Dan Quinn, Commanders Refuse Traditional Captains

Most NFL organizations have spent the last 48 hours preparing for the start of the 2024 season while also naming their captains for the grueling year ahead.

The Washington Commanders have only done part of that.

Despite entering his second stint as a head coach, Dan Quinn is doing away with the standard captain approach where players and coaches name permanent captains for the upcoming season.

Instead, Washington will name captains on a week-to-week basis.

"We'll be using game captains and I'll also utilize a group of some leaders that will be kind of with me on some decisions that or emphasis that I wanna make with the team,” Quinn explained. “But, we'll pick game captains until the postseason and then we'll pick post-season captains. That'll be throughout."

As head coach of the Atlanta Falcons from 2015-2020, Quinn named permanent captains while helping the organization reach their second Super Bowl in franchise history.

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Despite the success he had in Atlanta, a culture change is underway in Washington, and it's made the coach rethink his strategy to make the Commanders a viable approximation of an NFL team - something that many coaches have failed to do to this point.

Quinn's decision may be unorthodox, but it's a sign of the changing times in the Nation's Capital, and how different this team could look moving forward.