Hogs Haven
Which new face on defense can help the Commanders get beyond the NFC Championship game this season?
Washington Commanders Key Players will be a short series — likely three articles — in which John Portis and Bill-in-Bangkok will, together, explore newcomers to Washington’s roster that need to punch above their weight for the Commanders to progress to the next level of competition.
Since last year’s roster went to the NFC Championship, in essence we are discussing which offseason additions could propel the franchise to the Super Bowl in 2025.
The qualifications are simple: any Commander that was not with the franchise at the start of last season is eligible for consideration. This includes players acquired from in-season trades, free agent additions, and the draft. We even plan to address the coaching staff in this series (though the coaching candidates may not actually meet the ‘newcomers’ qualification).
Of course, Dan Quinn needs a high level of performance from all his players to reach the ultimate goal, but in these articles, we are trying to distill things down to a single player each (one for John & one for Bill) that we expect to have the most impact in 2025.
Obviously, this is opinion — not an exact measurement or evaluation. Rather, the intent is to “prime the pump” a little bit and encourage discussion about which player(s) might make the biggest impact in the coming season.
To make this a little different, and hopefully more fun, newcomer John Portis and long-time veteran Bill-in-Bangkok have agreed to provide their thoughts on one candidate in each article.
We encourage you to not only comment on the players we have chosen to highlight, but to add your own thoughts or candidates for consideration. To keep things tidy, we ask you to focus your comments on the group under discussion for the day — and today, that means defense.
While we are starting with the defensive side of the ball this morning, we’ll feature a different aspect of the team in each article of the series, which will run every Wednesday until the start of training camp.
Per Pro Football Reference, the Washington Commanders ranked 18th in Team Defense at the end of the 2024 regular season. This represented a significant improvement over the team’s 32nd ranking in 2023. The upward movement was accomplished by improvement in the passing defense. Ranked 32nd in 2023, the secondary made a substantial leap to 3rd last season. Meanwhile, the rushing defense regressed to 30th from an already dismal 27th ranking in 2023. In a division that boasts the team with the second-best rushing attack in the league, that’s not going to cut it. From a John Keim article published in May:
There’s a lot of things that we want to get better at,” coach Dan Quinn said. “Run defense was certainly part of that.”
The Commanders’ defense was able to get to the quarterback last season, ranking 11th with 43 sacks in 2024, but a good...
