Do you remember when the Washington Commanders fielded a defensive line featuring four first-round picks?
It was supposed to be the foundation of a dominant defense that would carry the team to championships. For a variety of reasons we won't rehash right now, that didn’t really work out.
Under Adam Peters’ leadership, it seems the current Commanders are trying a kind of bargain-rate version of that strategy in the defensive backfield. True, it hasn't applied to all the starters, and the team has opted for second-rounders instead of firsts, but you can still see the vague outlines of the plan.
Three recent second-round draft picks — safety Quan Martin, chosen by Ron Rivera in 2023, and cornerbacks Mike Sainristil (2024) and Trey Amos (2025), selected by Peters — supposedly form the core of a new and improved secondary.
Commanders' second-round defensive backs need to up their performances
The only problem is that, at least for this season, the plan has yielded even worse results than the first-round defensive line approach did from 2021 to 2023. Diagnosing just what has gone wrong will be essential to Washington’s plans for a quick bounce back after a very disappointing 2025.
You can blame the poor performance of Washington’s young defensive backs on injury. You can blame it on a below-average pass rush. Both are legitimate explanations.
Losing safety Will Harris may have hurt more than anyone realized at the time. Veteran Marshon Lattimore was beginning to shake off the rust of his 2024 injury when he went down once again with a torn ACL. That might be the last time he sees the field in Washington.
And the pass rush? Fans were worried that Peters had done little to address it, especially after allowing Dante Fowler Jr. to leave via free agency. It turns out the fans were right. The Commanders never found a plus pass rusher, and then they lost their best option when Dorance Armstrong Jr. got hurt.
So we shouldn’t totally discount injuries and roster holes. But there’s no getting around this simple fact… Martin, Sainristil, and Amos have not been at their best this season.
You can look at their Pro Football Focus (PFF) grades for one example. The two corners rank in the 80s out of 108 total players. That’s the bottom quarter of the entire league. Martin is even worse, ranking 86th out of just 93 safeties. That’s the bottom 10 percent.
If you don’t trust PFF grades, look at their raw numbers. In terms of most major secondary stats — completion percentage allowed, yards per target allowed, opposing passer rating, missed tackle percentage — all three defensive backs rank toward the bottom of the league.
Is this merely a blip, or is this a sign that these highly-regarded players aren’t as good as advertised? They have all played well at times. Amos looked outstanding early this season before falling off. Sainristil and Martin seem to be in a funk, but both played well last year.
If last year was the anomaly and we are getting a more accurate picture this season, that spells trouble for Peters and his plans to reshape the roster.
After a relatively long period of ignoring the position in the draft, Rivera tried to address it by taking Benjamin St-Juste in 2021 and Emmanuel Forbes Jr. in 2023. Both were dispatched quickly by Peters and Dan Quinn.
Before the St-Juste pick, Washington had not invested a Day 1 or Day 2 draft pick in a defensive back since 2017, when they got Fabian Moreau in the third. So the impulse, from both Rivera and Peters, to invest some high picks in a young, athletic secondary made all the sense in the world.
But if these guys can’t perform to expectations, they will have to start over.
No secret weapons are waiting in the wings. Peters has added a few young developmental prospects to the secondary, and hopefully, a couple will become serviceable pros. But if the three second-rounders do not recover, it will set back the defense's development considerably.