ASHBURN, Va. – I’m Scrooge McDuck.

Yes, the Washington Commanders had a great offseason. They did the most important thing right: They poached general manager Adam Peters from the San Francisco 49ers. And they did the second most important thing right: They were so bad last season that they were able to sign a potential franchise quarterback in Jayden Daniels.

They probably got the third biggest thing right: They parlayed a seemingly failed affair with Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson into hiring Dan Quinn. He combined his boundless energy and hard-earned lessons from his last stint as a head coach with what Washington and its still-new owners and front office need: someone who knows what they want in a football team, who can sell it. And teach it.

“This is how we get down,” Quinn has said about 600 times since he was hired. (What is it with coaches and their favorite phrases?)

But none of that – including the positive vibe and professionalism that Peters, Quinn and the many new hires have already been praised for by others around the league – means that DC should expect a one-year turnaround like the Houston Texans.

Yes, there are similarities between the Commanders and the Texans. Houston hired a top executive with a proven track record of acquiring talent in 2021, Nick Caserio from the New England Patriots. The Texans hired a high-energy, defensive-minded head coach in 2023, DeMeco Ryans. The Texans selected Ohio State quarterback CJ Stroud second in the 2023 NFL Draft after a more well-known QB was selected first.

And the Texans finished 10-7 last season and won the AFC South after going 11-38-1 from 2020-2022.

Commanders’ ownership has been restructured, with Josh Harris and his group now in charge. (Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)

So couldn’t that happen here too? Couldn’t Daniels, last year’s Heisman Trophy winner from LSU, immediately take Washington to where it hasn’t been since Robert Griffin III’s rookie season? Couldn’t the Commanders break through with the perfect mix of high-character veterans like Bobby Wagner, Austin Ekeler, Jeremy Chinn and Frankie Luvu combined with fresh blood like Daniels, second-round picks Johnny Newton and Mike Sainristil, unsigned safety Tyler Owens and young holdovers like Brian Robinson Jr., Sam Cosmi, Quan Martin and Terry McLaurin?

Yes, they could.

But they probably won’t.

And you know what? That’s not a bad thing at all.

After 32 years in the wild, you can wait a few more seasons. That will take time. A new system with new coaches and players takes time to implement, then to know, then to master.

There are too many holes in the existing roster, despite more than half of last season’s roster being cut. The left side of the offensive line is, shall we say, unproven. The Commanders say they love their wide receivers, but on Wednesday they signed ex-Texan Noah Brown to the active roster. The secondary was overhauled and Washington got its new starting kicker from the Cleveland Browns a week before the end of the preseason.

And even though Stroud had a historic rookie season, most first-year quarterbacks struggle to lead their teams to winning records.

As promising as Daniels is, he will experience many, many difficult moments as a rookie.

“I just have to get through it, just go out there and be myself, know who God made me to be,” Daniels said Thursday. “Stay grounded; don’t get too worked up, but don’t get too worked up either. At the end of the day, it takes a team to help people. I can’t go out there thinking I’m the savior and stuff. When the plays are there, I have to make them. But I have to get the 10 other guys and the whole organization to move forward in one direction.”

But if we keep the most important thing in mind, as someone here has said many times, Washington is on the right track, regardless of its record in 2024. The right people are finally in charge.

The Commanders’ overarching problems that have plagued them for three decades no longer lie on the road like broken bumpers on the Beltway. The ownership that set the tone for the team’s tone deafness and toxicity off the field and its incompetence on it has been restructured. Josh Harris and his group are now in charge. Peters, one of the NFL’s best talent scouts, is in charge of personnel. Quinn won a Super Bowl and nearly a second as the Seattle Seahawks’ defensive coordinator and kept the Dallas Cowboys’ defense in the top 10 for the past three seasons.

“We’re definitely going to have a lot more fun,” Harris said Sunday.

Harris knows how a fundamental player can turn around a dying franchise. His Philadelphia 76ers drafted Joel Embiid with the No. 3 pick in 2014 through the “process.” It took a while, but the Sixers eventually caught up and have been a contender ever since. His New Jersey Devils went 31-41-10 in 2018-19 and received the first pick in the 2019 NHL Draft, drafting center Jack Hughes. Four years later, Hughes broke the franchise record for points in a season and the Devils made it to the second round.

Now it’s Daniels’ turn to be the cornerstone. That will probably happen in spurts and with a lot of thunder. But if he’s a flop, it will be a shock.

“When you have a difference-maker player, you’re ultimately going to see improvement in the team,” Harris said. “Every sport is different. In the other sports, of course, there are only so many. … If you have a league MVP on your roster, you’re going to be pretty good. With the other franchises, we’re really at the point where we’re trying to win championships. And our regular season is less important to us. We’re a little early on that, I think. But I think if Jayden develops into what we all expect him to be, that’s certainly the key position in the NFL. He’s obviously going to take us further.”

The Commanders, except for Griffin’s rookie season, have always started behind — way behind — at the one position where you almost always have to be elite to have any chance of making a championship team. Without a franchise quarterback, an NFL team is always on the hunt and always behind.

Lance Newmark, the Commanders’ assistant general manager, spent 26 years with the Detroit Lions before coming here to work with Peters in February. In the Motor City, Newmark worked for another franchise that was unable to salvage its survival for decades. But after solidifying the quarterback position – first with Matthew Stafford and then Jared Goff – and hiring a Quinn-like head coach in Dan Campbell, the Lions have finally turned things around.

“If you feel comfortable there (as a quarterback) and you feel like you can win games with that person, you can really explore all the other options,” Newmark said. “It’s a unique situation, playing with a young guy. I’m very excited. It’s a little bit like the Stafford experience. But I don’t know. I feel like we’re a better team here than we were at this (same) time in Detroit.”

But they are still a long way from being able to regularly compete in the NFC East – Washington’s division record over the last five seasons is 8-21-1 (!) – and certainly not from being ready for a longer playoff run.

Still, we all know that patience will be tight for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for Week 1 in nine days, even as the team wants to be competitive this season and ready to go in three or four years.

Quinn knows the back-and-forth between coaches and their executives. A coach in any sport, at any level, wants – and needs – to keep his job to win the game that is on the schedule that day. A GM and the executives always think three or four years ahead. That doesn’t mean their desires have to conflict, but that’s always a potential problem.

“We’re a developmental team,” Quinn said Thursday. “That means for every player, it’s about knowing how far we can take them. There are going to be some players who are early in their careers, and in years to come, you’re going to say, ‘I remember when that guy was a rookie.’ And there are going to be some guys from that rookie class who will be that. You have to go through some setbacks, you have to go through some growing pains when you first play in the NFL against guys who have played for five, 10 years. You have to go through that. But that’s how you learn.”

That’s a good motto for this franchise in 2024. Bumps and learning. But the biggest bumps will finally go away. Calluses will grow to cover the places where so much pain and heartache have been the norm of this organization for so long.

(Top photo: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)