The Commanders’ Bet on Sam Howell Has Been a Long Time Coming

Washington coach Ron Rivera’s confidence is unwavering as he gives the second-year quarterback the reins this fall.

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It was the night of Jan. 8, and Commanders coach Ron Rivera was making the hourlong commute from FedEx Field in the Maryland suburbs back to his Virginia home. Sitting shotgun was his wife, Stephanie, and it didn’t take Rivera long to bend her ear with the 26–6 win over the Cowboys to close out an up-and-down 2022 season.

The topic: quarterbacks. And, really, not quarterbacks plural, but one in particular.

The coach made the decision to turn to Sam Howell a week earlier, starting him instead of going with his initial instinct (to start Taylor Heinicke, then go to Howell after a series or two). And by the time Rivera climbed into his car, he not only had affirmation that the final call was the right one—Howell’s numbers weren’t spectacular, but he also was comfortable and in command during the win—but Rivera also knew he had a rookie who had played well enough to invite new questions.

“You can ask Stephanie, all we f---ing talked about was the quarterback, what the quarterback did, who he was,” Rivera said, sitting on his office couch on another steamy August day. “I kept saying, F---, if I would have known this, I would have played him sooner. When you only have so much time to show it, it’s hard, I kept thinking, God … but after that game, everything told me this kid, give him the opportunity and see what he does with it.”

Howell completed 11 passes for 169 yards and a touchdown in his one game appearance in 2022 :: Brad Mills/USA TODAY Sports

By the time the coach and his wife pulled into the driveway, they’d reviewed everything. Rivera told Stephanie he was particularly impressed with Howell correcting the one big mistake he made, a pick on a second-and-goal from the Dallas 5-yard line early in the second quarter. Howell explained to the coaches that he got greedy and tried to feather the ball over the coverage to Cam Sims, rather than lead him to the corner of the end zone.

Now, I know, the quarterback told Rivera. I’ll throw it to pylon next time.

Rivera thought to himself, This is a guy that gets it. He understands. He sees what’s going on.

He explained to Stephanie that he wanted to get Howell in the right mindset with the offseason coming, because the coach thought Howell had a real chance. Knowing that exit meetings started the next morning, she asked her husband what he planned to tell the quarterback.

Rivera thought for a minute. He’d tell Howell the opportunity was there for him to win the starting job, and that the Commanders would sign a veteran backup who would come in and compete with him for it—but that Howell would have every chance to assert himself as the No. 1. It was all the QB needed to hear.

“I knew I had to come in and still earn every single day,” Howell said, a few minutes earlier, and a short walk from Rivera’s office. “I knew people like me, fifth-round picks don’t get that opportunity very often that early in their career.”

Seven months later, Rivera and so many others here are betting their futures on his ability to take full advantage of it.

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We’re back, and the preseason is over. Ten days to the opener. Here’s what we got on the site this week …

• A look at the Patriots-ization of the Rams’ offense.

• A postmortem on the Trey Lance era in San Francisco.

• Takeaways from all over the final weekend of preseason games.

But we’re starting in D.C., with the Commanders’ big quarterbacking gamble.

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In a normal year, Howell’s story—going from the fifth round to entrenched starting quarterback—would be a real outlier.

This year, it’s not as much, and that’s in large part because of how the 2022 quarterback class has set itself up to prove a lot of people wrong over the next five months. Panned as perhaps the worst group at the position entering a draft in decades, there are now more players from its ranks slated to start (Howell, Kenny Pickett, Desmond Ridder, Brock Purdy) than from the ballyhooed ’21 class (Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Mac Jones).

Pickett is the only first-rounder of the four from 2022, and he was drafted later than all five of the quarterbacks who went in the first round the year before. In all four cases, teams are making big bets, with Purdy and Pickett piloting veteran rosters with a chance to win now, and Ridder entrusted with the Falcons in Year 3 of Arthur Smith and Terry Fontenot’s build.

But nowhere are the stakes higher than with the Commanders. Howell’s playing for a new owner who will spend the season trying to find the right course for his once-proud franchise, a head coach who needs to win to show that owner that he’s the man to chart that course, and an offensive coordinator who arrived having been passed over head coaching jobs for a half decade, looking to take the final steps to land a top job.

So it goes without saying Howell had to do plenty to earn their trust, as much or more so than his draft classmates did, based on how many folks had so much on the line.

And the story there really starts with how Howell fell to the fifth round in the first place.

Going into his final year at North Carolina, and coming off a breakthrough 2020 campaign, the Tar Heels’ skill-position cupboard was stripped bare. Two running backs (Javonte Williams, Michael Carter) and two receivers (Dyami Brown, Dazz Newsome) were drafted; as a result, the coaches made the decision to incorporate the quarterback in the run game more and, as the season wore on, more and more and more.

“We went into the season expecting to do a lot of the same things that we were doing before,” Howell says. “Early on, it just wasn’t working too well for us. One thing that was working well for us was the quarterback run game. They kind of came to me and asked if that was something I was O.K. with doing a lot of. I said, Of course. Whatever I need to do to help us win games. That was kind of my mindset that last year. I really didn’t think I had a bad year that last year in college.”

Others disagreed.

He threw three picks in the opener against Virginia Tech, and, over time, the physical toll mounted. In order, he logged 13, 11, 15, 16, 13, 11, 17, 18, 21, 17, 18 and 13 carries in his 12 starts. Meanwhile, he threw for 500 fewer yards, six fewer touchdowns and two more interceptions, completed 6% fewer of his passes, and compiled a passer rating 25 points lower than he did as a sophomore.

For some, it was proof that the 6'1", 218-pound junior wasn’t the type of quarterback who could carry a team. The Commanders saw something different—a guy willing to do all he could to carry his team, even if it meant putting his draft stock in harm’s way to do it.

Someone else saw it that way, too. Eric Bieniemy, the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator at the time, had a ton of coincidental ties to UNC. He coached high school ball in 2000 with Heels DL coach Tim Cross—the two knew each other as fraternity brothers in college (Bieniemy at Colorado, Cross at Northern Colorado). Bieniemy’s former Chargers teammate Natrone Means, a UNC alum, was coaching for Mack Brown, too.

And Chiefs OL coach Andy Heck had two sons play there—one played with Howell, and another was a strength coach when Howell was there—so Bieniemy saw plenty of the Heels on Kansas City road trips, and was part of a process in assessing Howell that was dripped with real insight. So when Bieniemy got to D.C., he knew plenty.

“I knew I was going to get a leader,” Bieniemy says of assessing Howell before the draft for the Chiefs. “I knew he was a quiet kid but a quiet leader—he does everything with his actions. On top of it, the kid’s got an arm; he’s a very confident kid. He knows how to correct his mistakes. When he makes a mistake, you can tell, he’s just a little hesitant, but once he figures it out, you don’t see him repeat that mistake. The kid has a unique skill set about him, and he’s just got a swag to him. It’s a quiet, confident swag that’s pretty unique.”

All of that led to Bieniemy’s putting the same grade on Howell before the draft that the Commanders did before Howell’s final season at UNC—both saw him as a second-rounder.

And doubling back on that grade, and tying to their background work on what happened in 2021, led the Commanders to reverse course on their plan for the position before the ’22 draft. They hadn’t expected to take a quarterback, because they wanted to show Carson Wentz that they were solidly behind him. But as Day 3 of that draft dragged along, Howell’s presence atop the Commanders’ board became more and more glaring.

So with the 144th pick, they pulled the trigger.

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The story of Howell’s falling into Washington’s lap isn’t wholly unlike what happened with Purdy in San Francisco. Maybe that makes the story of the 2022 draft quarterbacks one of a bunch of players who became undervalued, simply because teams were so afraid to overvalue them—and wind up with a Christian Ponder or EJ Manuel in the first round.

Either way, it didn’t take long for the Commanders to realize they might have something more than a run-of-the-mill, roster-fodder fifth-round pick on their hands.

Howell will play in Bieniemy’s offense, the same one Patrick Mahomes had for the last five years :: Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports

The coaches saw it first during camp, in how Howell would throw his receivers open and use defensive backs’ leverage against them. That carried right over into the season, when Howell, as the third-stringer, was working exclusively with the scout team, with all the reps running the Washington offense going to Wentz and Heinicke. As the weeks went by, the comments from the defensive players to the coaches started to add up for Rivera.

“I remember in the middle of the season last year, some of the DBs would come up to me and say, Coach, that guy, his arm’s unreal. I’m telling you, I thought I could make the play, and all of a sudden that ball’s past me. I thought I could undercut the ball, and the ball gets there before I can finish my break,” Rivera says. “Those were the things I started to hear in November. I said, Hopefully we’ll get a chance. Hopefully we’ll blow somebody out, and I can put the kid in and see what he can do.

“It never really came because we never really took that kind of lead where I said, Hey, we can throw him in now, just to see. But you can see it in practice, so I started paying even more attention to what he was doing as opposed to just watching the No. 1 defense. He was getting after them pretty good; he really was.”

Rivera’s desire to see more intensified when Wentz got hurt, which moved Heinicke into the starting role and afforded Howell reps as the new backup, up from third string, running the Washington offense in practice. The transition looked seamless, since Howell had been spending a half hour every day, in his words, going “through the entire script of practice” with backups and practice-squadders (Kyric McGowan was a regular), a routine that continued as Howell ascended “just to make sure [he] got those same reps.”

As a result, everything kept translating: from summer to early fall, and then deep into the season, from the scout team to the second team, and eventually to the first team.

Howell was devouring everything, standing behind the starter on the field, asking questions behind the scenes, and working with his position coach, Ken Zampese, to fine-tune things. This situation was new for Howell, but he figured the best way to approach it was as if every day was game day—no exceptions.

“Obviously, it was different for me,” he says. “It was the first time in my life I wasn’t the starter. I started every year of my football career until last year. Coming into it, I knew what the situation was. I knew it was Carson’s job. I came in with the mindset of try to get better. Use this year to try to do everything I can to become the best player I can be. If I do get a chance to play, great. I knew I would go out there and take advantage of it.

As the weeks wore on, Rivera’s desire to give him that opportunity grew. Then came the real tipping point, when it wasn’t just that the coach was hearing it just from players in the locker room, but others in the quarterback room.

“Taylor told me, Coach, this guy’s got arm talent. I can’t throw the ball like he does,” Rivera says. “Taylor told me that. I think the world of who Taylor is. For him to tell me that, that’s what drove me to play [Howell] against Dallas, it was really how honest and up front Taylor was about this thing. I thought, I got to play this kid. Sure enough, he lived up to it.”

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Howell never lacked for confidence—remember, he figured his slide on draft weekend really wasn’t ever reflective of his performance—but there was a throw in that Dallas game that was sort of the inverse of a Welcome to the NFL moment, where he first really knew he belonged.

It came on a first-and-10 from Washington’s 33-yard line. The Commanders were up 20–6 with 44 seconds left in the third quarter. Howell took the snap out of the pistol, then a five-step drop, and a drop-in-the-bucket dime way downfield to Terry McLaurin, in a small, vacated space between Cowboys corner Trayvon Mullen and safety Malik Hooker, for a 52-yard gain.

“It was just a go route to Terry,” Howell says. “The corner was kind of [playing] off, so you don’t like go routes when the corner’s playing soft. But I knew if he stayed there flat-footed, Terry would be able to go by him. I gave Terry a chance, and he was able to go by him and make a good catch. I just feel like putting a ball down the field gave me a lot of confidence moving forward.”

The reason why is pretty simple: Howell has always viewed that sort of throw as the strength of his game, so seeing it translate into a real NFL game gave him validation.

And he’s gotten more of that since.

While Rivera wanted free agent Jacoby Brissett to push Howell for the job (which is why he didn’t announce Howell would start until Aug. 18), the reality was that the second-year pro didn’t have to win the spot so much as he had to not lose it. Like Purdy, Pickett and Ridder, Howell got fed the great majority of first-team reps, with the idea being that getting him quality work with the people he’d play with was paramount, and certainly more important, in the coaches’ minds, than staging a true competition.

Howell was the first quarterback drafted by Washington since Dwayne Haskins Jr. in 2019 :: Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports

It’s also given Howell the leeway to tweak his footwork (to better marry it up with the pace of plays), work with Bieniemy and his teammates on making the system function for all, and make his mistakes on the practice field, instead of in the fall.

“Just having the communication we do in our meeting rooms, having him speak up,” Bieniemy says. “If he makes a mistake: Hey, I screwed this up, fellas. And just hearing the conversation going back and forth with the receivers and with the tight end, and with the back, with some of the O-line, that’s what we want. We want that open line of communication, because at the end of the day they have to be on the same page.

“We’re gonna give them the guidelines; we’re gonna give them the structure, but they have to get it done, and so that’s been the growth process that I’ve been really proud of.”

And as for Bieniemy’s tough-love coaching? The OC smiled on Howell’s handling of that.

“It doesn’t bother him. It doesn’t bother him,” Bieniemy says, before joking that “he wanted to snatch me up one day, but we were good. He’s a good kid. His dad’s a coach; he’s used to the tough coaching, the tough criticism. The thing I love about him, like I said, it ain’t the fact that you’re hard on him, it’s the fact that you want him to be better, he gets that.”

So Howell has gotten better and better since he was drafted, since he climbed the depth chart last year, and since Rivera implicitly gave him the reins in January.

And Rivera’s confidence in that decision has only been bolstered since he made it. In so many ways, how Rivera talks about it is how Howell felt about himself all along: “I’ll tell you this, too, if we were in a situation where we were going to draft him because we needed a quarterback, we would have taken him no later than the second round.”

If he had gone in the second round, maybe folks would view all this differently.

But for now, that doesn’t matter. What does, to so many people in Washington, is simply how the quarterback plays. Howell knows how much is on the line, for both him personally, the team, and dozens of his coworkers.

“For sure, I think a lot of people around here know that,” he says. “For me personally, it kind of goes back to playing that last game knowing that it’s a similar thing. I don’t have thoughts like that. I just try to come in every single day; I think, if everyone has the mindset to come in every single day and truly give this organization everything they have, at the end of the day they can look at themself no matter what the result is. If we go this year and everyone puts every single thing they have into the year, I feel like we will be successful.”

That Howell has put everything he has into the team is another reason why the Commanders are making this bet.

It’s a big bet, too.

But as Stephanie Rivera could tell you, it wasn’t made haphazardly.