Rivera’s cancer diagnosis is a challenge he and his players can turn into a building block

There are moments that matter most in the rebuilding of a broken franchise, and this was one of those — perhaps the biggest. If Rivera does indeed build a healthy culture and a winning team in Washington as he has vowed, the turning point could well have been Thursday, at the end of a walk-through in a practice bubble he does not like.

That was when he gathered his players and, in the gauzy glow of the inflatable building, said, “I have some tough news …”

Then he talked about the lump on the side of his neck that turned out to be squamous cell cancer in a lymph node. He talked about seven weeks of treatments and said the cancer was caught early and he will beat it. He told them he might miss days of coaching and there is a plan in place if he does.

When he was finished, there was silence.

“It’s a serious diagnosis,” defensive tackle Jonathan Allen said later.

But for the man who spoke that evening, it also was a chance to see how his players would handle the news. What would they do with it? How would it make them better? In the sometimes strange world of professional football, his revelation — as frightening as it may be — also was an opportunity.

“Without a doubt,” Rivera said Saturday. “[For them] let’s say, ‘Coach has to step back; are we going to wait for someone else to step up, or are we going to step up ourselves?’ I think this is all part of our growth, I really do.”

He has a term for that evening’s speech, one he uses from time to time as he tries to pull something good out of the muck that this franchise has been stuck in in recent years. He calls it “a learnable moment.”

“We are going to find out a little more about ourselves,” Rivera said.

Coaches rarely get to choose their learnable moments. A cancer diagnosis brought this one, and now Rivera has a way to connect with players he has coached for only a couple of weeks. No coach willingly picks a disease with a death rate — even a low one — to build a bond with his team, but the situation has handed Washington’s players a chance to mature, a point around which they can become closer and grow.

Little has gone right in Ashburn since Rivera arrived Dec. 31. The novel coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of the offseason workouts that new coaches use to instill a philosophy in their team. Rivera has been forced to oversee the organization’s response to the George Floyd killing and a national cry for racial justice, to talk owner Daniel Snyder through the team’s decision to drop its 87-year-old name and to serve as the franchise’s leading voice in responding to a Washington Post story in which 15 female former employees and two female sportswriters described a culture of sexual harassment.

Whenever he’s asked about a summer that many would decry as unfair, Rivera always responds with speeches about the team’s need to fight through adversity. It’s an old cliche, muttered at one time or another by any man who has ever coached a professional football team. There’s always this sense, in football practice facilities, that everyone is entrenched in some mythical war in which brilliantly drawn battle plans are constantly blown apart and every injury is another casualty to be overcome.

But those who know Rivera best say he thrives in the chaos and stays calm in the bleakest moments, forever giving a sense that everything will be all right. They say he does this not with stoic pragmatism but with a humanity not often associated with the most hawkish of major sports. His genius, they say, comes in the way he makes things personal. On Thursday evening, they all became one on the turf of the team’s practice bubble.

“There was no hiding it. He just gave it to us straight,” center Chase Roullier said.

“Whenever someone can be vulnerable with you, it really shows their mental toughness because that’s not an easy thing to do,” Allen said.

For months, Rivera has worked to keep the organization’s disarray away from the players, building a bubble of normalcy around the practice fields and allowing them to find their own challenges to fight through rather than take on what the front office is facing. On Thursday, a challenge came via the words no coach ever wants to say to his team. But now that they have been spoken and the secret is out, Rivera has given his players their first real hardship to overcome — and something they can survive together.

“I have some tough news …”

Where they go after those words will say so much about how fast Rivera can remake Washington’s football team.

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