Free agency and the NFL Draft have come and gone: It’s time to fully embrace the 2023 offseason by breaking down the fantasy football aspirations of each and every team before draft season truly gets underway.
What follows is a fantasy-focused breakdown of the Washington Commanders, looking at key questions like:
- Who will start more games: Sam Howell or Jacoby Brissett?
- Are both Brian Robinson and Antonio Gibson rather great zero-RB targets?
- Can Terry McLaurin and Jahan Dotson boom despite the lack of a great overall offensive environment?
Every fantasy-relevant player from the Commanders will be covered in the following paragraphs. Make sure to check out the Fantasy Life Team Preview Landing Page through the end of June for more all-encompassing fantasy football coverage.
Notable offseason moves
Head coach Ron Rivera is back for his fourth season in Washington with Jack Del Rio as the defensive coordinator. However, Washington moved on from longtime offensive coordinator Scott Turner and replaced him with ex-Chiefs OC Eric Bieniemy.
On the one hand, Bieniemy helped engineer five straight Chiefs offenses that ranked no worse than sixth in total yards and points during his time as OC.
On the other hand, it’s tough to separate how much of that had to do with Bieniemy and how much had to do with those Andy Reidy and Patrick Mahomes fellas.
At a minimum, the presence of Bieniemy *should* lead to two things for the Commanders:
- Throwing the damn ball more
- Operating at a quicker pace.
Just look at the contrast between each team’s rank in pass rate over expectation and situation-neutral pace over the past three years:
While I do believe in the “Jims and Joes” mattering more than the “X’s and O’s” at the professional level, a more wide-open Kansas City-style attack can only help the involved fantasy parties. This switch at OC should be viewed as a rather nice improvement compared to the slow, run-first offenses this team has run for the better part of the last three seasons under Rivera.