Adam Peters’ third trip to the NFL Scouting Combine as the Washington Commanders’ general manager will look a little different than the previous two. He’s no longer the hotshot first-year GM, no longer the celebrated executive who turned around a troubled team seemingly overnight.
Now he’s back at square one, with plenty of work ahead to remake a 5-12 team.
Washington has six draft picks this year, including the No. 7 overall selection, a silver lining of the team’s disappointing record. But it also has more than 30 players set to become free agents and numerous roster holes to fill. The Commanders need to get younger. They need to get faster. They need upgrades at the starter level and more reliability among their reserves.
They need personnel that fit their schemes, which will change this season under first-time coordinators David Blough and Daronte Jones.
“It’s good news-bad news,” NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah said of the Commanders on Thursday. “The bad news is you’ve got a lot of needs. The good news is you’re going to definitely fill one of them here.”
Much as coach Dan Quinn insisted his team needed simply a “recalibration” in 2024, there’s no denying the Commanders are now firmly in rebuild mode. And it starts this week at the combine, where their to-do list is extensive. Among their priorities:
1. Edge rusher, edge rusher, edge rusher
The Commanders’ situation isn’t that bad. They do have two of the most important positions filled, with quarterback Jayden Daniels and a mostly set offensive line that played well last season. However, they’ve had a glaring need for an elite pass rusher for years now, and they can’t wait any longer. They know that.
It’s why they retooled their coaching staff to bring in Jones, who learned behind longtime defensive coordinators Vance Joseph, Mike Zimmer and Brian Flores, and added Eric Henderson to oversee the defensive line and the Commanders’ defensive run game.
Last season, Jones and the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive line led the league with a 46 percent pass-rush win rate, according to ESPN’s analysis.
So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Jones, who has spent most of his career as a defensive backs coach, responded with this when asked about NFL defenses and his vision for the Commanders: “If you watch the last couple of years of the Super Bowl, it’s come down to fundamentals and techniques and winning the line of scrimmage. So that will never change in my opinion.”
Lucky for Washington, the class of 2026 is stacked with quality edge rushers.
Take Rueben Bain Jr., the former Miami star who had the second-most quarterback pressures (67) in college football and ranked sixth among qualified edge rushers in pass-rush win rate (22.9 percent), according to Pro Football Focus.
“Bain is just more kind of an identity pick, who just plays so hard and so physical,” Jeremiah said. “The dimensions aren’t going to be ideal in terms of the (arm) length, but there’s more that he brings than just what shows up on the stat sheet. Just the overall physicality and toughness that he plays with.”
Arvell Reese, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound linebacker out of Ohio State, has led Dane Brugler’s list of the top prospects in this year’s draft since midseason. Without knowing exactly how Jones envisions his defense, it’s unclear if Reese would project better as an off-ball linebacker or an edge defender in Washington, but Brugler believes he has the potential to develop into something “between Micah Parsons and Jalon Walker.”
Then there’s David Bailey (6-3, 250) out of Texas Tech, who has the explosiveness that Peters and Quinn both said they prioritize in pass rushers.
“There’s not a certain 40 speed,” Quinn said last year at the combine. “This is an initial quickness, how quickly you can anticipate you can get going. That’s the number one thing.”
But Bailey could be off the board before the Commanders pick at No. 7. Any of those three players could.
2. Lay the groundwork for free agency
The combine is one of the few league events attended by everyone — executives, coaches, scouts and agents — splitting the focus between the incoming rookie class and veterans looking for new deals.
Peters has plenty to do with his own free agents, assuming there are at least a few he would like to re-sign. Marcus Mariota should be one of them. Peters is prohibited from talking to representatives of pending free agents from other teams about any potential deal, and obviously, no one would ever illegally tamper at the combine. They would never take advantage of an instance in which their own free-agent players have the same representatives as other pending free agents. They would never have side conversations with agents or discussions that materialize into signed deals the moment the new league year begins. Never!
3. Make progress on a new deal for Laremy Tunsil
Tunsil will get paid, and handsomely. The Commanders knew this when they gave up multiple draft picks to acquire the left tackle from the Houston Texans last year, and it was only reinforced when he had one of his finest seasons.
After last year’s dragged-out negotiations with receiver Terry McLaurin, Peters has said he wants to get a deal done with Tunsil quickly. The 31-year-old has a year remaining on his current contract, which includes a $16.95 million salary and a $24.95 million cap hit. The contracts website Spotrac believes Tunsil’s market value is $29.2 million per year in average salary, which would make him the highest-paid tackle in the NFL (Rashawn Slater is currently No. 1, with a $28.5 million average per year.)
“We’ve had constant communication,” Peters said of Tunsil after last season. “He’s self-represented, but he has a team around him that we have constant communication with and have had throughout the year. So, I think what I can say is we definitely want to get something done with him, and sooner rather than later.”