What difficult decisions await new Washington Commanders general manager Adam Peters during his first offseason with the franchise?
The NFL is expected to announce compensatory draft pick allocations in early March. If you are a fan of the Washington Commanders hoping to pick up an extra pick or two, don’t hold your breath.
They will not be getting any. Do you know who will? The San Francisco 49ers.
They’ll be getting three third-rounders and a total haul of five picks. Teams are limited to four based on players lost, but the Niners pick up an extra one tied to the loss of DeMeco Ryans and Ran Carthon.
The Philadelphia Eagles will be getting four picks in the first five rounds. Other teams getting at least one pick in rounds 3-5 include the Buffalo Bills, Baltimore Ravens, Green Bay Packers, Kansas City Chiefs, Dallas Cowboys, and Los Angeles Rams. All of them made the playoffs this season. That would seem odd, given that these selections are awarded to teams that have lost good players through free agency.
The Commanders - along with most of the other cellar-dwelling franchises - will not receive any additional picks. The reason is simple. These are poorly run franchises that do not routinely draft and develop players to a standard that makes them coveted around the league.
That’s why Adam Peters is here. No team has worked this compensatory pick system better than the Niners over the last five years.
Now, to remain a competitive team - as most of the franchises mentioned above have been able to do in recent years - you must have a system in place that fills in gaps caused by free agency. You can be a good team with good players, but if you lose a bunch of them and don’t have a good pipeline of young guys waiting in the wings, you won’t remain good for very long.
In addition to hiring a coach and front office - in addition to preparing for the upcoming draft - one of the first things Peters has to do is evaluate the roster he has been left by the previous regime. We’re going to run through the five most difficult decisions facing the new general manager as he begins this task. Before we do that, let’s knock off a couple of important decisions, but not all that difficult.
The Commanders have three free agents who should generate a lot of interest around the league. I suspect that wide receiver Curtis Samuel will get several good offers and Peters will have to walk away from the veteran. Cornerback Kendall Fuller and safety Kamren Curl strike me as being more in play. But I don't think these are hard calls.
If you’re Peters, you want to re-sign both players. The only question is how much the Commanders are willing to pay.
This means you just pick a number - for the sake of argument let’s just say that you offer Fuller three years for $39 million, and Curl four years for $23 million. You can tinker with the numbers and with the structure. NFL guys enjoy doing that. But the bottom line remains the same.
If they want to come back at your price, sign them. If not, let them go and most likely pick up a couple of compensatory picks down the road.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the five toughest decisions for Peters regarding the Commanders' current roster.
Commanders scouting/coaching conundrum
We’ll talk about four specific players after this. But we’re going to begin with a crucial crime-scene reconstruction task.
NFL people generally don’t like to assign blame for past mistakes. Right now, it is essential to understand what went wrong during the Ron Rivera years.
No Washington Commanders player was in contention for any post-season honors or all-star teams. Only one had what could be considered an elite Pro Football Focus grade - Sam Cosmi. Across the board, this team did not have a lot of talent.
Did Rivera, along with Martin Mayhew, Marty Hurney, and the scouts. simply do a poor job in evaluating talent? Or did the front office bring in talented players only to see the coaching staff do a poor job of developing them?
This is a very important distinction that may have a major impact on a group of young players who have underperformed thus far. Players like Saahdiq Charles, Phidarian Mathis, Percy Butler, and Cole Turner could be seen as building blocks for the future if Adam Peters decides they could thrive with better coaching.
For the record, I made my position on this pretty clear when I recently graded the coaching staff for the past season. Except for running backs coach Randy Jordan, safeties coach Richard Rodgers, and perhaps new quarterbacks coach Tavita Pritchard, the Commanders coaches have not adequately developed a single young player brought to the team during the Rivera years, apart from Cosmi, who was drafted to be an offensive tackle.
I believe a lot of the recent failure has been caused by poor coaching.
Commanders must decide Sam Howell's fate
This is the single most important player evaluation Adam Peters must do. The Washington Commanders' entire draft strategy hinges on quarterback Sam Howell’s perceived ceiling.
If Peters were to decide that Howell was the man he wanted to build around, it would open up the entire draft board. A trade-down from pick No. 2 becomes not only possible, but almost a certainty.
In this scenario, Peters could stock up on picks as part of his ethos to build through the draft. This would allow him greater flexibility during the later rounds to target specific players and areas of need.
If, on the other hand, Peters decides Howell is a limited prospect, it means he will need to plan for a future with Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, or maybe even Jayden Daniels as his franchise quarterback. He needs to decide how much he would be willing to give up to move to No. 1 overall in the 2024 NFL Draft if that is what it takes to get his man.
And then there is the middle road.
If Peters does not feel ready to make a final decision on Howell, he will have the chance to draft one of several intriguing prospects in the later rounds. Prospects like Michael Penix Jr. or Bo Nix would enter training camp as the backup, but would hopefully begin challenging for the starting spot by their second season.
Jamin Davis' fifth-year option
Jamin Davis enters his fourth season in 2024. That means the Washington Commanders will need to decide on whether to exercise the team option for a fifth year by March. If they choose to do so, the linebacker will be owed somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 million in 2025.
This is far from guaranteed. If the Commanders do not exercise the option, he will play out the remainder of his contract in 2024. Barring a negotiated extension, Davis will become a free agent when the season is over.
Davis’ case may be the most important example of what I mentioned earlier. Has the former first-round pick failed to develop because he was over-drafted, or because he has been poorly coached?
At this point, Davis is a fairly average linebacker. He is somewhat better than his disastrous rookie season when he was asked to assume traditional middle linebacking responsibilities and looked completely overwhelmed. This should have been obvious to Ron Rivera and Jack Del Rio because it was obvious to everyone else. But they stubbornly refused to tinker with his role until late in the season.
In his third year, he made some good plays. Davis was still out of position too often. In other words, an average player.
If that is Adam Peters’ judgment, you can not extend him. You will have to let him play on an expiring contract in 2024. If he shows growth, you can try and re-sign him during the season, or you can bank an expected compensatory pick when he leaves.
If, however, the Commanders decide there is talent waiting to be unlocked, then perhaps they extend him. Only two current Washington players have lasted with the team through their rookie deals. This is an enormous black mark on the franchise as a whole.
Speaking of which…
Commanders must figure things out with Jonathan Allen
Jonathan Allen is one of the first-rounders who remained with the Washington Commanders past his rookie deal. His interior linemate Daron Payne is the other after he received a mammoth contract extension to prevent him from leaving in 2023.
Allen has been a leader since he arrived in 2017. Both on and off the field, he has been a first-class person. The kind of player you build around.
Sadly, there were serious signs late last season that Allen may have had enough of losing in Washington, and is eager to move on. It’s a little bit perplexing because the Commanders would seem to be headed in a better direction right now than it has been in any year since he has been here.
I suspect the prospect of a total rebuild has Allen thinking that success on the field is still several years away. But a glance across the league - the turnaround with the Houston Texans, and the Philadelphia Eagles' implosion - would seem to suggest that any rebuild could happen very quickly.
Adam Peters cannot trade away all of his core veterans - Allen, Payne, and Terry McLaurin. That would signal a complete, long-range rebuild. But he could move one of them for more assets.
If he thinks that Allen doesn’t want to be in Washington anymore, he might have to pull that trigger. I suspect this is merely frustration, and that once a new coach settles in, the former Alabama star will make some statement about his desire to stay in Washington.
I hope so, anyway.
Tress Way's future
This one hurts.
Tress Way has been the Washington Commanders' most consistent player over the past decade. After Brandon Scherff fled town a few years ago for the Jacksonville Jaguars, the punter was the team's only legitimate shot at getting someone into the Pro Bowl.
That’s generally the mark of a bad football team - when your punter is your best player. But that’s what we were left with.
Way will be 34 years old at the start of next season. He is currently the third highest-paid punter in the league, making more than $3 million per season. I hate to say it, but he is no longer one of the three best punters in the league.
He was not especially good in 2023, finishing in the bottom half of the league in both yards-per-punt and net yards per punt. On the flip side, he was still pretty good at pinning opponents deep. He was such a good holder on kicks that long-snapper Camaron Cheeseman probably survived a few extra weeks due to Way’s excellence.
However, there are at least 15 punters in the NFL all in their 20s who had arguably better seasons than Way. It may be time to find somebody new. But that is one of many items on Adam Peters' to-do list during what's sure to be a baptism of fire in his first offseason as Commanders general manager.