One brutal stat that exposes the Commanders' biggest problem

A complete postmortem on the Washington Commanders’ rapidly disintegrating 2025 season will have to wait until it's over, but several things are already obvious.

Some analysts predicted a regression to the norm in terms of the team’s close wins this year. They have been spot on.

Dan Quinn’s team pulled out a lot of nailbiters last year. There seems to have been an almost divine symmetry at play in the two contests with the Chicago Bears in 2024 and 2025. A miracle win one year and a sloppy loss the next — both leading to protracted runs of success and failure.

Injuries and mathematical constants are understandable. Unfortunate perhaps, but still comprehensible. The regression of some of the teams’ best young players is much more confounding — and ultimately much more important.

However, the regression has been primarily an issue for Joe Whitt Jr.’s defense.

Commanders are missing way too many tackles, and it's a massive problem

Whitt inherited the worst defense in the entire league when he took over last season. Adam Peters made immediate wholesale personnel changes, and he began a rebuilding process similar to the one he had helped Quinn achieve with the Dallas Cowboys in 2021. It seemed to be working.

The Commanders’ defense was only a middle-of-the-pack performer last year, but middle-of-the-pack was a significant step up from the bottom of the barrel.

It was expected that Quinn and Whitt would continue to build that defense this year. Instead, it is performing more like that catastrophic 2023 unit.

They are surrendering more than 50 extra yards and more than three more points per game this year. Yards per play are way up. Turnovers are down. The pass defense, in particular, has been wretched.

You can point to a variety of stats to illustrate just how bad it has been. This one says it all for me.

In 2024, the Commanders allowed six yards per pass attempt, the 11th-best in the league. This year, that number is up 7.7 yards per attempt, dead last in the entire NFL.

Injuries and a rather apparent lack of quality pass pressure have hurt the defense as a whole. But those factors are only part of the story. There is no denying that the individual players have not performed as expected.

One small example of shoddy play is the number of penalties the defense has committed. Whitt’s unit has plummeted from near the top 10 in the league to the bottom five. They are committing an extra penalty-and-a-half this season and giving away 15 extra yards as a result.

But the even more troublesome statistics concern tackling. It is the most fundamental part of defense. No schematic innovation matters if defenders fail to make tackles. And this season, the Washington Commanders are missing tackles at a stunning rate.

Frankie Luvu has been the poster child for this disaster. The 2024 second-team All-Pro was credited with just six missed tackles for the entire season last year. Through nine games this time around, he has already missed 10, three times as high on average.

He is far from alone.

Daron Payne has also missed more tackles through the first half of 2025 than he did in all of 2024. Quan Martin has equaled last year’s total. Mike Sainristil is just one away from his misses from all of last year. All of their missed-tackle rates are significantly higher — sometimes more than twice the 2024 rate.

In all, 14 defenders have missed-tackle rates in the double-digits this year. Many, like those just mentioned, are among the team’s presumed leaders. Last year, just six defenders had rates in the double-digits. Half of them — Emmanuel Forbes Jr., Dante Fowler Jr., and Michael Davis — are no longer with the club.

How bad has it been? On that league-worst defense in 2023, linebackers Jamin Davis and Cody Barton missed a combined 13 tackles for the entire season. Luvu and Bobby Wagner have equaled that number in the first half of 2025.

Like any stat, missed tackles can be misleading. One of the reasons Barton’s misses in 2023 were relatively low was that he was constantly overrunning plays and not even giving himself a chance to miss the tackle. And Davis was often making tackles 10 yards downfield with help from defensive backs.

But no amount of qualifiers changes the fact that the Commanders' defenders are simply failing at the most fundamental part of their job this season.

If it were backups and aging veterans who were primarily responsible for these misses, that might be understandable. But the players sporting those double-digit failure rates include Luvu and Jordan Magee, Sainristil and Trey Amos, Martin and Tyler Owens.

Payne and Javon Kinlaw are both over 20%. That is not as bad as it may seem. Linemen typically have higher miss rates, but the number is still considerable.

These are the leaders of Washington's defense. Many of them are players whom Peters is counting on to be the defensive core for years to come. It looked like they were on their way to doing just that last season.

This year, it has collapsed. Peters now must figure out if this is simply a snake-bitten season or whether his core players are not as good as we all thought they were.