Two years ago, the Washington Commanders were one game away from the Super Bowl. Last year, they went 5-12.
Both of those things are true. And the 2026 season exists entirely in the space between them.
The question you keep coming back to with this team is which version of the Commanders is real. The 2024 version that rode Jayden Daniels through the playoffs as a wild card, reached the NFC Championship Game, and scared everyone in the conference? Or the 2025 version that fell apart the moment Daniels went down, cratered to last in yards allowed on defense, and watched a championship window slam shut in the span of a few months?
The honest answer is probably somewhere in the middle. But the 2026 season is where Washington finds out how close to the ceiling it can actually get when things go right.
The Daniels Question
Everything starts and ends with Jayden Daniels.
He is healthy again. Fully cleared. Back at training camp throwing the ball and looking like the quarterback who lit up the league as a rookie in 2024. The injuries that cost him most of the 2025 season, a knee sprain, a hamstring, and a dislocated elbow suffered on national television, are behind him, and by all accounts he is moving and throwing with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what he is capable of when healthy.
But health is exactly the thing you cannot guarantee with Daniels. He plays a physical style. He extends plays. He takes hits that quarterbacks with pure pocket instincts would avoid. That quality is part of what makes him so good, and it is also the reason his availability feels like the single most important variable in Washington's season.
In 2024, he played all 17 games and was one of the most electric quarterbacks in the NFL. In 2025, he played seven. The difference between those two outcomes was not talent or preparation or system. It was staying on the field.
This is Year Three. The third-year leap for quarterbacks is one of the most reliable things in the NFL. Daniels already showed in 2024 that he can be a franchise cornerstone. The argument for Washington is that a healthy Daniels, in a system built around him, with better weapons and a better defense, is a playoff-caliber quarterback on a playoff-caliber team. The argument against is that you cannot build a season around a player whose availability you cannot count on.
The Tunsil Blow
Before Washington could even play a preseason game, one of the most important players on the roster became the season's biggest injury concern.
The Commanders traded for Laremy Tunsil from Houston in 2025 to solve the most pressing problem on the roster: giving Daniels a blindside protector who could anchor the offensive line. This offseason, they doubled down by signing Tunsil to a two-year, $60.2 million extension. It was an aggressive, smart commitment by general manager Adam Peters. Tunsil is one of the best tackles in football.
And then, during a one-on-one pass rush drill at training camp, Tunsil suffered a torn right triceps tendon. Surgery. Out for a significant portion of the regular season, if not all of it.
Brandon Coleman now looks like the leading in-house answer at left tackle, with Andrew Wylie and Josh Conerly Jr. also part of the broader conversation. Coleman has tackle experience and has reportedly handled the early transition well, but he is not Laremy Tunsil. He is not the player who changes what a defense can do to Daniels. And for a quarterback whose injury history traces back to taking shots in the pocket, losing his best protector before the season starts matters.
It does not doom the season. But it changes the math. Daniels needs to be smarter with the football this year. He cannot hold the ball and hope to escape on every play. The Tunsil injury makes the worst-case scenario for Daniels' health more plausible, and that is the one thing Washington could not afford.
New Weapons, New Coordinator
The Commanders went into the offseason knowing they needed to give Daniels more help, and they attacked it from multiple directions.
The biggest addition is Stefon Diggs, who gives Washington a veteran receiver with route savvy, big-game experience, and the ability to win from multiple alignments. Diggs is not being asked to be the entire offense. He is being asked to make life easier for Daniels and Terry McLaurin, who remains the veteran anchor of the room.
McLaurin, coming off a difficult year that included injury and contract stress, is still the receiver Daniels trusts when the play breaks down. Pairing him with Diggs gives Washington a more credible one-two punch than it had for most of 2025. Add tight end Chig Okonkwo, rookie receiver Antonio Williams, and developmental pieces like Luke McCaffrey and Jaylin Lane, and the pass-catching group has more paths to functionality than it did a year ago.
The other major change: Kliff Kingsbury is gone. He and defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr. were let go after the 2025 collapse, and Washington promoted David Blough from assistant quarterbacks coach to offensive coordinator. Blough is a young, creative offensive mind, and the promotion is a bet that someone who knows Daniels and this offense intimately can do more with it than a coordinator bringing in his own outside system.
That continuity matters. Blough is adding more under-center work, more motion, and more structure, but he is not starting over from scratch. The goal is to keep what made Daniels special in 2024 while giving him cleaner answers and fewer obvious hits in 2026.
Rebuilding the Defense Around Sonny Styles
The 2025 Commanders defense was the reason the season fell apart long before Daniels went down. Missed assignments, no pass rush, and a secondary that could not cover anyone consistently added up to a unit that finished last in yards allowed and 27th in points allowed. That is not a roster problem that gets fixed in one offseason.
Washington's first answer came in the draft. With the seventh overall pick, the Commanders selected Sonny Styles, the Ohio State linebacker who gives new defensive coordinator Daronte Jones a big, fast, versatile piece in the middle of the field. Styles was a first-team All-Big Ten selection and second-team AP All-American, and he gives Washington the kind of range and physicality it badly needed.
Jones and the front office also brought in bodies. Odafe Oweh joins as an edge rusher. Leo Chenal gives the linebacker room more range. Rasul Douglas and Amik Robertson were added at cornerback to shore up the secondary, while safety Nick Cross gives the back end another young starter-level option. Interior defensive line additions include Tim Settle and Charles Omenihu, and Washington has already had to keep adjusting after veteran corner Ahkello Witherspoon and defensive tackle DJ Davidson retired during camp.
It is a lot of new pieces for a defense that needs connectivity and communication as much as it needs talent. Jones has to install his system, build trust between a group of players who have not played together before, and do it fast enough to make a difference in September.
The potential is there. Whether it comes together quickly enough to change what this team is capable of winning is a different question.
Which Version Is Real?
Both the 2024 and 2025 Commanders were real. That is the honest answer.
The 2024 team was built on a healthy Jayden Daniels playing at an elite level and a defense that held up in enough key moments to advance through the playoffs. The 2025 team was built on the same foundation, and when Daniels went down, everything collapsed around him. The defense, exposed without the offense setting up easier situations, ranked last in the league in yards allowed. The team went into survival mode and could not survive.
That tells you something important: the talent gap between Washington and the best teams in the NFC is real, but manageable with Daniels healthy. Without him, this roster is not good enough to compete. That is a narrow margin. It does not make them frauds. It makes them a quarterback-dependent team, which is most teams in the league.
The difference between 2026 being a bounce-back season and a repeat of 2025 comes down to two things. First: Daniels staying healthy, which requires Coleman or another left tackle option to survive now that Tunsil is gone. Second: a defense that is at least average, because last in the league is not a sustainable platform for a team trying to compete in January.
If those two things happen, Washington is a legitimate NFC playoff contender. The schedule will not be easy. The NFC East is a real division. But Daniels is good enough to carry this team if his line gives him a chance.
Crystal Ball Prediction
Win total: 9-8. NFC East contender, Wild Card.
Jayden Daniels is the reason to believe. Diggs and McLaurin give him veteran receivers who can win in different ways. Styles gives the defense a new centerpiece. The personnel is better than it was last year even if it is not elite. And a third year with Dan Quinn running the operation means this team knows what it is trying to be.
The Tunsil injury is the shadow over all of it. Daniels has to stay healthy, and without his best protector, that is harder. If he plays 17 games, Washington wins nine or ten and competes for a Wild Card. If he misses time again, this team falls apart fast, because we already saw what it looks like when he is not out there.
The 2024 Commanders were real. This roster is not that roster yet. But with a healthy Daniels and a defense that climbs from last to average, Washington is back in the conversation.
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