The Washington Commanders enjoyed one of the best turn-around seasons in major sports history in 2024. Following a 4-13 record in 2023 and no winning season since 2016, Washington finished 12-5 in the regular season and marched to the NFC title game before losing to the eventual Super Bowl champs.
There was a lot of change entering last season in the nation's capital, but it still made for one of the best seasons in recent memory.
As phenomenal a turnaround as it was, it's worth mentioning how extremely lucky the Commanders were throughout last season. And no, not just with the Hail Mary to beat Chicago.
For one, the Commanders finished the 2024 season with an astounding 87% conversion rate on fourth downs. They went 20-23 when deciding to go for it!
Washington had things working in those situations, but it takes some degree of luck to reach an average that inflated. Moving forward, it is far too staggering a number to build an expectation out of. It's simply not sustainable year after year.
In 2024, 23.7% of the Commanders' points were scored on drives that included at least one successful fourth-down conversion. That is the fifth-highest percentage this century. Even cutting this percentage in half, that's a lot of scoring lost.
The Commanders also saw the ball bounce their way a lot in crunch time. Washington had an 9-4 record in one-score games. They enjoyed a five-game streak winning games decided by eight or less near the end of the season.
There were multiple factors that played into this, with many of them being out of the Commanders' control but simply working out in their favor.
Washington was the fifth-healthiest team in the league based on "adjusted games lost" metric which accounts for the impact of each injury a team sustained.
Also, the Commanders benefitted from mishaps by their opponents. This can be seen in data analyst Tom Bliss' chart called the "luck dashboard" on NFL.com.
Bliss highlighted four scenarios where “teams benefit from actions in a game that are almost entirely derived from opponent performance or lucky bounces”. Those include opponent dropped passes, dropped interceptions, missed kicks, and fumble recoveries.
In total, the Commanders were almost 60 points ahead of the next luckiest team in the NFL based on their opposition's mistakes.
It's unfathomable for this luck to happen again, and it's definitely not something to be relied on.
“We have found no correlation for this luck metric from season to season,” Bliss wrote in an email via The Washington Post. “Thus, every team individually (including the Commanders) should expect to have a net win probability via luck of 0” going into next season.
The Commanders may have recognized some of this luck, but as competitive athletes, they believe more in putting in the work in the offseason and reaping the rewards during the season. Karma, if you will.
“We made a lot of lucky (expletive) happen last year,” offensive lineman Andrew Wylie said. “I’m not going to just discredit that. But a lot of winning-time moments went our way because we practiced them every day.”
Washington may not get as lucky as they did last year, but another double-digit win season could prove that luck wasn't as strong a factor in their turnaround as we thought.
