Washington interim head coach Bill Callahan is hoping to lose the “interim” label after the season.
Callahan said he “absolutely” hopes to be the head coach in 2020, and he believes the team has made progress since he took over for the fired Jay Gruden in October.
“I look at the fight of our players,” Callahan said, via the Washington Post. “I look at the resiliency, and [I] tried to bring back a work ethic into the program that I thought was lacking. I thought our players could have been better fundamentally. . . . I saw our players get better and compete for four quarters. I saw our players have stamina through four quarters of play. I thought long and hard about improving the team and what aspects I would really focus on. A lot of that was the second-half finish, and I thought we did that.”
There is something to be said for the idea that Callahan has improved the team: They were 0-5 when he took over and have gone 3-7 since he got the job, and Callahan has done that while prioritizing playing time for younger players. Still, it seems like a long shot that Dan Snyder will stick with Callahan, rather than trying to make a splash with a coach who might generate a little more excitement among the fan base. Callahan hasn’t done a bad job in his 10 games running the show, but he probably hasn’t done a good enough job to keep it going forward.