The Commanders have 90 healthy players comprising the oldest roster in the NFL and enter training camp with sky-high expectations
There have been a number of roster additions and subtractions since the last offseason roster depth chart I published in May.
Released:
- OT Anim Dinkwah
- S Trey Rucker
Signed:
- DT Carl Davis
- DE Von Miller
Added to NFI (non-football related injured reserve)
- Timothy McKay
Players with NFI status — designated as such due to an injury or illness that occurred away from official team activity — are ineligible to practice until cleared but still count against a team’s 90-man roster limit. Rookies, whether drafted or not, who were injured prior to the draft are placed on NFI even if the injury is related to playing or training for college football or preparing for the draft. Players who remain on the NFI list after the league’s final cutdown day at the end of the preseason are required to miss a minimum of four games.
Some notes on the depth chart below
First, and most importantly, it should be clear at a glance that the graphic display below is not a true depth chart that shows the starter and backups at every position. In that kind of true depth chart, a single player may be listed at multiple positions (e.g., the starting left guard might also be the backup center and backup right guard; a cornerback might back up 3 positions in the secondary).
In my ‘depth chart’, each player is assigned a single position because the purpose of the chart is to provide an easy-to-digest look at the full offseason roster. While it is intended to give some indication of positional depth, it is primarily intended as an easy reference for the 92 men (90 currently healthy — RG Sam Cosmi is expected to open camp on PUP and UDFA RG Timothy McKay is on NFI) who comprise the Commanders at the moment. I publish these ‘depth charts’ only in the offseason for the primary purpose of helping myself and other fans keep up with the frequent changes to the fluid roster. They do not serve the same function as in-season depth charts.
Click here to access all the previously published offseason depth charts
Secondly, since each player can occupy only one position on the chart — even though that player might end up playing several positions in a game or a season — I have to resolve things by making choices. For example, three cornerbacks — Jonathan Jones, Mike Sainristil and Noah Igbinoghene — each have played both wide and slot corner in their NFL careers and are considered competent (or better) at both. I have listed Jones as the starting CB opposite Marshon Lattimore while Sainristil and Igbinoghene are shown as starting and backup slot corners respectively. It’s more than possible that these players may end up being used differently, but a choice had to be made and I made it. This applies to other positions like offensive line, defensive line and wide receiver as well. If you aren’t happy with my choices — well, that’s what the comments section is for.
In a related note, Dan Quinn and Joe Whitt embrace a certain amount of “positionless” play on the defensive side of the ball. I have included a “hybrid” position on this chart that essentially comprises big safeties/small linebackers who don’t fit neatly into just one position group. I added this to the depth chart graphic after Joe Whitt’s press conference in June at which he said that drafted rookie Kain Medrano would be tried at both LB and S in training camp:
Kain is a unique kid because of his receiver background.
Is he a linebacker really?
Is he a safety?
Can he do some of the Jeremy Chin roles? Can he do some of the Frankie Luvu roles?
And so, we’re really testing the kid right now to see, alright, what is he going to be? And we’ll really tell a little bit more once we put the pads on.
He can really run. Does he have the ability to cover a tight end? Does he have the ability to beat a tackle in the rush? So, is he Frankie or is he Jeremy or is he across of both? And that’s what I’m trying to find out with him.
I ended up populating that position with four young players. Again, if you’re not thrilled with my choices here, feel free to discuss what’s wrong in the comments.
The updated offseason roster/depth chart
The numbers that appear beside some players’ names are 2025 cap hits per Over the Cap. I have not included cap hits below $1.5m.
The Commanders currently have 43 defensive players, 44 (healthy) offensive players and 3 special teams players.
Please note that assigned positions and color coding are my own personal opinions. They do not necessarily represent the thinking of Washington’s coaches or front office, nor are they necessarily consistent with fan consensus. This chart represents my personal interpretation, and may not reflect the thoughts of other writers on Hogs Haven. Finally, when it comes to backup players, I don’t put much effort into making sure that they are on the right or left or behind the specific player that they backup. I mostly just try to fit everyone on the chart efficiently as the goal is to visually represent the offseason roster and not predict regular season usage.
Some notes on selected position groups
Offensive line
Probably the most unsettled position group is the offensive line. We know that Laremy Tunsil will start at left tackle and that Tyler Biadasz is the starting center. When healthy, Sam Cosmi is the starting right guard, but an ACL tear and subsequent surgery in late-January put his availability into question although Dan Quinn spoke optimistically about his recovery during the May OTAs.
The rest of the position group is surrounded by questions. Quinn made it clear that last year’s starting LT, Brandon Coleman will be given every chance to win the starting LG spot in camp. First-round draft pick, Josh Conerly will compete with veteran Andrew Wylie for the starting right tackle job. If Conerly wins it, Wylie, along with last year’s starting LG Nick Allegretti, free agent Nate Herbig, and even veteran OT Trent Scott could all compete to start at Cosmi’s RG position while he is rehabbing. Herbig might also beat out Michael Deiter for the important role of backup center.
Running back
There is a lot of excitement about the explosiveness of 7th-round draft pick Jacory “Bill” Croskey-Merritt, but if the Commanders continue to carry just 3 active running backs, then he will have a tough fight on his hands to break into the 53-man roster. There seems little doubt that Brian Robinson and Austin Ekeler will be the top two backs in Kingsbury’s offense. To take the 3rd spot in the group, JCM will have to unseat veteran Jeremy McNichols, who, among other things, is a reliable pass protector. Both Chris Rodriguez, picked in the 6th round of the ‘23 draft, and 2024 UDFA Michael Wiley will also do their best to keep Croskey-Merritt from making the team ahead of them.
Defensive line
The biggest re-tooling efforts of the offseason involved the defensive secondary, the offensive line and, of course, the defensive line. New faces in the defensive front four include Von Miller, Javon Kinlaw, Deatrich Wise, Eddie Goldman and Jacob Martin. Goldman should help bolster the middle of the line while Wise and Martin should play traditional DE roles. Kinlaw has the ability to play both DT and DE, as he did with the Jets a year ago, and, this season, he might be asked to play more 5-tech this than ever before in his career. Von Miller will be a situational pass rusher who should see around 30% of defensive snaps, primarily on 3rd downs.
Roster age
Now that training camp rosters are basically set for all 32 teams, it’s been pointed out by numerous observers that the Commanders have the oldest roster in the NFL.
This is nothing new. The Commanders opened the ‘24 season with the 8th oldest team in the NFL and went on to win 12 regular season games and reach the NFC Championship game. Experienced players bring a lot of benefits to a roster. The danger of an older roster is having aging and declining players locked into multi-year contracts, which is definitely not the case with the Washington team.
When it comes to the 2025 Commanders, this league-oldest roster — as was true last year — is a relic of the poor drafting that took place during Ron Rivera’s 4-year tenure from 2020 to 2023. Because Adam Peters and Dan Quinn are working on a multi-year recalibration of the franchise, the current average roster age is a feature, not a bug.
The team is built around its incredible quarterback
Of course, the key to Washington’s roster is at the quarterback position. The Commanders made the best pick in the draft a year ago when they selected Jayden Daniels with the No. 2 overall pick. Unfortunately, they had that pick because they weren’t a good team.
By hiring GM Adam Peters and head coach Dan Quinn, who assembled an impressive coaching staff across the board, the Commanders solved the leadership issues at the executive and coaching levels immediately.
But an NFL roster can’t be re-loaded with young talent in a single year, and much of the work last season was comprised of cleaning up messes left behind by Ron Rivera. Young players like Jamin Davis, Emmanuel Forbes, Phil Mathis, and Benjamin St-Juste were given the chance to compete, but ultimately let go.
To take advantage of having the best QB in the NFC on the Commanders roster, Peters turned to free agency and the trade market to fill in roster holes with veteran players, who, by definition, are older players.
But Peters didn’t just sign the guys with the flashiest stats. He took into consideration how each player complements the rest of the team’s roster; he paid attention to relationships with coaches, and he relied heavily on one-year contracts that both incentivize players to perform at a high level to earn an extension and offer the team maximum flexibility in roster construction in the following season.
Who are the older players on the roster?
Think back a year ago to the criticisms leveled at older players on the roster.
Zach Ertz was supposed to be ‘washed’; he responded with his best season since leaving Philly, compiling 654 yards and 7 touchdowns in the regular season and another 18 catches for 13 first downs and a TD in the playoffs.
Austin Ekeler was thought to be done after he struggled through a tough year with the Chargers in 2023. Last year, his first as a Commander, he averaged 4.8 yards per rush and 10.5 yards per reception, rivaling the best seasons of his career.
In 2024, 30-year-old Marcus Mariota was perceived to be a failed quarterback with a losing record who was a bad signing. In fact, he not only mentored rookie Jayden Daniels through the best season by a rookie QB in modern NFL history, but played an integral role in the season by coming off the bench to lead the team to 2 crucial wins in the 12-win regular season.
The criticisms this year involve these same players along with others like Laremy Tunsil, Jonathan Jones, Eddie Goldman, Deatrich Wise, Deebo Samuel, Terry McLaurin, Jacob Martin, Marshon Lattimore and Noah Brown, who are all between 29 and 31 years of age. Personally, I expect the results we saw in 2024 — continued or resurrected on-field performance like that of Ertz, Ekeler and Mariota — to be repeated in 2025.
The 9 oldest Commanders players
Putting Von Miller aside for the moment, the oldest players on the roster are also mostly filling roles where their age is not much of an issue, if at all:
- Josh Johnson – 39 yo – Camp QB who will likely never take a snap in Commanders uniform in the 2025 regular season
- Nick Bellore – 36 yo – Special teams ace who led the NFL in ST tackles last year
- Tress Way – 35 yo – He’s the punter, and one of the best in the league
- Bobby Wagner – 35 yo – This would be the 2024 Pro Bowl and 2nd-team All Pro linebacker recently named to the 2025 top-100 players list
- Zach Ertz – 34 yo – The guy who caught 6 TD passes in the final 7 games of the regular season in ‘24
- Tyler Ott – 33 yo — The long snapper; I mean, c’mon!
- Carl Davis, Chris Moore and Kevon Seymour – 33, 32, and 31 respectively – three backups who are ‘on the bubble’ in training camp
These are the 9 oldest players, comprising 10% of the Commanders current healthy roster. It doesn’t require a very critical eye to see that the oldest players on this roster are not any sort of detriment to team success.
Great coaching and Jayden Daniels are force multipliers
A force multiplier is a factor or a combination of factors that significantly increases the effectiveness of a force or a group, allowing it to achieve more with the same or fewer resources. Essentially, it’s something that amplifies the impact of an existing capability
It is generally accepted that the 2024 Commanders did not have the most talented roster in the NFL last year. In fact, many informed observers went into the 2024 season saying that it was at best a bottom-third roster in terms of talent. I’m not here to argue otherwise.
How did that stitched-together roster comprised of such limited talent reach the NFC Championship game?
The Commanders had the benefit of two force multipliers: Dan Quinn and his coaching staff, and Jayden Daniels. The good news is that both of these force multipliers are back for the ‘25 season.
Dan Quinn
Last year, Dan Quinn convinced me that, having learned from both past success and past failure, he brought a highly-evolved approach to his position as head coach of the Commanders.
Initially, it felt like a lot of Dan Quinn’s purported strengths were reminiscent of Ron Rivera’s approach with a strong focus on players and culture, but it quickly became apparent that DQ’s approach, while superficially similar, was fundamentally and massively more effective. I won’t try to summarize his approach here; enough has been written and spoken about it for every Commanders fan to be aware of what DQ did from his first day on the job in Washington. If you know, you know. If you don’t, Google can be your friend here. Remember that Dan Quinn spent a significant amount of time learning how to coach from Pete Carroll in Seattle.
The fact is that, last year, Quinn rapidly and effectively melded a diverse group of veterans and young players into a tight-knit team that was greater than the sum of its parts. Relationship was part of that calculus, but so were preparation, mental and physical conditioning, and continuous attention to detail. Week after week in 2024, I saw players in burgundy & gold who were, if not more talented than their opponents, usually more disciplined and better prepared. I saw Washington coaches who demonstrated commitment to a play style and a strategy that seemed unwavering. I saw the Commanders winning most of the close games they played, not because they were lucky, but because they were better coached, better prepared, and more disciplined.
In short, Quinn and the rest of the coaching staff did the work needed to turn a roster comprised of a lot of young players, old players, and players of middling talent into a high-functioning unit (or set of units) that punched above their weight class last season.
In 2025, we will find out if it was a one-year fluke or if the coaching results are sustainable. I’m betting on the latter.
Jayden Daniels
The single greatest advantage that the Commanders have is second-year quarterback Jayden Daniels. He was a mistake-eraser and a play extender on offense as a rookie. He was clearly and completely in charge of the offense from Week 3 onward (though the scheme and playcalling were limited during the mid-season 3-game losing streak due to JD5’s injury). And while the Bengals’ quarterback may be known as “Joe Cool”, Daniels showed week after week that he has ice water flowing through his veins. As a rookie in 2024, he was already the coolest dude in the NFL under even the most intense of pressurized moments.
Anyone who evaluates the Washington roster by trying to objectively assess the skill levels of each position group and compare the result to rosters of other teams will likely underestimate the Commanders — not because Washington’s team is jam-packed with talent on both sides of the ball — but because Dan Quinn and his staff are better coaches than most, and Jayden Daniels is capable of putting on the Superman cape as needed. These two force multipliers give the Commanders advantages — “Skintangibles” if you will — that are difficult to quantify, but which were on full display in much of the 2024 regular season and the first two rounds of the playoffs.
Quinn and Daniels act as force multipliers that turn what might be viewed as an unimpressive roster into a group of winners — players that fight together, believe in each other, and simply perform better under pressure than most of their opponents.
Salary Cap Update
The most recent salary cap numbers available from Over the Cap do not include the recent signing of Von Miller and, of course, do not reflect any possible cap implications from a likely Terry McLaurin extension.
Based on these un-adjusted numbers, the Commanders currently have the 17th most (or 16th least) available cap space at $21.3m.
Von Miller’s deal is rumored to have a base value of around $6.1m, a number that we will take at face value until details of the contract become public later this week.
If you subtract $6.1m from the available cap space for Miller, then add back $1.1m for Foster Sorrell, who gets pushed out of the top-51 offseason cap space calculation, then the expected cap space after the Miller contract is processed is around $15.3m, which would probably be the 8th lowest in the league right now.
The impact of a McLaurin extension is impossible to estimate. Depending on its structure, the ‘25 cap space figure could rise, fall or remain unchanged.
My personal bet is that his extension, when it is signed, will not affect his 2025 cap charges at all, but we’ll (hopefully) know the answer to that question soon.
A little discussion of dead cap
Washington currently has the 9th lowest dead cap at $14.1m. Dead cap isn’t necessarily a sign of poor management — and may be a sign of superior strategic planning — but the top-3 teams with respect to dead cap are:
- 49ers – $93.6m
- Saints – $82.7m
- Eagles – $76.9m
The Saints are paying the price for a decade of poor ad hoc cap decisions. It looks like 2025 will be a year of pain, and it may not be the last one. New Orleans is currently projected to be $24m over the ‘26 cap, and that number is likely to only get worse before next offseason.
The Niners are in a process of transition as they navigate the end of Brock Purdy’s incredibly cheap rookie contract and move into a new phase, with a lot of dead cap hitting the books this year as they re-work the roster.
The Eagles under GM Howie Roseman are simply playing the salary cap game differently than everyone else, consciously choosing to defer cap spending, with resulting dead cap numbers that might make other NFL general managers feel a bit faint. But Roseman is working to a plan that he understands, and his track record of creatively navigating the salary cap and the NFL trade market should give pause to anyone who wants to denigrate his strategy, especially with Philly’s current deep and talented roster and a shiny new Lombardi Trophy in the case at Eagles HQ.
Commanders dead cap
When you look at Washington’s dead cap detail, it looks pretty similar to most NFL teams. The bottom 4 charges total only about $1.6m and simply represent draft picks that didn’t work out. The two earlier round picks (Mathis and Stromberg) sting a bit because of the draft capital used, but the cap impact of these four players is fairly minimal.
The $2m for Jahan Dotson, who was traded to the Eagles last August, is simply the un-prorated portion of his signing bonus, as is the $6m for Jonathan Allen, who was released prior to the start of the 2025 league year. While some people balk at these as mistakes, they really aren’t. When NFL contracts are developed, written and signed, the possibility of future trade or release is contemplated and the cash flow and cap charges are designed to work out appropriately if the player is traded or cut after the guaranteed money is exhausted. The signing bonuses that comprise the dead money for Dotson and Allen were paid out years ago when their contracts were signed; for these two players, the dead money is just an accounting entry — a simple matter of timing for the cap hit. There was no extra cost to the team associated with either Dotson’s trade or Allen’s release. Again, this is simply accrual accounting in action.
The problem in this list is Emmanuel Forbes, though the dead cap issue could easily have been worse. As a first-round pick, he received a healthy $8.2m signing bonus. In less than two seasons after he was drafted, the Commanders got only 20 games out of him in which he played defensive snaps, and in 7 of those games he played 6 snaps or less. Because Forbes was claimed off of waivers by the Rams, they inherited his contract, which meant that LA took over responsibility for the remaining guarantees. If he hadn’t been claimed off waivers, Washington’s dead cap hit chart above would include the 2025 and 2026 base salaries for Forbes in addition to the $4.1 million in signing bonus that resides there now. In the final 5 weeks of the season Forbes spent in LA, he played 39% of the defensive snaps, and he didn’t see the field at all in the playoffs. A bit of a dodged bullet here.
2026 cap flexibility
Per Over the Cap, Washington’s cap situation at the start of the 2026 league year will likely be similar to what it was like at the start of the 2025 league year.
The current estimate (not including the Von Miller contract) is that Adam Peters will have roughly $66m in available cap space at the end of the regular season, with 43 players under contract. These numbers are fluid and may change often and dramatically between now and the start of the new league year in March.
The most obvious potential change is the looming Terry McLaurin extension. When it is signed, it will cut into the estimated 2026 cap space, but it will also increase the number of players under contract to 44.
Meanwhile, a quick way to clear around $16.8m in cap space would be to cut or trade Daron Payne. Doing the same with Marshon Lattimore could add back $18.5m. Making moves on both players could pump the available cap space by more than $35m.
Of course, restructures or extensions to other high-dollar contracts could also affect the cap situation, but that goes far beyond the scope of this article.
None of this discussion of ways to increase available cap space via trade or termination is intended to recommend these moves as the right path forward; they are mentioned only to illustrate how fluid cap space estimates are.