a million years of a wear and tear. You just dealt with that
09:02
not for a minute, not for six months when we're saving some money for decades, you couldn't use
09:07
that thing. It took Harris an hour. I go, what? We can't use that. Be bull crap. We're fixing that
09:12
right now. That's just, that's just what you do. The whole business is supposed to be about winning
09:16
football games and treating people. Well, it comes back to you and I'm proud of him. Honestly,
09:21
that's awesome. So this was pulling of the players. I want to reiterate NFLPA did this,
09:26
and these are the things that they saw that mattered to them
09:29
that made their experience better with the commanders.
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