Daily Slop – 8 Apr 25 – Wes Welker joins former Texas Tech teammate Kliff Kingsbury on Commanders staff

A collection of articles, podcasts & tweets from around the web to keep you in touch with the Commanders, the NFC East, the NFL and sports in general, and a sprinkling of other stuff

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Articles

Washington Post (paywall)

Former Pro Bowl wide receiver Wes Welker to join Commanders’ staff

The receiver-turned-coach will work in both personnel and coaching in Washington.

Former Pro Bowl wide receiver Wes Welker will join the team as a personnel analyst, working with both the personnel and coaching staffs, according to two people with knowledge of the hire. He will start around the time the Commanders’ offseason program begins April 22, one of those people said.

Welker’s familiarity in Washington starts at the top and runs deep. General Manager Adam Peters worked in personnel for the Patriots and Denver Broncos during Welker’s stints with both organizations as a player. The two reunited in San Francisco, where Peters was the 49ers’ vice president of player personnel and later their assistant GM, while Welker coached the wideouts. Among those receivers was Deebo Samuel, whom the Commanders acquired in exchange for a fifth-round draft pick last month.

Welker was also college teammates with Commanders offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury, Texas Tech’s second all-time leader in passing yards. Welker was Kingsbury’s leading receiver in 2002 with 1,054 yards.

Welker also was teammates with Washington special teams coordinator Larry Izzo, a former linebacker, in New England in 2007 and 2008.

Welker is expected to work closely with Peters’s personnel staff, including assistant GM Lance Newmark and director of player personnel David Blackburn, as well as with Dan Quinn’s coaching staff.

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Commanders Wire

Commanders hiring of Wes Welker reunites him with familiar faces

In addition to Samuel, second-year wideout Luke McCaffrey stands the most to benefit from Welker’s presence. The Commanders believe in McCaffrey. While he didn’t put up huge numbers as a rookie, he did get open. They want him to take the next step in 2025, and Welker could help get him there.

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Commanders.com

Commanders culture shift keeps core foundation together

Players like Ertz, Way, linebacker Bobby Wagner and quarterback Marcus Mariota all had multiple options for where they could go next in their careers. Wagner and Mariota both proved they could still be valuable members of a roster in different ways; Wagner had another 100-tackle season and became one of the team’s key leaders, while Mariota provided mentorship for quarterback Jayden Daniels and played well in relief for the rookie.

Mariota was willing to hear teams out about opportunities, but any potential deal would have to “knock my socks off,” he said, because of what he had in Washington, which offered the chance to be around a coaching staff he liked as well as one of the most exciting young players in the league. He had built a good rapport with Daniels and the staff, and he’s been around the NFL long enough to know that it’s not a guarantee he could replicate that with another team.

“At the end of the day, the grass isn’t always greener,” Mariota said. “…You understand that when you have a good thing, and you have a good culture, and you have a great room, that’s not everywhere.”

It was more than just opportunity that brought Wagner back to the Commanders, too. As someone who has now started for multiple organizations, Wagner has already proven that he can play well in any system. Although his Hall of Fame resume gets more solid every year he gets to triple digits in stops, there’s not much more he can do to convince people that he’s one of the best defenders in league history.

But Wagner didn’t even let the situation get to the point where he would have to consider other teams. He views Washington as “the place” and wanted to remain where he felt he was accepted and appreciated.

The Commanders were once again active in free agency this offseason, signing a list of 24 players that includes nine new faces, along with trades for Laremy Tunsil and Deebo Samuel, all excited to join the team’s new culture. The situation is a bit different from last year, though, because rather than selling hope, Quinn and Peters have tangible proof that their system works.

And the word is out; Washington is one of the best places to be in the NFL right now, and players are eager to help write the next chapter in the team’s history.

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Commanders.com

Nick Emmanwori could be ‘menace’ for Commanders defense

The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect those of the team.

This week, we’re staying on the defensive side of the ball and looking at a safety prospect that ESPN’s Field Yates believes could be a good fit for Washington.

South Carolina’s Nick Emmanwori is one of the best safety prospects in this year’s draft class, and depending on which draft analyst you follow, NFL teams couldn’t ask for a better prospect at the position. He’s physical, a willing participant in run support and freakishly athletic. If some of that sounds like it’s been ripped from Chinn’s skill set, you’re not alone; NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein proclaimed in his draft profile of Emmanwori that his best comparison is the 2020 second-round pick.

Safety is not a glaring need like other positions on the Commanders’ roster, but the work general manager Adam Peters has done in free agency gives them some leniency to take the best player available at No. 29 overall. Yates believes that will be Emmanwori if he falls to them.

Emmanwori certainly has enough athleticism to be a versatile piece in the secondary if that were what Quinn and the defensive staff wanted to do with him. He ran a 4.38 40-yard dash — the second-fastest among safeties — and had the best vertical jump (43 inches) and broad jump (11-foot-6) of anyone in the class. NextGenStats gave him the best production and athleticism scores for a safety, and his Relative Athletic Score (RAS) is a perfect 10, ranking him first for his position since 1987.

But it isn’t just that Emmanwori has an abundance of traits; how he uses them makes him one of the draft’s most productive prospects, regardless of position. His highlights are filled with plays of him breaking on routes for interceptions and delivering hits near the line of scrimmage in the run game. He led South Carolina with 88 stops in 2024 and earned First Team All-American honors from several media outlets because of it.

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Podcasts & videos

How Dan Quinn Revived The Commanders | Full Interview

Another outstanding long-form one-on-one offseason interview. I found the discussion of special teams that starts a bit before the 40:00 mark to be especially interesting.

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NFC East links

Blogging the Boys

4 Cowboys with a lot to lose in upcoming draft

The draft is going to change a lot about the Cowboys.

CBs Trevon Diggs and DaRon Bland

It is widely projected that Dallas will target a cornerback early in this draft, even as high as the first round. The higher the investment, the more likely it is that the Cowboys are preparing to move from one of their high-profile veterans.

Diggs is coming off two tough years wrecked by his 2023 injury. After his 11-interception season in 2021, he remained an excellent overall corner but then got injured in Week 2 of the 2023 season. While he did return to play in 11 games last year, Diggs was clearly still not all the way back. There was also talk that the team was not happy with how he approached his medical care and rehab, potentially limiting him in 2025 as well.

Bland also just had a down year following a training camp foot injury. His record-breaking performance in 2023 with five touchdowns off interceptions was far from duplicated; no turnovers of any kind in the seven games he played last season. But Bland did look better in coverage by the end of the year, leaving hope that he can get back to his previous form.

The big difference between these two is where they are in their contracts. Diggs has four years left on the large deal he signed after 2022, while Bland is entering the final year of just his rookie contract. After this year, Diggs can be released for over $12 million in cap savings and Bland becomes an unrestricted free agent.

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NFL league links

Articles

Front Office Sports

Goodell’s Influence Faces Test As NFL Mulls Tush Push Ban, Reseeding

Two big proposed rule shifts were tabled at last week’s NFL annual meeting, but they will soon resurface with support from league commissioner Roger Goodell.

A possible Tush Push ban dominated chatter at last week’s NFL annual meeting, due in no small part to the Eagles’ perfection of the accentuated quarterback sneak en route to a Super Bowl LIX triumph. Owners are said to be split evenly on the issue. While opposition to the play has centered in large part on player safety concerns, no actual injuries were recorded last year from Tush Pushes. Instead, the real objection lies closer to aesthetic issues and a perceived similarity to a rugby play.

“I think there are safety issues that are being considered in that case,” Goodell said last week. “We have very little data from it, but it’s beyond data. There’s also the mechanism of the injury that we study, that type of thing, that leads us to show the risk involved with a particular play or a particular tackle.”

Goodell hinted at considering a return to pre-2004 rules, when players were not allowed to push or pull a ballcarrier.

The playoff seeding issue, meanwhile, carries many more economic implications, as it would potentially remove a guaranteed home game in the postseason for a division winner. One possible middle ground is a requirement to have a winning record in the regular season to get a home playoff game. The goal with the proposed switch would be to heighten the importance and appeal of late regular-season games.

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Discussion topics

Pro Football Focus

2025 NFL Draft: 5 prospects who could be surprise first-round picks

CB Trey Amos, Ole Miss

Mock Draft Sim ADP: 41.9

Amos has long been a fringe top-32 player on the PFF big board. His adequate height and length for the position are boosted by a 79th-percentile wingspan. That allows him to comfortably play in press-man coverage, but his work this past year in zone was also impressive with more playing time. He earned a career-high 85.9 PFF coverage grade in 2024 and did not record a season-long PFF coverage grade below 75.0 in the past four years. He also uses those long arms to his advantage, recording a forced incompletion percentage above 20.0% in each of the past three seasons.

The Ole Miss product’s body type and data points suggest he can be a scheme-versatile CB2 to start his career with the potential to develop into a CB1. With as valuable as consistent cornerback work is in the NFL, that should be worth putting him in the first-round conversation.

RB Kaleb Johnson, Iowa

Mock Draft Sim ADP: 59.9

Johnson didn’t quite have the athletic showing at the NFL Scouting Combine some expected, but his name still sneakily carries first-round potential simply because his tape at Iowa shows that there aren’t many running backs with his combination of size and speed.

Johnson’s height (6-foot-1), weight (224 pounds), wingspan (78 1/2 inches) and hand size (9 5/8 inches) were all above the 78th percentile for the position. His 4.57-second 40-yard dash placed him in just the 46th percentile, but weight-adjusting that score makes it just fine. Still, some were expecting more, and because of that, his stock seemed to cool.

But make no mistake, this is a big, explosive back who, behind a zone-heavy blocking scheme, could be a 1,000-yard back early in his rookie contract. Teams such as the Broncos and Steelers (teams that ran a heavy amount of zone in 2024) could at least consider him on Day 1. The Commanders, who deploy more of an even split between zone and man/gap run blocking, are also an intriguing landing spot.

EDGE Bradyn Swinson, LSU

Mock Draft Sim ADP: 52.2

Swinson wasn’t a high-profile name when people really started to turn their attention to the 2025 NFL Draft, so his being a “riser” is more of a product of people getting around to his evaluation (the same is true for me).

Since watching Swinson, I can’t help but feel some teams will at least consider him in the first round. He earned a 90.3 PFF pass-rush grade in 2024 and earned PFF pass-rush grades above 79.5 in each of the past three seasons, dating back to his time at Oregon before becoming a starter at LSU. His 22.2% pass-rush win rate was one of the highest in college football last season, and on a high volume of pass rush pass-rush snaps (313).

He didn’t do much at the NFL Scouting Combine, but his three-cone and short shuttle numbers were both above the 65th percentile, showcasing his flexibility to bend and corner as a speed rusher. His burst and hand speed are also pluses in his game as a 3-4 outside linebacker edge rusher. The league is always looking to take chances on guys who can get after the quarterback at the rate that Swinson does.

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