The Commanders went 12-5 in 2024 and reached the NFC championship game. They went 5-12 in 2025. The symmetry is as perfect as it is worthless.
Records don’t invert because a truth reveals itself, so the main question swirling through Ashburn as the 2026 Commanders open training camp: Which previous iteration of head coach Dan Quinn’s team is closer to what they are now?
The answer is 2024. The team that went 5-12 last season was never the team that went 12-5, and the reason is not complicated: The quarterback barely played.
Jayden Daniels started just seven games last season and finished only four of them. A Week 2 left knee sprain in Green Bay cost him two games. He strained his right hamstring in Dallas Week 7 and missed another. A gruesome dislocated left elbow on a scramble against Seattle in Week 9 sidelined him until Week 14, only to come back in Minnesota and land on that same elbow after an interception, never to suit up again in 2025.
That led to a total of eight starts for Marcus Mariota and two from journeyman Josh Johnson. A receiving corps decimated by injuries saw even reliable Pro Bowler Terry McLaurin limited to 10 games and career lows in catches (38), yards (582) and touchdowns (3) after he broke out for a career-best 13 TDs in 2024, his fifth straight 1,000-yard campaign.
We have made the following roster moves:
– Placed CB Trey Amos, DE Dorance Armstrong and DE Deatrich Wise Jr. on the Active/Physically Unable to Perform list
– Placed CB Fred Davis II on the Active/Non-Football Illness list— Washington Commanders (@Commanders)
So Washington’s offense didn’t just have a bad season. It basically played without one. The scoring offense fell from fifth in the NFL to 22nd, averaging 20.9 points a game. It was a fall befitting a unit playing large stretches without the two players it was built around.
The rest of the collapse was arithmetic that doesn’t repeat. The Commanders finished minus-13 in turnover margin after finishing plus-1, and they got there by taking the ball away just 10 times all season. Ten. That’s nowhere near the Quinn defense we were sold. It’s a coin that landed the wrong way over most of 17 weeks, and will assuredly not land that way again.
Here’s the part that doesn’t fit the story, and it’s the part that matters most.
The defense, ranked dead last in the NFL in yardage allowed, wasn’t a victim of 2025. It was already broken in 2024, and the headline run-stopper brought in to help shore it up, Deatrich Wise, landed on injured reserve after a quad injury in Week 2. Holdover Dorance Armstrong, the Commanders’ best defensive end, joined him on the shelf in Week 7 — and both are still recovering entering training camp.
We have made the following roster moves:
– Placed CB Trey Amos, DE Dorance Armstrong and DE Deatrich Wise Jr. on the Active/Physically Unable to Perform list
– Placed CB Fred Davis II on the Active/Non-Football Illness list— Washington Commanders (@Commanders)
But the run defense didn’t need their absence to be bad. Washington ranked 30th against the run in 2025 at 4.8 yards per carry. It ranked 30th against the run in 2024 at an identical 4.8 yards per carry. That rot was there — we were just distracted by Daniels’ Rookie of the Year performance for the ages and the Burgundy and Gold’s best season since the 1991 Super Bowl run.
In fairness to general manager Adam Peters, he basically inherited nothing. Not one of Ron Rivera’s first-round picks is still on the roster — including Chase Young, the No. 2 overall selection and 2020 Defensive Rookie of the Year, taken at the exact position Washington has been scrambling to fill since his departure. Patching the 2024 defense together with 30-somethings was essentially the only move available to him.
But it worked, and that’s the trap.
A unit that finished 18th in points allowed helped produce 12 wins and a trip to the NFC championship game, so Peters decided “close enough” and ran it back in 2025 with the oldest roster in the league instead of starting the youth movement he’s finally getting around to now. Von Miller led the team in sacks at 36 years old, which is less a compliment to Miller than proof the reinforcements never came. Peters read the same mirage everybody else did.
And the missing reinforcements show up in the math. Quinn’s Dallas defenses took the ball away 93 times from 2021 to 2023, leading the NFL in takeaways all three seasons. A reputation forged with the “Legion of Boom” title teams in Seattle eventually migrated to Washington and produced just 17 takeaways, then only 10.
The hallmark didn’t travel, because forcing turnovers is a function of who is on the field — peak Richard Sherman and Micah Parsons aren’t walking through the door in Ashburn — not what is written on the call sheet.
So why should 2026 be different?
Not because new defensive coordinator Daronte Jones coached defensive backs. His predecessor, Joe Whitt Jr., was a career secondary coach too, and he was also a first-time play caller when he got here. That experiment ended with to try to salvage it before Quinn moved him out and called plays himself 10 games into last season.
The difference isn’t the résumé, it’s the coaching tree. Whitt came from Quinn’s Dallas staff running a version of the same system. Jones spent the past three seasons under Brian Flores, whose last season, by far the most in the NFL (the next-closest team sat at 38%). For the first time since Quinn arrived, someone in Ashburn is proposing a different answer instead of a better version of the same one.
Of course, scheme doesn’t work without bodies that can run, which is why No. 7 overall pick Sonny Styles matters more than the usual rookie hype. The 6-foot-5, 244-pound physical freak played safety at Ohio State before moving to linebacker, and he covers like it. Pair him with free agent signing Leo Chenal and last year’s old and slow Bobby Wagner-led linebacker unit is suddenly one of the fastest in the league.
And they brought the same medicine to the back end, signing Bowie-born, DeMatha-and-Maryland safety Nick Cross — a downhill run-stopper and blitzer who profiles perfectly for what Jones wants to run (and, as a bonus, gets to Raise Hail in his own backyard).
A Flores system asks defenders to blitz, drop, disguise and cover in the same package. Washington spent the offseason acquiring players who can actually do all four and create burgundy blurs all over the field.
Odafe Oweh is the other reason, and he is the signing my own argument should hate. A four-year deal worth up to $100 million with $68 million guaranteed is the first sizable check Peters has written, and it went to a player with one great half-season on his ledger. , noting that Baltimore flipped an underperforming 10-sack player for a so-so defensive back and a Day 3 draft pick, which tends to mean the people who watched him every day were not sold. One could make the case Oweh was a fallback after Peters came up short on Jaelan Phillips and inquired about Boye Mafe.
The counter is age and trajectory. Oweh is 27 and ascending, not 36 and renting, and his production is the specific kind the Commanders lacked: three sacks and two forced fumbles against eventual-AFC champion New England on wild-card weekend. Washington sacked the quarterback 42 times last season, only one fewer than in 2024. So, the pressure was there, just not the kind that dislodged the football and stole possessions.
And the offense isn’t simply welcoming back injured stars — it’s getting a schematic overhaul. Kliff Kingsbury’s system lived in the shotgun and the no-huddle; over his two years Washington ran the fewest under-center snaps in the NFL, by far. He’s gone. David Blough, a 30-year-old first-time coordinator who was a practice squad quarterback just three years ago, is installing more under center, less no-huddle and more disguise. Quinn calls it an aggressive, balanced attack. It’s also a rebuild of the one thing that was working, and now with significant questions at receiver and center.
Which means Quinn has handed two flawed units to first-time play callers. That’s either conviction or desperation, and Ashburn is where we start finding out which.
So camp becomes a test instead of a preview. Two things have to move, and both can be checked by the Nov. 10 trade deadline on a schedule that breaks Washington’s way. (And Peters has no need nor excuse to wait: he entered the summer with roughly $43.7 million in cap space, third-most in the league, and a quarterback who won’t be on a rookie contract much longer.)
If Washington is still bottom-five in total defense at midseason, the scheme change didn’t take, the speed infusion was of no consequence and a flawed roster was the problem the whole time. If the pass rush is there and the ball still isn’t coming loose, Oweh looks like a bad bet and the takeaway drought was never about opportunity.
Miss both and 2025 was not an accident. It was the truth arriving a year late — and perhaps Quinn departing sooner than expected.
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