OPINION:
The first OTAs of the new season for the Washington Commanders start Wednesday, and they may need name tags for all the new faces — not just among all the free agents and draft picks, but also for a coaching staff that has undergone a dramatic change after last year’s disappointing 5-12 season.
Many of the coaches will be strangers to even the returning veterans — seven new coaches plus the promotion of David Blough to offensive coordinator. Both he and new arrival Daronte Jones, who will call the defenses, will be performing their tasks as NFL coordinators for the first time.
It will be like a “get to know you” party at the organized team activities, and I found on the web a couple of games that head coach Dan Quinn might use to break the ice:
Two Truths and a Lie: Each person shares three facts about himself (two true, one false) and the group guesses the lie.
This or That: People choose between two options (e.g., Coffee or Tea?, Beach or Mountains?) to reveal their preferences.
One new face may not have to take part. D.J. Williams, former quarterback with the Atlanta Falcons, will be the quarterbacks coach, replacing Tavita Pritchard, who left to take the head coaching job at Stanford.
Williams won’t need a name tag. He can just point to the 1988 Super Bowl trophy on display at the team’s headquarters and say, “See that? My dad won that.”
That would be Doug Williams, MVP of that Redskin rout of the Denver Broncos.
Coaching turnover isn’t unique to the Commanders. In fact, it was the norm this winter, with 21 out of the 32 NFL teams hiring new offensive coordinators, with 17 of them, like Blough, calling plays for the first time. On the defensive side of the ball, 14 teams will have new defensive coordinators. Four of them will be calling defensive plays for the first time in the league.
Three teams will have new offensive and defensive coordinators. Two of them — Baltimore and Buffalo — were hired by a new head coach.
Just one — Washington — will have new play-callers on both sides of the ball this season who were hired by a coach who apparently got it wrong the first time he did this here two years ago.
I mean, you don’t fire Kliff Kingsbury and Joe Whitt Jr. if you got it right.
The main focus for Washington as OTAs begin, as it has been since he arrived in 2024, will be quarterback Jayden Daniels and how he responds coming off last year’s disappointing injury-filled season.
After that, though, come the new coordinators and the coaching staff — particularly Jones, brought in to fix one of the worst defenses this franchise has ever put on the field last year.
After all, Blough has Daniels, who, when healthy like he was for much of his record-setting 2024 rookie year, has proved to be an eraser on the field, with the ability to correct failures around him. And the 30-year-old Blough, who bounced around the league as a backup quarterback from 2019 to 2023, was the boy genius who, after two years here as assistant quarterbacks coach, was the one we were told the Commanders couldn’t afford to let leave the building, where other teams were supposedly waiting to grab him.
Jones, 47, was apparently the one they could convince to come here after being turned down by multiple candidates for the defensive coordinator job. He has a traveling salesman-type resume, with stops at high schools, small colleges, major schools, the Canadian Football League and multiple NFL teams, the last one Minnesota, where he was the Vikings’ defensive backs coach from 2022 to 2025.
Washington is hoping Jones will bring some of the defensive genius of his Minnesota boss, Brian Flores.
Jones will have better players than Whitt had to work with, as they signed seven new defensive free agents, including $100 million pass rusher Odafe Oweh, and picked Ohio State linebacker Sonny Styles with their first selection in last month’s draft.
The work begins on Wednesday.
“The one good thing that can come, not one, many of the good things that can come is you’re building it from the ground up,” Quinn told reporters when he introduced Blough and Jones in a Feb. 10 press conference. “So, everyone here is on the same exact page of how we’re doing it, what it’s called, why it’s called, and you make those kinds of tweaks now, and everybody who’s in that room knows why we called this this, here’s the reason why. And so, that doesn’t happen very often, and we’re going to take great advantage of that.”
Actually, it happened two years ago, and, after reaching the NFC championship game in that first season, it didn’t seem like it would happen again soon. But here we are, making introductions and learning everyone’s names again.
• You can hear Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.
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