



With all the recent hand-wringing about our offensive line, I'm curious what ideas y'all have for what we should have done this offseason, given that you can't predict injury and going in to free agency:
With all of that in mind, what should the front office have done differently? Who should they have signed or traded for? Which tackle, guard, or center should they have drafted instead of the guys they did (which did include an o-lineman)?
For the record, these are not rhetorical questions; they're sincere. I'm certainly no expert and don't pretend to do any deep film analysis on players or anything like that. I do feel like releasing Biadasz was a pretty clear mistake (so much so that I suspect there was more to his release than we are aware of), but even so, I don't think that single transaction was the make-or-break move that has people starting to panic over our o-line.
Would be nice if they'd show the front view.
From a quick Google, it looks like this guy is still on the team. Is he still injured? Has he been seen in training camp at all?
Not expecting anything of him, just curious.
There has been much discourse on the performance of the draft picks of Adam Peters and it sparked my curiosity to put some numbers alongside the discussion.
As you will see below, the 2024 and 2025 draft picks for the Commanders have delivered surplus value on the field, both aggregated and relative to their draft positions. This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been misses (Ben Sinnott), but it does mean on the whole, commanders draft picks have played and produced more than their contemporaries.
I could do a whole post on the methodology used (check out the link in the comments for more details), but the brief version is that I use pro football reference’s Approximate Value to measure on field production and fit a curve based on pick number, position and years since drafted to estimate how much Approximate Value that combination will generate. Then I compare the residuals to infer performance, a player that has a positive residual (actual-estimate) has a performance that exceeds their draft position (e.g. Jacory Croskey-Merritt, who finished 23rd in the league in rushing yards from pick 245) and someone with a negative number (e.g. Dominique Hampton, who delivered 0 AV) has underperformed their draft position.
First, the Commanders had disastrous classes in 2022 and 2023 under Ron Rivera. Combined, the Commanders come in 31st of 32 teams.
However, the metric completely flips over 2024 and 2025 draft classes under Peters, with the Commanders 4th of 32 teams.
Here is a look at each player’s performance, segmented by the two regimes. You can check out the link in the comments to filter and sort for yourself.
AV has some limitations, and therefore I think it's wise to use caution around claiming too much on the back of it, particularly at the individual player level, but I think it's directionally accurate enough for light inference on the team level aggregation. Also, I don’t believe the correct interpretation of these results is to say the commanders are now awesome at drafting, more like the first two classes are off to a good start.
One last thing that I notice in the data is something that I think is really clever by the Commanders front office is what they’ve done with waivers and free agency for players from the 2022 draft class. While the Commanders didn’t get a lot of their own 2022 draft class, they’ve signed a relatively big collection of productive players from that class:
Player (2022 class rank by AV):
Rachaad White (26)
Leo Chenal (50)
Chig Okonkwo (71)
Nick Cross (75)
Nicholas Petit-Frere (100)
Jerome Ford (102)
Treylon Burks (128)
Drake Jackson (153)
Some of these guys are genuine training camp lottery tickets, but Peters saw the market and went and bought four of the top 75 most productive players from the class to fill the gap left by the previous regime.
Included this tweet because Keim primarily discussed the incident in his podcast. Very worrying (obviously) considering he is switching positions in a brand new system and has gotten practically zero training camp work.
P.S: How insane is it that Allegretti is such a crucial piece of our O-line to the point his absence is incredibly noteworthy. Me in April would have called you insane if you’d have said we’d be in that position.
Found this old pin in a box of watches I bought. Anyone see these before, are they worth anything or do people collect them?
Jacory "Bill" Croskey-Merritt: The primary incumbent after rushing for 804 yards as a rookie in 2025. Coaches are pushing him to become an every-down back, they are working on his passing game.
Rachaad White: A vet who was the lead running back for the Bucs for a while and signed here expecting a role. Considered an elite passing downs back for his blocking and reliability.
Kaytron Allen: A sixth-round rookie draft pick out of Penn State who has turned looked good in camp and strong preseason.
Robert Henry Jr.: Henry is an undrafted rookie who looked even better in the preseason game.
I think it will be a 60/40 committee with Rachaad on more of the passing downs as i think he’s a good blocker/receiver. Hopefully Bill improves and becomes our bell cow but i don’t think he has the blocking and pass catching ability yet.