Jayden Daniels Is Allowing Me to Dream Again

The Washington Commanders’ rookie sensation has me feeling like I’ve won the lottery.

I don’t buy lottery tickets to actually win the lottery.

I buy them to dream.

For a week or so, I get to imagine my life as a millionaire. I get to think about how I would spend the money. I get to see myself on a yacht in foreign waters, yelling at someone named Geeves or Farnsworth about the perfect temperature of my eggs.

For that week I’m not just a dreamer, I’m actually a millionaire because I honestly believe that I, just as much as anyone else, have a right to be a winner.

And then the numbers are drawn and the reality of hard work sets in, and I go back to my life and regular temperature eggs and no one named Geeves or Farnsworth to blame.

And that’s what it’s felt like to be a Washington Commanders fan ever since birth. I was born a Commanders’ fan. I didn’t decide to become a fan. I was indoctrinated as a fetus. I’m old enough to have seen wide receiver Art Monk play. I was in elementary school when Joe Gibbs was the coach and the Fun Bunch and the Hogs were a thing. I owned an original Doug Williams “Touch of Class” T-shirt and still have two unopened Wheaties boxes with his image on the front.

I remember the Super Bowls in 1983, 1988 and 1992.

And then the actual numbers came in and the dream of being a fan of a championship team got crushed. For 33 years, Commanders’ fans have watched as it seemed everyone but us got invited to the dance. We watched as other owners spent money to bring in top names while we got recycled players and expiring contracts. We watched for what felt like 100 years as we barely treaded water with names like Heath Shuler, Gus Frerotte, Trent Green, Brad Johnson, Jeff George, Shane Matthews, Patrick Ramsey, Tim Hasselbeck, etc.; interchangeable quarterbacks that would all end up supersizing drinks.

We all clutched our tickets thinking just maybe this is our time in 2012 after the Commanders drafted Robert Griffin III, but horrible coaching and a win-now attitude ruined his career. We laughed as Kirk Cousins used his mediocre abilities to fleece the rest of the league into enormously undeserved contracts. (Seriously, an entire book could be written about how Cousins used nothing but his whiteness to steal $294,169,486 in his 13-year NFL career despite being the Kwame Brown of the NFL.)

And most of this happened under the tyrannical watch of former owner and world-class asshole Dan Snyder, a man that even Jesus calls an asshole. Don’t believe me? This might be my favorite Dan Snyder is the king of asshole stories of all time.

During Snyder’s 24-year ownership, the Commanders would win only two playoff games and the ire of all of the team's fans and owners alike. While we loved the team, we openly hated Snyder and he hated us, too. Thankfully, NFL owners — or as I call them, the “uncharacteristically large group of blindingly white men,” one of whom was photographed 67 years ago among the shouting white faces that blocked Black teenage boys from entering a school in Arkansas — hated Snyder enough to get him up and out of there. Snyder reluctantly sold the team, and hope came with it.

Then the team drafted former LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels, a skinny kid with an infectious smile, carefree attitude and a belief in himself. And things began changing. At this point, I’d become a curmudgeon. I didn’t believe in anything anymore. I thought the kid was too thin to play quarterback and that this was RGIII all over again. And then something happened. The normally stoic wide receiver Terry McLaurin started liking the kid. They started connecting on long pass plays. It even looked like they were having fun.

And then Oct. 27, 2024, I got proof that God himself was a Commanders’ fan. With the Commanders near midfield and down by three against the Chicago Bears with two seconds left on the clock, Daniels dropped back and heaved the ball, in what felt like an eternity, down the field only for the pass to be tipped right into the awaiting hands of wide receiver Noah Brown for the game-winning touchdown. The kids began calling it “Hail Maryland.”

I don’t care if the Commanders win the Super Bowl. I don’t even care if they make it to the Super Bowl. This team has already superseded all expectations just by beating the top-seeded Detroit Lions in the divisional round with little more than a young kid with a slingshot for an arm. I just love that for another week, I get to hope for something that seems insurmountable. I get to watch as this small team moves mountains. I get a whole week of being a winner and sometimes, especially during these times, it’s good to believe in something bigger than yourself.