The Washington Commanders have fallen to 3-5 after taking their third consecutive loss on Monday Night Football, getting trounced by the Kansas City Chiefs. At this point, there's no more hiding from the harsh truth: this isn't the same team as last year.
The Commanders entered the 2025 season with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations for perhaps the first time in more than three decades. They had Jayden Daniels coming off one of the greatest rookie campaigns in NFL history, and a roster figured to improve in several key areas from a group that made the NFC Championship game. Playoffs were the expectation, and lifting the Vince Lombardi Trophy was the limit.
Instead, Washington's season has been doomed by age, injuries, and (gulp) the crippling reality that last year's team was more lucky than good.
But for as much of a mirage as it was for the Commanders ever to be considered a title contender, it can also be said that they're not as lost as they seem in 2025.
Sustaining success in the NFL is hard, but you always have a chance
The fact that Washington went from winning four games in 2023 to 12 (plus two more in the playoffs) in 2024 should be proof enough that every year is different. This is the double-edged sword of NFL football: it's the most demanding sport to contend in consistently, but it's also the easiest one in which to conduct a quick, successful rebuild.
In the NBA, it can take close to a half-decade for a team to rise from the basement into relevance unless it acquires a game-changing superstar. In baseball, it usually takes years of development for young prospects to reach the MLB level, let alone start winning. Rebuilds are lengthy, arduous journeys that leave fans tuning out in droves, even when they ultimately work.
This is not the case in the NFL.
Given the extremely short window of players' primes and the ability to perform at a Pro Bowl-caliber level right away at most positions, all it takes is one strong draft or free agency class to change everything. The Commanders largely went the latter route in 2024, and many of Adam Peters' moves landed on the extreme high end of their outcome variance.
Most of this, in retrospect, was because Washington was highly fortunate in avoiding major injuries and feasted on the magical vibes of a dream season all year long. Role-player pickups like Frankie Luvu, Jeremy Chinn, and Dante Fowler Jr. all had career years out of nowhere. Aging vets such as Zach Ertz, Bobby Wagner, and Austin Ekeler proved to have more gas left in the tank than expected. Everything that could have gone right went right.
It's been the opposite story this fall.
This year's roster remains a better one on paper than last year's, but everything that could have gone wrong has. It illustrates the same dilemma that carried Washington in 2024, but in reverse: NFL performance is highly volatile, with wild swings from year to year determined by just one or two factors.
For those ever so hopeful that 2024 would be the start of a new normal in Washington, it was never going to be that easy. But at the same time, we know that the world exists. It is within the realm of possible universes that the Commanders can make deep playoff runs under their current leadership, something that couldn't be said before.
And they're as close to getting back there as they were far away in reality last year.
With the right roster tweaks, anything is possible. The 2026 campaign will need to prove that this version of the Daniels-era Commanders is the exception, and last year can still become the rule.