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It’s been a tough few weeks for the Washington Football Team. Just before Washington’s Week 14 loss to the Cowboys, a COVID-19 outbreak would hit the locker room, and the team is still battling the virus.
Two weeks later, linebacker Cole Holcomb and All-Pro guard Brandon Scherff would miss Washington’s 56-14 loss to the Cowboys in the rematch on Sunday Night Football in Week 16.
After Washington’s embarrassing prime-time performance, head coach Ron Rivera spoke to the media, expressing his disappointment in his team’s performance.
“We got beat,” Rivera said. “They played better than we did, and we didn’t take advantage of our opportunities when we had them.”
The coach spoke of his message to the team after the game:
Well, more so than anything else, we’ve got to games left to play, and we’re going to play them to win. That’s just the way it is. I told them, I said, ‘If you play this game long enough, you’re going to get beat like this. It happens. How you respond to it, how you bounce back, how you play, that tells more about who you are than anything else.’
Rivera didn’t make excuses for Washington’s blowout loss but did express frustration with some of the media’s questions after the game. That was probably more due to his emotions after such a painful loss than anything else.
Rivera was also asked if he blamed COVID for Washington any of its top linebackers available for the game. Rivera gave a more insightful look at what Washington has been battling over the last few weeks.
You don’t. It’s all tied together. I mean, if you look at the things that have happened in the last couple of weeks, we’ve dealt with a lot but that’s football. That’s life. You’re going to deal with a lot in life. How you handle it, though, that’s the important thing and we didn’t handle it very well tonight. That’s disappointing. We’ve got to be better than that. We expect to be able to win football games. We’ve got to be better than that as a group.
The media session turned a bit tense when Rivera felt like he answered the same question twice.
I just told you. We just went through a few weeks…a couple of things…bad things happen, ok? You have to deal with those things and it’s tough. It’s not easy to try and separate and compartmentalize situations like that. It spills over. It gets to people. It’s human nature. These guys are more than just robots. These are players. These are people. They’ve got a teammate going through something right now. It’s tough. You have an opportunity, and you don’t have everybody playing. That’s hard on people. I mean that’s not normal shit. That’s real-life shit and that’s what they’re dealing with.
Rivera is referring to the situation of safety Deshazor Everett, who was involved in a fatal car accident last week. Everett is a captain and one of the most popular players on the team.
It’s been a tough season for Washington, which is now winding down. Washington has two more division games to end the season and looks to finish strong after an embarrassing defeat.