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5 things to know about Leo Chenal
He played running back in high school.
Like many high school players, Chenal played both offense and defense in high school as a running back and linebacker. Not every player is good at both, however, and Chenal made an impact no matter where his coaches at Grantsburg put him.
While Chenal settled in at linebacker in college and the NFL, he was also a capable offensive weapon in high school. He finished that part of his career with 5,006 total yards and 85 touchdowns. Most of his damage was done on the ground, though, as he rushed for 3,706 yards with 68 scores. He was named Wisconsin’s small school Offensive Player of the Year as a senior and earned Second Team all-state honors as well.
But as he was at running back, Chenal was arguably better as a linebacker. He had 385 tackles, seven sacks and three interceptions for his high school career, earning him All-American honors and two all-state nods. He was the WFCA Defensive Player of the Year as a senior and voted as the top linebacker in the state that year.
Commanders Roundtable
Could Jeremiah Love to Washington Commanders Materialize?
Washington has made moves at the position this offseason after signing both Rachaad White and Jerome Ford in free agency, while re-signing Jeremy McNichols for another season to pair with Jacory Croskey-Merritt heading into his second season. But the role of an alpha dog is missing in the room with the current makeup pointing to a committee approach in year one of the David Blough offense - and a critical year three of the Dan Quinn era.
Whether seven is too high to take a running back is the next question, though wide receiver would still enter the rest of the offseason with intrigue. Of course, the looming question remains if and when Brandon Aiyuk’s release materializes with the 49ers holding on as the Commanders are viewed as the overwhelming team to acquire him in 2026.
But Love could be the game changer the Commanders’ offense needs in a David Blough offense that is expected to feature the rushing attack to set up play action, a selection that insulates quarterback Jayden Daniels with more talent at the skill position.
Love is coming off a junior season where he was named a finalist for the Heisman Trophy while he was named both a unanimous All American and the Doak Walker Award winner, handed to the nation’s best running back. He was the only player to rank inside the top three nationally in scoring, total touchdown and yards from scrimmage through the regular season after rushing for 1,372 yards and 18 touchdowns on 199 carries.
A to Z Sports
The Commanders have a difficult decision to make with the No. 7 overall pick, but it should be clearer after Jaxon Smith-Njigba reset the WR market
2026 is likely McLaurin’s last season with Washington, with his contract taking a massive $34 million salary cap hit in 2027. The Commanders need to find his complement for next season, and very well his replacement for the 2027 season. Jordyn Tyson has become too much of a risk for the Commanders with his injury concerns still lingering, but they could replace McLaurin with another Ohio State WR.
Carnell Tate is their best option if they want to find the next best outside WR in the NFL Draft, and he’s just turning 21 years old. Tate is a savvy route runner, and his speed surprises defenders. If the Commanders want a dominant slot WR who is similar to Smith-Njiba, USC WR Makai Lemon is on the board as well, and has a top-30 visit with the Commanders.
No matter who they decide to take, the Commanders need their future playmaker with the No. 7 overall pick and give Jayden Daniels a weapon for years to come.
Commanders.com
Mock Draft Monday | Is Makai Lemon the weapon Washington needs?
The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect those of the team.
Most analysts have Ohio State’s Carnell Tate as the best receiver on the board, and Pro Football Focus’ Gordon McGuinness did have him available to the Commanders in his latest mock draft. However, he had the Burgundy & Gold going in another direction -- USC’s Makai Lemon.
“Lemon, the first wide receiver off the board in this mock, earned an elite 91.4 PFF receiving grade in 2025, placing him first among 432 qualifying college receivers,” McGuinness wrote.
Lemon, a former Under Armour All-American and Polynesian High School Player of the Year finalist, didn’t do any of the main drills at the combine, but the stats he put up at USC are enough to get people interested in his future NFL career. He went from being a reserve player with the Trojans to one of their most dynamic weapons, catching 79 passes for 1,156 yards -- the eighth-most among FBS receivers -- and 11 touchdowns. It earned him several accolades, including the Biletnikoff Award for being the top receiver in the country.
The Trojans put him all over the field, but he spent the majority of his time in the slot, where he could use his quickness, route running ability and patience to get open in the middle of the field. There were few players better than Lemon last season. He ranked fifth among FBS receivers in the slot, where he played 70.6% of his snaps, with a grade of 90.3, and quarterbacks had a passer rating of 109.8 when targeted -- the fifth-best among any receiver.
According to NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein, an AFC scouting director said that Lemon could become “one of the top 10 slots in the league on Day 1 of camp,” but there are signs that he could be more than an inside threat. Despite having an average frame at 5-foot-11 and 192 pounds, Lemon had one of the best contested catch rates among receivers with at least 100 targets. He caught 10 on 15 contested targets, giving him more than Jordyn Tyson -- another receiver getting first-round consideration -- and KC Concepcion.
Lemon also knows what to do with the ball in his hands. He had the 11th-most yards after the catch -- about 300 more than Tate had last year -- and had the ninth-best average depth of target. He also did well against man coverage, catching 20 of his 28 targets last year with five touchdowns -- tied for the fourth-most in college football.
Jaylen Waddle, who was recently traded to the Denver Broncos, was taken No. 6 overall after playing extensively in the slot at Alabama, but most teams are hesitant about using that kind of capital on such a player. St. Brown, for example, wasn’t drafted until the fourth round of the 2021 draft, despite having 2,270 yards and 16 touchdowns in college.
But St. Brown’s draft class was stacked at wide receiver with three receivers going in the top 10. This year will be a bit different with defensive players dominating the top of mock drafts, but there’s little, if any, debate about whether Lemon is a sure-fire first-round pick.
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UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Washington Commanders Top 10 Defense PUSH with Deatrich Wise Jr. - EXCLUSIVE
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Blogging the Boys
Seattle just made the George Pickens deal more complicated
Let’s get this out of the way: George Pickens is not Jaxon Smith-Njigba. George Pickens is very good, though. George Pickens is arguably worthy of being paid near the top of the market at his position.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and the Seattle Seahawks, just reset that on Monday morning. The former Rockwall standout and the reigning Super Bowl Champions agreed to terms on a four-year, $168.M extension with $120M guaranteed. The APY for JSN is $42.15M. OMG.
One would assume that conversations with George Pickens have to start around the $40M per year mark, right? If we compare the situation (nothing is ever apples to apples) to CeeDee Lamb two years ago, Lamb never reset the market. Justin Jefferson reset it earlier in that offseason (while we were screaming for the Cowboys to get something done so that very thing didn’t happen) and Lamb slotted in just south which felt fair.
Is history repeating itself here? JSN is certainly among the best receivers in the NFL, has the Super Bowl win wind working at his back, and this is his first offseason of eligibility. As we often say getting to the player at that first window is advantageous and the Seahawks clearly recognize that.
Big Blue View
NY Giants 2026 NFL Draft scouting report: CJ Allen, LB, Georgia
CJ Allen projects as a developmental linebacker at the NFL level. Allen would likely start his career as a depth or rotational player, but has the potential to grow into a starter in the right situation.
It’s notable that he improved each of his three years at Georgia and executed Kirby Smart’s sophisticated defense well. He has some athletic limitations that could keep him from being a great coverage linebacker, however he’s also better going downhill than many coverage linebackers.
Allen could be an ascending prospect who could improve significantly over the course of his rookie contract. He’ll likely be a Day 2 pick, but could wind up outplaying his draft slot.
Final Word: A later Day 2 pick
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The Athletic (paywall)
Why the 2026 Pats could be like the 2025 Commanders
The similarities between the two teams are striking, especially in their preceding seasons. Both the 2024 Commanders and 2025 Patriots had first-year veteran leaders — Dan Quinn and Mike Vrabel — who leaned on their previous experience as a head coach elsewhere. Both had young quarterbacks — Daniels and Drake Maye — who drastically outplayed expectations and lifted rosters that otherwise wouldn’t have been championship contenders. And, yes, both had easy schedules by virtue of their teams finishing last in their divisions the previous season.
Everyone knows the Patriots had one of the easiest schedules in recent NFL history last season. The combined winning percentage of their opponents was .391, by far the lowest in the league. In 2024, the Commanders’ opponents had a winning percentage of .436, the NFL’s second-easiest schedule.
So both teams benefited from a relatively easy path in the regular season. The schedule got harder for the Commanders in 2025, as it will for the Patriots this fall.
Injuries — or the general lack of them — also played a huge role in the teams’ respective successes. In 2024, the Commanders had the fifth-lowest AGL (adjusted games lost) metric in the league. In 2025, the Patriots had the lowest number in the NFL. It’s logical to assume there will be some regression to the mean, as there was for Washington in 2025.
But the biggest reason for each team’s success was the quarterback play. Daniels, who was 23 for most of his first season, put together one of the best rookie quarterback seasons in NFL history on the way to being named the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of the Year. Maye, who was 23 last season, had one of the better Year 2 campaigns in recent memory, finishing second in league MVP voting.
So perhaps it’s fair to reason that Daniels was due for a sophomore slump (or, at least, a minor regression) last season after such a surprisingly productive rookie year. It’s not unfair to wonder if Maye could be headed for something similar this season.
Both teams were also able to keep their core coaching staffs in place, which is a rare feat for a team that comes out of nowhere to win.
While there are plenty of reasons the Commanders struggled last season, the most important were the injuries Daniels sustained, which allowed him to play in only seven games.
Sure, injuries can happen to any football player, but Daniels always seemed more at risk of injuries than Maye.
In other words, Maye seems less likely to incur the kinds of injuries that derailed Daniels a year ago, given the size difference between the two. That’s one big reason the Patriots’ 2026 season should be different from the Commanders’ 2025 campaign.
The other massive difference is in roster construction. The Commanders signed four new starters in free agency last year, the same number as the Patriots this year. Of the Commanders’ new starters, three were at least 30 when the season ended. Of the Patriots’ four new starters, only safety Kevin Byard will be over 30 when the 2026 season ends.
[W]hile that’s a difference for now, it may not be for long. The Patriots had serious conversations about trading for A.J. Brown, who will turn 29 this summer, and could circle back to that deal in June, when the Philadelphia Eagles would be more willing to part with Brown.
Over the Cap
Thoughts on Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s $168.6M Extension with the Seahawks
The cash commitment from the Seahawks is truly stunning in this contract. What I consider his “year 0” salary (his raise over his existing rookie contract salary) is a gigantic $42.65 million. The other high end players on the market are all around $18 to $11 million. While some of that is influenced by the fact that many were signed with one year rather than two remaining on their rookie contract, that typically is taken into account when doing an extension.
Those numbers continue into the first year of the contract where he will have earned $62.5 million when no other player is above $53.2 million, which is about 17.5% growth in salary. This again sets new high water marks compared to the rest of the market both in terms of overall salary and salary paid as a percentage of the total contract value.
The salary cap structure is strong for Smith-Njigba. Once the team exercises the first option his 2028 dead money will spike to $45 million in 2028, which would make him pretty hard to release prior to his vesting date just a few days after the Super Bowl. In 2029 that number would be $42 million and Seattle would need at least $10 million in remaining 2028 salary cap room to cut him prior to that early vesting date. So all of the injury guarantees are pretty well protected by the cap structure. 2030 would be the first year really open to debate if his play were to decline.
This is a really strong player contract that really moves the needle for the receiver market as the next group of players gets ready for an extension. This position is always a risk, but my opinion is if you are not willing to walk off the rookie deal (and there Is no reason Seattle should considering how good he has been) you get the extension out of the way early and keep your fingers crossed that no injury or other issue comes up that limits the productivity of the player. Seattle did that and then some with this extension.
Pro Football Talk
Free agent RB Najee Harris wants to show teams he can run, six months after torn Achilles
Harris’s agent posted video of him sprinting on a treadmill this week. Harris tore his Achilles in his third game with the Chargers, on September 21.
Running in a straight line on a treadmill is a far cry from the kind of cutting a running back has to do on the football field, but being able to sprint in March is a good sign that he’ll be able to do everything he has to do by Week One.
2025 was a rough year for Harris, who also injured his eye in a fireworks accident on the Fourth of July. That forced him to miss a lot of work in training camp and the preseason, but he was ready to go by the start of the regular season.
The 28-year-old Harris signed a one-year contract with the Chargers last year but was lost for the season after carrying the ball just 15 times.
Discussion topics
How often do top free agents actually pan out?
Not as often as teams would like. The average grade for these 500 free agents landed at 2.26 -- closer to disappointing than average. Most players were either below average or lived up to expectations, but there were far more utter disasters than stunning breakouts, which makes sense; if a player’s already being paid market value or better to start, it’s going to be easier for them to come up short via injury or inconsistency than exceed expectations to play at a Pro Bowl-or-better level. And the vast majority of Pro Bowl-caliber talents never hit the open market.
The “6” grades over this decade are players who hit free agency under unique circumstances such as Trent Williams (held out for a year over medical concerns, was traded and got the right to hit free agency as part of the deal) and Trey Hendrickson (who had only one year of high-level play as a starter with the Saints before excelling in Cincinnati).
If you prefer to consider this as a binary question, my evaluations suggest there’s a 41% chance that a typical top-50 free agent will produce a successful contract, either by living up to the expectations implied by the contract value or exceeding them. That feels about right. Free agents can still be valuable within that context, given that teams might not have access to similarly talented players via the draft or trades. And while rookie contract players are far more likely to produce surplus value than free agent additions, the latter can still generate outsized value, as the likes of Baun and Barkley did in 2024.
What about the tippy-top best players on the market?
If we split each year’s top 50 into groups by average annual salary, the top free agents are actually worse, not better, than the players below them. In part, that’s because expectations are higher. It’s also because many of those contracts go to quarterbacks, and as I’ll get to in a moment, free agency tends to be a very high-variance place to go for a starting quarterback.
Players in the bottom half of the top 50 both were more likely to succeed (grade of “3” or higher) and posted a higher average performance on their free agent deals than players in the top 10, top 20 or top half of those same classes. The differences aren’t significant, but it does seem telling that there’s no drop-off from the top of the class to the next tier or two down after adjusting for how much each group is getting paid. This seems to suggest that teams might be overconfident in their ability to sort through which free agents are worth prioritizing.
Are certain positions more productive than others?
While the sample gets small at certain positions -- particularly at running back -- there is a pretty consistent trend. Players who touch the ball fail most often, while players who have a more subtle impact on the game are more likely to deliver or exceed expectations.
Do younger free agents work out more often than older ones?
[Y]ounger free agents are still more productive and succeed more often than their older counterparts. I’ve rounded ages down to the closest full year to make evaluation simpler, but free agents who are at or entering their peak years (hitting free agency at ages 24-27) are better bets than players in their peak seasons (ages 28-30) or post-peak years (ages 31-plus), even after accounting for contract size.
There’s really no drop-off from ages 28-30 to the 31-plus group, which might also be a product of selection bias. Players who are still getting paid top-50 free agent deals as they turn 31 or older are typically quarterbacks (who age slower than other positions) or true high-end talents (who might have slower aging curves than lesser players at their positions). Even so, some of those well-known talents on the wrong side of 30 can drop off quicker than the teams that sign them might think.
Grade: Average (3)
After sitting out the 2019 season in the hopes of leaving Washington, Williams was dealt to the 49ers in spring 2020. As part of the deal, the 49ers agreed to take the franchise tag off the table for Williams after the season. He had an excellent debut year in San Francisco, and when the Chiefs pushed to add Williams, the 49ers had to offer him more than $23 million per season to keep the star tackle.
While that move might have cost Williams a couple of Super Bowl rings, there’s no arguing with what he has done in San Francisco. The future Hall of Famer made the Pro Bowl in each of his final seven seasons in Washington, but he had never been a first-team All-Pro at left tackle. He earned those honors in each of his first three seasons under this contract with the 49ers. It’s hard for a player making this much money to drastically exceed expectations, but Williams qualifies.
16. Josh Norman, CB, Washington (2016)
The deal: Five years, $75 million
Grade: Disappointing (2)
Norman was one of the few players to be slapped with the franchise tag before having it pulled, allowing the opportunistic cornerback to hit free agency. Despite hitting the market weeks after it opened, he still landed a significant contract with Washington. Coming off a first-team All-Pro campaign, though, Norman didn’t push for Pro Bowl honors, with Washington wavering on whether to have him shadow top receivers. Norman lasted four years in Washington without ever showing his best form from the Panthers days.
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