Washington Commanders keys for 2025: Coaching staff

Which coach will be most instrumental in ensuring that the Commanders get beyond the NFC Championship game this season?

Washington Commanders keys for 2025 is a short series of three articles — this is the last — in which John Portis and Bill-in-Bangkok, together, explore newcomers to Washington’s roster that need to punch above their weight for the Commanders to progress to the next level of competition.

Since last year’s roster went to the NFC Championship, in essence we are discussing which offseason additions could propel the franchise to the Super Bowl in 2025.

The qualifications for the first two player-oriented articles were simple: any Commander that was not with the franchise at the start of last season was eligible for consideration. This included players acquired from in-season trades, free agent additions, and the draft.

In this 3rd article, we have, for practical reasons, waived the requirement that the coach be new in 2025; instead, each of us was able to pick a candidate from among the entire coaching staff.

Obviously, this is opinion — not an exact measurement or evaluation. Rather, the intent is to “prime the pump” a little bit and encourage discussion about which player(s) might make the biggest impact in the coming season.

To make this a little different, and hopefully more fun, newcomer John Portis and long-time veteran Bill-in-Bangkok have agreed to provide their thoughts on one candidate in each article.

We encourage you to not only comment on the players we have chosen to highlight, but to add your own thoughts or candidates for consideration. To keep things tidy, we ask you to focus your thoughts on the group under discussion for the day.

We are finishing with the coaching staff this morning, and look forward to the start of training camp, which is right around the corner.

Part 1 – Washington Commanders key additions for 2025: Defense

Part 2 – Washington Commanders key additions for 2025: Offense

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For the final installment of Key Additions 2025 we are going to bend the “newcomer” requirement. Okay, we are going to remove it completely. If we didn’t, it would be a short article because Brian Schneider, the assistant special teams coach who took John Glenn’s place this off-season, is the only new hire. Despite interviews or interview requests from other teams for current staff members Joe Whitt Jr, Brian Johnson, Tavita Pritchard, and David Blough, all the remaining coaches were retained for the upcoming season.

Head coach Dan Quinn

Considered a “retread” hire, Dan Quinn was initially met with some trepidation, as some in the media painted the former head coach as the fallback option to former Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald and Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, who notoriously canceled an in-person interview with Adam Peters while Washington’s decision-makers were in mid-flight. Meanwhile, the Commanders front office and beat reporter John Keim maintained Quinn was always one of the top choices for the job.

Hogs Haven writer Bill-in-Bangkok discussed fan reaction to Dan Quinn in an article shortly after the hire:

As the days have passed and a bit of the shock has worn off, I get the sense that fans are warming up to the hire [of Dan Quinn], and that this process is being helped along with every component that gets added to the 2024 coaching staff.

While fans are certainly not dancing in the streets, I think that a level of positive acceptance is already taking root, and some quiet optimism is beginning to develop. We may not have gotten what we were told to expect, but the coaching staff appears to be shaping up nicely.

With veteran free agency starting in just over 4 weeks, it’s time for attention to turn to the roster as we begin the next promising era of Washington football.

Quinn’s coaching staff

Soon after the head coaching hire was made, as priority free agents and coaches signed on for Washington’s recalibration on the strength of Dan Quinn’s reputation, some of the concern started to fade away. Joe Whitt Jr. readily followed Quinn from Dallas to become the defensive coordinator, while unconfirmed reports indicated part-owner Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. worked some magic on Kliff Kingsbury, swaying him to sign with the Commanders over the Raiders.

Continuity

The 2024 season certainly delivered on the promise of a new era for Washington fans. Let’s review the coaching staff Dan Quinn was able to retain for the upcoming season.

Offense

Despite several interview requests, former head coach and current offensive coordinator, Kliff Kingsbury opted to remain with Jayden Daniels and Washington for another season. The offensive continuity is welcomed by fans, who have seen too many young quarterback prospects struggle with system changes. Offensive Pass Game Coordinator Brian Johnson brings previous offensive coordinator experience, while Run Game Coordinator Anthony Lynn is another former head coach well respected in his own right. The offensive coaching staff is rounded out by up-and-coming quarterback coaches Tavita Pritchard and David Blough, offensive line coach Bobby Johnson, wide receiver coach Bobby Engram, and tight ends coach David Raih. David Blough is particularly well thought of in the building and has been earmarked as a possible successor to Kingsbury.

Defense

Joe Whitt Jr. promised a “run and hit defense” in his introductory presser with the media,

While Whitt was not able to fully deliver as promised last season, the sophomore defensive coordinator will have more players suited to the scheme this year. While Whitt is relatively inexperienced as a defensive coordinator, his Senior Defensive Assistant, John Pagano, is not. Also, Jason Simmons was an underrated hire as the Defensive Pass Game Coordinator, having previously helped turn around secondary units for both the Green Bay Packers and the Carolina Panthers. Defensive line coach Darryl Tapp not only played for Dan Quinn, but previously worked with Adam Peters as well. Linebackers coach Ken Norton Jr also has previous ties to Quinn. Former Redskins player Ryan Kerrigan has none, but the freshly minted Assistant Linebackers Coach/Pass Rush Specialist is one of only three coaches retained from Ron Rivera’s staff. Defensive Backs Coach Tommy Donatell rounds out our look at the defensive staff.

Larry Izzo joined Dan Quinn’s staff as the Special Teams Coordinator following Mike Macdonald’s arrival in Seattle where Izzo had been coaching prior to 2024.

The value of coaching

I saw an interesting comment in an article last week inquiring about which issues could be corrected by good coaching and which ones cannot. Clearly, the answer is complicated and depends on many things, but include the fact that good coaches influence technique, assignment discipline, motivation, scheme, and in-game adjustments. It should be noted that adjective “good” modifies the term “coach”, so, what makes a good coach?

NFL.com writer Jim Trotter did a piece on the most valuable traits of an NFL head coach in which NFL players weighed in on the topic. The traits most often mentioned by players were honesty and trust. Hall of Fame wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald put it simply, “If a player knows you care for him and his well-being, he will run through a wall for you.” This is a philosophy to which Dan Quinn is already subscribed and which he has indoctrinated in his staff. Bill-in-Bangkok once referenced an article from Tyler Dunne that detailed Dan Quinn’s transformation of the Washington Commanders, and I will do so again here:

Playbooks could collect dust. Quinn informed his staff that football would take care of itself because they’re all athletic, all smart, all gifted. Players needed to know coaches cared about them — first.

Dan Quinn and his staff have already completed the most important part of improving their players’ performance and with the foundation in place, the coaching staff will look to build on last year’s success.

Which Commanders Coach will be the key to unlocking Washington’s play in 2025?

The John Portis Take:

While we did remove the newcomer tag for the coaching article, when I started to think about which coach to select for this article, I began by considering which position group had changed the most. Initially, I considered Jason Simmons or Darryl Tapp, but the process of elimination left me with the coach with only one clear starter in his group, Bobby Johnson.

Those who have read the first two installments of the Key Additions series will remember that last week I opted out of selecting Laremy Tunsil with the statement that protecting Jayden Daniels will be a group affair involving multiple personnel. That puts Bobby Johnson at center stage this week. The team has publicly stated that all four positions outside of left tackle are open to competition, but I’m going to skip to the end with Tyler Biadasz and just name him the starting center. That still leaves the Johnson with the task of developing three new starters in one off-season — all of this for the coach that was probably the most maligned hire of last off-season.

In 2023 with the New York Giants, Bobby Johnson was known as the coach whose unit gave up the most sacks in the league. Additionally, Johnson was indicted for not developing 7th overall pick Evan Neal or integrating several free agent additions that the Giants secured to protect Daniel Jones.

The hire by the Commanders in 2024 was considered perplexing at best and very concerning at worst:

So why hire Johnson to be the Commanders’ new offensive line coach? Once fans started delving into the hire more, they discovered that Johnson’s squads were fairly effective at run blocking. Three of his units in the previous five years had ranked in the top 25% in rushing yards before arriving in Washington.

It was also relevant that Coach Johnson had experience working with both zone and gap schemes. Kliff Kingsbury confirmed, in an interview with Zach Selby, that he saw Johnson’s previous work in the run game as a fit for what he wanted to do in Washington:

“He has been at a lot of great places,” Kingsbury said. “[He] Worked with some great of offenses there in Buffalo with Josh Allen and some of the creativity and the run game stuff they were doing and tempo and some different things that I really liked. And so, from afar I liked how he handled himself, some of the stuff he did in the run game and then had got rave reviews from people I really trust in the profession and so did Dan. So, it worked out.”

Once Bobby Johnson was here it was time to get to work. He was handed a perennial backup and third round rookie at LT, a free agent backup left guard, a priority free agent center, a potential Pro Bowl right guard, and a RT with a spotty track record. As discussed in the offense article, the results were far from dominant, but not as bad as many fans feared at the start of the year.

This season, Johnson is the recipient of a Top-5 left tackle that — as fans are fond of saying — upgrades multiple positions on the offensive line in one move. But is it really that simple? Brandon Coleman profiled as a better guard than tackle prospect in the draft, and is still a third rounder with technique issues. Josh Conerly Jr oozes potential, but will need to develop quickly in order to claim the RT job. If he does, Andrew Wylie will likely move back to RG for the first time in 4 years; if not, journeyman Trent Scott may man the spot. Working within a hybrid scheme will increase the communication and coordination burden required to mold the group into a cohesive unit; completing it in a short time frame will be key for Washington’s Super Bowl aspirations.

Is Bobby Johnson up to the task? We will find out in 2025, but so far he likes what he has seen from his first rounder and is already utilizing his veterans to speed the process.

The Bill-in-Bangkok Take:

I think John has made a great case for his choice of Bobby Johnson as the coach most integral to Washington’s chances of putting a 4th Lombardi trophy on the shelf in February, and his selection goes hand-in-hand with my choice of Laremy Tunsil as the key offensive player addition in chasing a Super Bowl championship.

But when it comes to reversing Washington’s fortunes from the 55-23 drubbing that the Commanders were handed in the NFC Championship game this past January, I look at the Eagles offensive box score and see all I need to know:

• Saquon Barkley had 3 rushing TDs and averaged 7.9 yards per carry while Philly amassed a team total of 228 rushing yards!
• AJ Brown scored a touchdown and averaged 16 yards per reception while Washington aided the Eagles passing game with multiple defensive penalties.
• Jalen Hurts had a 110.1 passer rating.
• The Commanders defense forced zero turnovers.

While offensive turnovers were extremely damaging to the Commanders in the NFC Championship loss, the inability of the defense to stop the Eagles offense was devastating. And, unlike the rash of offensive turnovers that plagued the Commanders offense vs the Eagles, Washington’s defensive woes persisted throughout the regular season and postseason.

In that NFC Championship game, on Philly’s 13 offensive drives, the Eagles punted twice and took a knee to end each half securely in the lead; the closest the Washington defense came to a stop in the other nine drives was when Jake Elliott missed a field goal at the end of a 12-play Eagles drive in the 2nd quarter.

In my heart, I believe that the Commanders 2025 offense will be better than the 2024 iteration that was 5th in the NFL in points scored. To win Super Bowl LX at the end of the 2025 season, Washington’s defense — ranked 19th in points allowed and 30th in rushing yards allowed in ‘24 — has to play at a very different level.

In other words, the defense needs to be able to control opposing running backs, force turnovers, and maintain defensive pressure in the 4th quarter of games. From a coaching standpoint, this will require innovative schemes, the teaching of proven techniques for taking the ball away, and a strategic change in game management.

The coach who fills the critical role — the one who has to find a way to dramatically enhance his squad’s performance compared to 2024 — is defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr.

I get the sense that Whitt, Quinn and Peters are working to a plan defensively that isn’t well-understood outside of the Commanders executives and coaching staff. I’ve already speculated a bit in other articles on how that might play out, but a lot of things need to go right for the plan to work.

Javon Kinlaw

Clearly, the group sees potential in Javon Kinlaw, who was the team’s premier offseason free agent signing, getting a 3-year, $45m contract. Whitt clearly has a plan for Kinlaw in Washington’s re-worked ‘25 defense.

He’s a uniquely big man that can bend and play with some power and speed. We will have the ability to move him up and down the line of scrimmage. So, we can put him wherever we want to because he has that type of skill set. He’ll be difficult for tight ends to block if we put him in the six technique, or, if we kick him inside, he has the length that’s going to be difficult for guards to deal with as well. So, he’s an intriguing young man to work with.

This seems to confirm that Kinlaw will be used the way the Jets used him in 2024 – at times playing the DT spot in a 4-3 defense, but at other times, lined up on the outside shoulder of the tackle on the strong side (where the tight end is aligned).

With the Jets in 2024, per PFF, Kinlaw played 316 snaps at left tackle and 299 snaps at left end. This contrasts with his alignment pattern with the 49ers. With SF in 2023, Kinlaw lined up as a DT on 418 snaps, but played DE on only 116 snaps.

In 17 games with the Niners in ’23, Kinlaw produced 25 tackles and 3.5 sacks. In 17 games with the Jets in ’24, his production jumped to 40 tackles and 4.5 sacks. On a per-snap basis, he produced 9.3% more tackles in 2024 than he had in 2023 and his run defense grade from PFF jumped from 35.6 in ’23 to 50.8 in ’24. He earned healthy pass rush grades from PFF in both years (71.9 and 68.2).

The addition of Kinlaw to the roster seems to be part of a deliberate plan to use him as an inside/outside defensive lineman who can operate in diverse schematic alignments without the need for constant substitutions.

2024 shortcomings

Washington’s defense will need a lot more than a breakout year from Javon Kinlaw to have a successful season in 2025. I don’t think I can put it any better than Joe Whitt did himself:

Last season:

· We didn’t produce the ball like I wanted to — the reason being we dropped 16 of them, literally just balls that touched our hands that we felt that should have been caught. If we catch half of those, that puts us in a different ring.

· We didn’t play the run well enough, and I thought that we would have.

· Third, [we didn’t] close games out… the way that I was anticipating.

And so, when we get into the offseason, we look at it in three different things:

1. Was it schematics?

2. Was it the player? or

3. Sometimes, did we just get beat?

And so, the turnovers we’re going to emphasize because we just have to catch the ball. Some of the things we’re doing with the front for the run game we have changed and some we have adjusted. And then winning time moments in two-minute — we’re going [to compete] every day to get those things better.

But the defensive coordinator also faces a number of more granular challenges this season.

Whitt is going to need to find a way to insure that Will Harris (or somebody) is as good or better than Jeremy Chinn was last year.

He also needs to get dramatically better play out of Marshon Lattimore while integrating veteran Jonathan Jones and rookie Trey Amos into a cornerback group that underperformed last season.

Stopping the run

However, the biggest puzzle appears to be the plan for the front-seven; Whitt will need to have creative schemes to turn what looks like a bit of a motley crew of d-linemen into a high performing unit. Clearly, Whitt feels that the Commanders took steps in the right direction with the DL this offseason:

With [Detrich] Wise, [Javon] Kinlaw, [and] Eddie [Goldman], we’ll be bigger on first and second down and we’ll be bigger versus 12 personnel [or] 13. When people want to get big, we’ll be able to get real big with them and be able to shore up some of the gaps on the front end. So, now the backers can play more free and the guys behind them can overlap.

Creating turnovers & closing out games

Whitt has the advantage of being an organized thinker and a pretty clear communicator, but he came to Washington proclaiming that his defense would ‘produce the ball’ (force a lot of turnovers) as the Dallas D had under Quinn. That didn’t really come to fruition. In his first season as DC, 23 NFL defenses forced more turnovers than Whitt’s group, and only 5 teams recovered fewer fumbles. That’s not good enough given what Joe Whitt told Washington fans to expect.

The comments in those two tweets above came from Joe Whitt’s introductory press conference at Ashburn.

Here’s part of what he had to say at his most recent press conference:

We didn’t produce the ball like I wanted to, [how] I envision us to now. The reason [is] we dropped 16 [potential interceptions] — literally, just balls that touched our hands that we felt that should have been caught. If we catch half of those, that puts us in a different ring.

[With respect to] closing games out, it wasn’t the way that I was anticipating.

We’re going to emphasize [forcing interceptions] because we just have to catch the ball. And then winning time moments in two minute, we’re having competition every day to get those things better.

Turnovers
In short, Whitt seems to feel as if the lack of turnovers was simply poor execution. He feels as if the scheme was putting players into positions to succeed, but they didn’t get the job done.

We certainly have a dramatically different secondary. Jeremy Chinn, Emmanuel Forbes, Benjamin St-Juste, and Michael Davis are gone. Will Harris, Jonathan Jones, and rookie Trey Amos have been added. Last year, Marshon Lattimore was a mid-season addition by trade, but due to injury, he played very little and not very well. A healthy and full-time Lattimore can be seen as another addition to the pass defense. It’s possible that 6th round pick Kain Medrano could also have a role in the upgrading of the pass defense.

I do hope that the plan is more sophisticated than simply hoping that the players catch half the potential interceptions that they dropped last year, and I’m sure that it is.

Closing out games
In my mind, this is the bogeyman that Joe Whitt has to figure out. The Commanders won 14 of 20 regular season and postseason games last year, but too often they won them in the first three quarters, giving up ground in the 4th.

This chart only shows the first 14 weeks of the regular season, but it helps highlight a troubling trend:

Washington was very much a ‘first half team’ through 14 weeks, and specifically struggled in the 4th quarter.

This wasn’t because the offense failed to put up points in the final stanza. Washington’s offense was ranked 4th in the league in 4th quarter scoring for the full regular season; through 14 weeks, they ranked 8th in the NFL.

The issue was with the defense. For the full regular season, the Commanders were the third-worst in 4th-quarter points allowed, which was a slight improvement over the first 14 weeks accounted for in the chart above when Washington was dead last in the league.

Joe Whitt’s “run and hit” defense seemed to run out of gas too often in the the final quarter of regular season games — particularly against good teams with strong running attacks. His biggest challenge as a defensive coordinator in 2025 may be figuring out how to get his defense to play a full 60 minutes rather than fading in the final 15. If he can do that, then the Commanders, with their elite offense, will have more than a puncher’s chance of holding up a shiny Lombardi trophy at the end of the ‘25 postseason. That’s what makes him my choice for the member of the coaching staff that will be most critical to the team’s successful pursuit of a super bowl win in the coming season.