3 immediate issues for Commanders owner Josh Harris in 2023

Commanders must sign Emmanuel Forbes and Quan Martin

Like most teams, the Washington Commanders locked a lot of their draft picks into standard-issue contracts within weeks of their selection. But they have still not signed their first two picks, Emmanuel Forbes and Quan Martin.

This is not a big issue in the first half of July. As of this writing, there are 25 rookies who remain unsigned across the league. Forbes is one of eight first-rounders still negotiating and Martin is one of 13 unsigned second-rounders.

Six other teams, like the Commanders, are still working out deals with their first and second-round picks.

Martin skipped rookie camp with an excused absence, but both players have been active participants in the team’s OTAs, so their unsigned statuses have not interfered with their development to this point. It will not matter, provided they ink their deals before the start of training camp at the end of July.

When the NFL and NFLPA reached a deal on rookie contracts about 10 years ago, it made negotiations far simpler because it largely proscribed salaries based on draft position. These days, hold-ups typically involve how much of the contract will be guaranteed and whether there will be offset language designed to protect the team if the player is released before the contract runs its course. That is almost certainly what is holding up the Forbes and Martin deals.

The only worrisome part of this is the truism that says “until they are signed, they are unsigned". We’d all like to kick this pebble out of our shoes and move on to more important things.

We don’t know, for instance, if Josh Harris is preternaturally insistent on offsets, and Forbes is equally opposed to them. That probably isn’t true, and there’s a 99 percent chance that both are signed and sealed by the start of training camp.

But it hasn’t happened yet.