Commanders' draft success doesn't end with the scouting department

Very soon, the Washington Commanders will add a raft of new players via the 2025 NFL Draft. Excitement will be high. There will be plenty of assessments of each pick. A year from now, everyone will regrade.

Five years from now, we’ll do the same thing.

This comes with an assignment of credit or blame to the general manager and scouts who made the decisions. They will be praised for finding Nnamdi Madubuike in the third round and roasted for blowing a first-rounder on Jeff Okudah.

We’ll be making a mistake, at least regarding some of those picks.

The coaching a young player receives upon entering the league can sometimes be even more important to his eventual success. The best teams in don’t simply have better scouts. They have better organizations, which include better coaches who know how to develop effectively.

We all know that the Commanders’ draft history under Ron Rivera was abysmal. Fans have tended to blame the head coach's lack of evaluation skills. However, in hindsight, his failure to assemble and develop a quality coaching staff deserves some of that critique.

Last year, Adam Peters and Dan Quinn cut two of Rivera’s first-round picks. The release of both Emmanuel Forbes Jr. and Jamin Davis didn’t shock anyone, but it was nonetheless as damning a statement as possible about the previous regime.

Though he is still young enough to silence his doubters, Forbes does appear to be an awful scouting blunder. Reportedly, the actual scouts knew this, but Rivera overrode them. The strawweight cornerback simply doesn’t have the athletic profile to star in the NFL.

Davis is a different matter.

He may have been over-drafted based on one excellent season at Kentucky, but the linebacker had the physical tools to succeed. Davis was a victim of terrible coaching decisions, from the initial choice to try the inexperienced player at middle linebacker to never letting him attack the backfield, which was his greatest skill.

Will Davis succeed with the New York Jets? The jury is still out on that.

NFL careers are short, and Davis is already five years in. In head coach Aaron Glenn, defensive coordinator Steve Wilks, and linebackers coach Aaron Curry, at least he will have a group of experienced teachers. Of course, we all assumed that Rivera and Jack Del Rio would have provided that in Washington.

Commanders have the coaching staff in place to nurture young talent at long last

They did not.

Del Rio, as you no doubt remember, was fired from his job as defensive coordinator during the 2023 season. The coaching staff assembled by Rivera for that campaign may be the worst in club history — or at least in the past 50 years. After all, there were some pretty dismal days in the 1950s and 1960s.

I won’t get into the weeds on this because, trust me, you can follow these breadcrumbs for a long time. Suffice it to say, the Commanders had a coaching staff comprised of 24 men and women in 2023. Dan Quinn retained four of those.

That’s not a bad number. It speaks rather well for Tavita Pritchard, Bobby Engram, Ryan Kerrigan, and Shane Toub. New head coaches often clean house when they arrive. Quinn saw some promise in a select few.

Of the other 20 coaches, three made parallel moves. Long-time running back coach Randy Jordan took a similar position with the Tennessee Titans. A few others made what might be considered parallel moves — trading in a low-level NFL position for a place higher up the food chain in college.

Reggie Howard, who had an entry-level NFL position with the Commanders, is now a position coach with an FBS college program. However, calling that parallel may be generous since he held similar college posts earlier in his career.

Even if we are similarly generous in our assessment of other members of the 2023 Commanders staff, it is safe to say that 13 of them — better than 50 percent of the coaches that year — either took lesser positions in 2024 or left football coaching all together.

Apart from the four who remained with the Commanders, there is just one member of that staff who appears to be ascending. Cristian Garcia rose through the ranks to eventually become an interim position coach after Brent Vieselmeyer was let go late in the 2023 season. Though he did regress, he is now a position coach with the Arizona Cardinals and appears to have a bright future.

The NFL is littered with players who were once deemed busts and then became very good. Coaching may not always be the determining factor, but it often plays a big part.

Former Commanders quarterback Alex Smith was a failed No. 1 pick playing under defensive-minded head coaches Mike Nolan and Mike Singletary in San Francisco. When former college signal-caller Jim Harbaugh took over in 2011, he magically turned into a Pro Bowler.

Garett Bolles needed a year of tutelage from offensive line coach Mike Munchak to make a similar turnaround in Denver. Roddy White was flaming out in Atlanta before former Washington coach Terry Robiskie became his wide receiver coach. The list is endless.

Interestingly, Robiskie credited the addition of veteran receiver Joe Horn as being a major factor in White’s emergence. That merely reinforces the point that coaching doesn’t only come from coaches. Having strong veteran leadership is often even more important.

So we are left with this question: Did the Washington Commanders scout players like Brian Robinson Jr., Antonio Gibson, Chris Rodriguez Jr., Kamren Curl, and Quan Martin better than they scouted other players? Or was the fact that those men had the benefit of being coached by Randy Jordan (running backs) and Richard Rodgers Sr. (safeties)?

Those were Washington’s two best position coaches during the Rivera era. Their players tended to make solid contributions.

Quinn appears to have assembled an excellent staff, balancing experience and youth. That is crucial for whatever success the new batch of Commanders’ draftees will achieve.

A draft pick, no matter how talented, is only as good as his coaches allow him to be.

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