Washington head coach Ron Rivera caused a bit of a stir on Monday with his comments on quarterbacks in the NFC East.
Rivera has since walked back those words, calling it a “mea culpa moment” on Tuesday. And when Commanders signal-caller Carson Wentz was asked about what Rivera said, he essentially brushed off the comments as no big deal, saying he didn’t know much about them until the team’s PR staff brought it up to him.
“But yeah, coach addressed it, handled it — nothing, for me, that I’m overly concerned about,” Wentz said, via Jay Finely of NBCSportsWashington.com. “Coach is a very straightforward, up-front guy. He addressed it in the team meeting, which I thought was really cool, and what he meant by it all. So I feel very confident in that.”
Wentz was then asked the same question that prompted Rivera’s “mea culpa” words — why he thinks the other NFC East teams are ahead of the Commanders.
“Yeah, I wish I had all the answers on that,” Wentz said. “I think there’s a lot of football left. There’s a lot of varying factors across our division, which is obviously a very good division at this point in the season. At the same time, I know there’s a lot of ball left. And we talked about it after the game, unfortunately we kind of dug ourselves a little bit of a hole.
“But we know where we’re at. We know what we’re capable of. And we can’t try and fix it all right tawny. Our job is to go 1-0 this week and we’ve got a short week to do that, so we’re focused on that.”
Playing the Bears on Thursday, the Commanders are a bigger part of the news cycle than they might otherwise be, especially as a 1-4 team in a division with two 4-1 teams and the league’s only 5-0 club. If Wentz can have a strong, winning performance against Chicago, it might sink Rivera’s comments into irrelevancy.