Alex Smith proved his leg is stable. Washington’s QB situation is anything but.

By Barry Svrluga,

As the pocket collapsed, you could be forgiven for being caught someplace between choking up and holding your breath. Football is a brutal sport, with the potential for catastrophe on every snap. And here on Sunday, in the middle of a mass of humanity, stood Alex Smith.

His body already has been broken. He almost had his leg amputated. He hadn’t been hit in nearly two years. Aaron Donald, the NFL’s best defensive player, tossed aside linemen as if he were a 6-year-old searching for the right Lego. And here came 280 pounds ready to jump on Smith’s back and put unspeakable pressure on his right leg, a veteran of 17 surgeries that still contains a titanium rod.

Look away. Just, look away.

“The first one felt good,” Smith said.

[Nearly two years after a life-threatening injury, Alex Smith completes an impossible comeback]

NFL players are the strangest of creatures. Smith is next level. And with that, a week marked by equal parts drama and pretzel logic in Ashburn ended with the benched first-round pick from 2019 at home with a tummy ache, his replacement dinged with an arm injury on a ferocious hit near the sideline and the 36-year-old Smith running from Donald and his Los Angeles Rams’ mates in a lopsided 30-10 loss that made any talk about division titles seem somewhere between remote and ludicrous — even as they’re still ongoing in the locker room, if not anywhere else.

It’s just such an unappealing stew. Washington is now 1-4 and was outgained by 321 yards Sunday. Yet Ron Rivera, its coach, is saying stuff such as, “This is an interesting stretch for us.” Kyle Allen, the man who became the starter after the rock-the-franchise benching of Dwayne Haskins, survived a jarring hit from Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey and will be the starter if he shows up for work healthy Wednesday. And Smith, whose comeback from a horrific broken leg nearly two years ago is both unimaginable and inspiring, is left to say, “Whatever this team needs me to do, I’ll do.”

We all need more Alex Smith in us. Even in producing an unsightly stat line hardly of his own making — 9 of 17 for all of 37 yards and six sacks taken — Smith shows why Washington kept him around even though so much of the roster needs improvement. It’s not as much for his production as it is for his example. If Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott needs an example of what’s possible after his shudder-inducing ankle injury Sunday against the New York Giants, he can do no better than Smith.

“It’s incredible, what he has overcome,” Rams Coach Sean McVay said. “I am just so impressed with him.”

“It’s a hell of a story,” said Rivera, who coached his fifth straight game as he battles cancer and therefore knows something about stories and whether they deserve hell-of-a status.

For Washington, Sunday was about figuring out exactly what direction this team is headed and who will handle the sport’s most important position. Instead of clarity, there is more theater. On the first week of his benching, Haskins didn’t even appear at FedEx Field because he told club officials he wasn’t feeling well, and doctors advised he head home. Allen was so-so, leading the team’s lone touchdown drive and scoring himself on a run but engineering three other drives that went nowhere before Ramsey’s hit knocked him from the game.

And that left Rivera to deliver his latest mixed message: He believes right now the best quarterback to help Washington win is Allen. But even after Allen was cleared medically, the coach didn’t put him back into a game in which Washington trailed just 20-10.

“I would have liked to have seen him finish the game,” Rivera said. “I decided I didn’t want him to take another big shot.”

The person then in line to take that big shot — rather, frankly, shot after shot after shot — became Smith. Since he broke that leg in November 2018 on a hit from Houston’s J.J. Watt — Donald’s predecessor as the game’s most disruptive force — he hadn’t even dressed for a game, let alone absorbed a hit. Suddenly, all those Goliaths swarmed around him. Given the state of Washington’s offensive line — which could be described as “banged-up” or “terrible,” take your pick — the carnage had to come.

Smith’s wife, Elizabeth, looked on from the stands, their three young children bouncing in the seats next to her. They stood and cheered his first completion, then watched the Rams come again and again and again. Luckily, the pandemic forced Elizabeth Smith to wear a black mask with the No. 11 to conceal her face. What expression was under there? Pride, maybe. But there had to be dread, too.

Put it this way: I don’t remember ever being this nervous to watch a specific football player in a football game, and I didn’t bear Smith’s three kids. On Smith’s third live snap in 694 days, Donald tromped into the Washington backfield, where Smith was trying to operate. Donald’s response: Jump on Smith’s back. Smith’s response: Stand there under the weight before finally collapsing under it — and then getting up.

“It was nice to obviously know you were fine,” Smith said. “It was nice to knock the cobwebs off, so to speak.”

[Four takeaways from Washington’s 30-10 loss to the Rams]

Donald has 6.5 sacks in the Rams’ five games this season, so Smith was neither the first nor last quarterback he has buried. He knows how these humans respond as they’re being annihilated. Back on the bench, he looked up at one of FedEx Field’s replay boards, which showed the play — Smith standing, even momentarily, under Donald’s weight.

“That [fella’s] leg is strong,” Donald said, eyes wide.

So is his will. But if Smith proved Sunday that his leg is stable, he must know that the situation in which he enters is not. Rivera’s public midweek reasoning on benching Haskins had to do with the upcoming schedule. Indeed, over the next six weeks, one-win Washington plays the winless New York Giants twice, 2-3 Dallas twice as well as Detroit and Cincinnati, each with one win.

“If we just put it all together and play consistently, we can get on a run,” cornerback Kendall Fuller said.

And then they printed the stat sheet, and it said the offense gained 108 yards, the third-lowest total for the club since 1961. And it said the defense allowed 429 yards and gave up at least 30 points for the fourth straight week. And if Rivera was looking at that upcoming schedule and saying, “There’s a chance,” he has to know that each and every opponent is looking back at Washington and thinking, “That’s a ‘W.’ ”

Sunday, though, shouldn’t be remembered as just the latest messy chapter for a franchise that has written almost nothing but for a quarter century. It should be remembered as the day Alex Smith got back on a football field, took a shot and walked away, still healthy and strong.

For more by Barry Svrluga, visit washingtonpost.com/svrluga.