It’s the 2023-2024 off-season. The Washington Commanders have finished 6-11 and end up with the 7th overall pick.
Josh Harris has announced after an extensive search, you are announced as the new General Manager. Magic Johnson uses an AI program to make a matter of fact tweet about your hiring. Harris’ instructions are clear. Replace Ron Rivera’s coaching staff. Having sold out home games in Washington is paramount. There’s a New jersey being revealed in the off-season so keeping Terry and Allen are musts for huge sales.
You’ve got among the most cap space in the league and some real intriguing additional cuts that can be made to increase that.
You’ve got the 7th overall pick, 36th and 39th overall picks to focus on at the draft.
There’s a tremendous amount of pressure on your shoulders to grow the culture of Washington football and wipe away the bad taste of decades of ineptitude during the he-who-shall-not-be-named ownership era.
What’s your off-season plan?
Promote EB to Head Coach. Push him to hire an OCoordinator to help him with playcalling duties, someone he trusts. I think EB is pretty good at drawing up plays, his concepts are modern and good, but HC is a lot of responsibilty to have and I dont think its wise to expect EB to be able to handle all the new duites without some help.
For D-coordinator, look at luring some college talent cause Im so sick of NFL retreads. First choice is Glenn Schumann out of Georgia, hes been instrumental in building that defensive juggernaut in GA. Second is Ferentz out of Iowa, knows how to run a traditional smash mouth defense well that can shutdown even highly talented offenses such as Michigan and OSU. Or Jim Knowles out of OSU, both of them. Built a creative and very good defense out of OSU that punched above its weight, and when he moved on to OSU he has transformed OSU’s defense from being an underachieving disappointment to being one of the nations best defenses. Schematically he has shown great flexibility, in adjusting his scheme to be a less risky scheme (though still aggressive) that was better suited for less-talented teams looking to confuse the opposition, to one that is still aggressive and disguises coverages well while being able to play more conservative football in areas where a talent advantage lies. For example, OSU D-line is a highly talented group, its secondary has talent but underachieves at times, nobody can run on them, and its LB unit leaves something to be desired. Sound familiar? No problem, Knowles figured out so far how to turn that into an elite shut down defense with a scheme that maximizes talent while minimizing deficincies.
Draft Oline and LBs, sign anybody decent in FA to shore up those positions. Get more talent iat TE through draft and by FA, even if we have to slightly overpay in FA, as long as they are relatviely you.
We’re good at Cb, thats enough of drafting CBs. But Look to replenish the Dline with some average level starters or some mid-round picks.
Extend Howell 's contract as early as possible before it gets to be prohibitively high. Do the exact opposite of what we did with Kirk.
EB can play call but his protection schemes scare me at times.