Hogs Haven
The second season of the Peters/Quinn rebuild hasn’t gone to plan, with the roster depleted by injuries, key players seeming to regress and growing questions about the coaching and schemes. With a 3-8 record, the Commanders would need to win their remaining six games simply to finish the season with a winning record.
That is a big ask for a team that has lost its last six games and is missing its star QB and multiple key starters on defense. There has been some good news this week that Terry McLaurin and Will Harris will play against the Broncos. But their return from injury, and even a late season return of Jayden Daniels, is likely to be too little too late to resurrect the team’s playoff hopes.
While some fans will stick it out the bitter end before turning their thoughts to the off-season, others are already there. The Commanders will need an infusion of youth and talent this off-season to upgrade underperforming position groups and replace multiple starters who will retire or leave in free agency.
That will be particularly challenging for GM Adam Peters after having traded this year’s second and fourth round picks to the Texans for LT Laremy Tunsil. He will have to do much of the work to patch up the roster in free agency to set up the draft as an opportunity to raise the talent level and inject youth into what has become the oldest team in the league.
The DraftBot has been enjoying some time off during the regular season to pursue other interests. But it is never able to fully detach from its core mission to fix what ails the Commanders through better drafting. Since Adam Peters took over, it has been training its fifth generation bio-cybernetic neural network processing array to emulate his draft decision making process, as well as those of other top performing GMs around the league.
One aspect of Peters’ draft process that it has picked up on, and which will come to the fore in this mock draft, is stacking the draft board against the team’s existing roster. This is the process by which the scouting staff incorporates team needs into its prospect rankings. It was explained by Tariq Ahmad when he was Director of Scouting under Peters in San Francisco:
What does it do for the scouting process when you have a roster that looks like there’s virtually a starter at every spot, the depth looks pretty good? Does that change how you approach it and where your eyes go when it comes to evaluating the talent?
TA: Yeah, so it doesn’t change the process. We’re evaluating everyone through the fall as if we’re starting the roster from scratch to get the value exactly correct. But, as we talk about the players as we go in the winter and then, during the April meetings, we compare them to the guys on our roster and how they would fit in. So, initially it...
