Why can’t Commanders, NFL’s biggest surprise to this point, win the NFC East?

Every NFL season has its fair share of surprises where teams overperform or underperform based on the preconceptions that people had for them coming into the year. Through the quarter mark of the season, there hasn’t been a team that has exceeded initial expectations more than the Washington Commanders, who sit at 3-1 and currently hold a one-game lead for first place in the NFC East.

That is incredible, considering they were coming off a season where they were bad enough to need a new coaching staff and quarterback. A week after they scored 38 points against the Bengals, the Commanders went to Arizona and absolutely lit up the Cardinals en route to a 42-14 beatdown on the road.

This is the most impressive performance of any team in the early portion of the season. Jayden Daniels has taken a strong command on the Rookie of the Year race, completing 47 of his past 53 passing attempts over the past two weeks. This stretch has shown just about everyone why the Commanders felt comfortable making him the second pick in the draft and immediately making him the fresh new face of the franchise in the post-Dan Snyder era. He has comfortably been the most productive rookie quarterback in the league and his start has allowed the Commanders to perform like one of the best offenses in the league — which is genuinely a surprise!

There was reason to be skeptical that this level of production was possible this early into the regime. The offensive line was shaky last year, offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury ran an incredibly plain scheme toward the end of his Cardinals tenure, and rookie quarterbacks tend to struggle in general. None of that has stopped the Commanders up to this point in the season, particularly over the past two weeks. They’ve combined for 80 points in those games and are first in success rate (57.9%) in that timespan according to data collected from rbsdm.com. Daniels has meshed perfectly with a rejuvenated Kingsbury, who spent time coaching at USC last year after some time away from football following his exit from Arizona and has gradually built Daniels into the offense instead of throwing everything at him at once.

One of the coolest parts of Daniels’ game right now is how confident he is and how decisive he is throwing the ball. He hasn’t been making a whole lot of mistakes from holding onto the ball too long, and he’s gotten better at working under pressure from defensive lines, which was a concern for talent evaluators and scouts coming into the draft. After taking seven sacks the first two weeks, Daniels has been sacked only twice during the Commanders’ offensive explosion and wasn’t sacked at all in their game against Arizona.

One of the biggest reasons why teams with rookie quarterbacks usually struggle is an abundance of negative plays. That hasn’t been a problem for Daniels yet. Every game likely won’t feature an 80% completion percentage as the Commanders play tougher defenses than the Bengals and Cardinals moving forward, but there’s no reason to not believe in this start from Daniels — he’s been getting better every single week and has raised the ceiling and floor of the Commanders’ offense.

It’s impossible to say what’s next for this team because no one expected it to be in this position in the first place. The defense is still a concern, but the NFC East doesn’t appear to have any dominant teams with the Eagles (2-2) and Cowboys (2-2) floundering and the Giants (1-3) being the Giants.

Why not the Commanders? They at the very least appear to have an offense, and a quarterback, to give them a fighting chance to win the division. That’s a massive win compared to where they were a few months ago.