Did the Commanders Blow the 2026 Draft by Beating the Giants in Week 15? Will they Blow it by Trading Down for More Picks?

With the Commanders disappointing 2025 season winding to a close, attention is now shifting to the next round of off-season team building.

The mismatch between expectations heading into the season and results on the field seems to be driving a level of hysteria that we have not seen since the 2024 offseason, when Adam Peters famously neglected to invest all of his resources into the OT position after selecting a QB second overall.

Following the Commanders’ Week 17 loss to the Cowboys, they are now slated to pick no later than seventh overall, with realistic possibilities to move up one or two spots if they get help from other teams in the final week of games.

This article takes inspiration from two seemingly overstated arguments which have been making the rounds for the past few weeks:

1. If you are a regular Hogs Haven reader, you have probably heard that Dan Quinn blew the Commanders’ draft by playing to win and beating the Giants in Week 15. Had the Commanders lost that game, they would currently be sitting at second overall in the draft order, rather than seventh. By winning a meaningless game, we are led to believe that Quinn dropped the Commanders out of the range of sure-thing impact players in the draft and the blockbuster trade offers that come with them. While the win did drop the Commanders 5 places in the draft order, as it currently stands, is it also true that the change in draft position will have such a drastic impact on Adam Peters’ outlook in April?
2. If that were not bad enough, you might have also heard that trading back from 7th overall to acquire additional picks could make things even worse. By trading back, Adam Peters would be passing up on an impact player, like OSU safety Caleb Downs or ASU WR Jordyn Tyson, just to pick some guys later in the draft who are not likely to move the needle. Does that sound a little overstated?

Both of these arguments are based on a commonly voiced misconception about draft prospect evaluation. Anyone who has followed the NFL draft, even casually, should know that projecting college players to the NFL is not a precise science. Practically every draft class sees highly rated players picked early in the first round who fail to ever catch on as starters. And every year impact players are picked as late as Day 3, or go undrafted. The truth is that prospect ratings are only partially predictive of player outcomes.

That doesn’t mean that player evaluation is a total crapshoot. As a group, players picked early in the first round tend to have better long-term outcomes than those picked in the 20’s. But the margin of error around player evaluations is so wide that it becomes meaningless to split hairs around a few places in the draft order.

Strong statements, like the ones I have paraphrased above, oversimplify the complexity of draft decision-making, and underestimate the extent...