Editor’s note: Each day, Hogs Haven compiles 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, with a sprinkling of other stuff. Enjoy!
Commanders links
Articles
The Athletic
Washington Commanders 2026 schedule: Revamped team faces a brutal opening stretch
Week 1 keys to victory
Stop the run. That’s been the key for Washington when facing the Eagles over the previous two seasons. In his past four games against the Commanders (including the NFC Championship in January 2025), Eagles running back Saquon Barkley amassed 546 rushing
yards and eight total touchdowns. That’s an average of 136.5 rushing yards a game. The Commanders haven’t had a player top 136 rushing yards in a game in five years (Antonio Gibson had 146 in Week 18 of the 2021 season).
The Commanders revised their defense and will now operate in Jones’ system, which could look quite similar to Brian Flores’ defense with the Minnesota Vikings. But using a similar system doesn’t guarantee similar results.
Last Man Standig
Commanders 2026 schedule: Passport stamps, playoff tests and a whole lot of prime time
In the spotlight
Washington remains firmly on the national stage despite last season’s abysmal showing (0-8) in primetime or standalone games. This schedule includes at least five such contests, including the franchise’s first trip to London since 2016. The others include two Monday Night Football appearances, plus one each on Thursday and Sunday night.
Fox Sports
2026 NFL Schedule Release: Win-Loss Predictions, Analysis For Every Team
Record prediction: 6-11
Vacchiano: The Washington Commanders are counting on the healthy return of Jayden Daniels to vault them into contention, but even that could be tough unless the complete rebuild of their league-worst defense actually works. They’ll find out because they face six of the top 11 offensive teams from last season, plus two more teams (Philadelphia Eagles, Cincinnati Bengals) that could be in the top 10 this year. In fact, outside of road trips to Arizona and Tennessee, they don’t face anyone who doesn’t have a legit shot at the playoffs in 2026. Daniels’ return will surely give them a boost, but they are plugging in so many new pieces, including two new coordinators, that they might need time to figure it all out. But this schedule really doesn’t give them any breaks.
Bullock’s Film Room
Did Commanders minicamp confirm 3-4 defense?
Most people that posted this clip focused on first round pick Sonny Styles dropping back into coverage and catching an interception. But that part doesn’t really interest me. What interests me more is the schematics of the clip. They don’t have 11 players on the field, but what we do see is the skeleton of a 3-4 defense. You can see they have two edge rushers in rookie fifth round pick Joshua Josephs and second year rusher T.J. Maguranyanga, who made the team as part of the international pathway program last year. Behind them, Sonny Styles lines up next to Devin Harper, a tryout for the camp. You can also see undrafted free agent safety Malik Spencer just behind Styles prior to the snap.
This clip shows some key principles to the 3-4 defense we’re expecting Jones to run. First, you’ll notice both edge rushers are trying to disguise their intentions pre-snap. They both walk back off the ball, telling you they’re playing outside linebackers in a 3-4 rather than staying on the line of scrimmage as 4-3 defensive ends. Then they suddenly walk up to the line of scrimmage just before the snap. As the ball is snapped, the offense doesn’t know if they’re rushing or dropping into coverage. As it turns out, Maguranyanga rushes off the left side of the line while Josephs drops off into coverage, which I’ll talk more about shortly.
While Maguranyanga rushes, the other four players we can see in this clip all drop into zone coverage. This is another core part of the defense. The Vikings were aggressive blitzers last year but they played a lot of zone behind those blitzes and stayed in zone when they only rushed four. Jones shows that he’s bringing that idea here to Washington too. You can see both inside linebackers play hook-curl zones while Josephs sinks back to play the flat on his side and safety Malik Spencer drops down to play the flat zone on the other side of the field.
This is likely to be a basic Cover-3 defense with four underneath zone defenders relatively evenly spaced. But they got there from a 3-4 look by dropping an edge rusher into the flat and have a safety start deep before buzzing up into the flat on the other side. It already is emphasizing the importance of disguising things in this defense. We’ve long anticipated that new defensive coordinator Daronte Jones would be shifting the Commanders to a 3-4 base defense, given the success he had working under Brian Flores in Minnesota where they ran a 3-4 base defense together, but we didn’t know for certain.
Podcasts & videos
NFC East links
ESPN
Source: Giants, Malik Nabers target Week 1 after 2nd surgery
New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers underwent a second procedure on his right knee earlier this offseason, a source confirmed to ESPN.
It was considered a “cleanup” procedure after Nabers tore his right ACL in September. The surgery was to remove scar tissue that was causing stiffness.
The Giants remain hopeful that Nabers will be ready for Week 1, a source told ESPN. The Giants open the season Sept. 13 with a “Sunday Night Football” matchup with the rival Dallas Cowboys at MetLife Stadium.
New York was optimistic at the start of the year that Nabers would be ready for the beginning of training camp in late July. That has since been pushed back to later in the summer given the difficulty of his recovery.
NFL league links
Articles
Sports Illustrated
Albert Breer Details How the NFL Built the 2026 Schedule
This year, per Schroeder, three in particular stuck out.
The first was the raw number of international games. The NFL is going to Australia, France and Rio de Janeiro this year, along with the usual spots in London, Munich, Madrid and Mexico City. Each game has its set of challenges. For instance, the game in Melbourne had to be in Week 1 because of the travel demands on the teams to go halfway across the world. That meant bumping the Brazil game, which was held in São Paulo the past two years, out of Week 1.
The second was the new windows that were being negotiated, with the Thanksgiving Eve game standing as the biggest challenge—mostly because that meant putting a game on a Wednesday, and arranging byes to accommodate it. Also, because the first Friday of the season this year fell on the second Friday of September, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 would prevent the NFL from using that date as a window, which it had for the Brazil game the past two years.
The third challenge was less obvious, but also geographic. The two West divisions now have three teams apiece on the league’s marquee, and those two divisions play each other in the scheduling rotation this year. That meant more big games were locked into either the late-afternoon window on Sunday or prime time.
ESPN
2026 NFL schedule release: Judging overreactions to matchups
The Bears will miss the postseason
Chicago was one of the great stories of the 2025 season, reaching the NFC divisional round in Ben Johnson’s first year as head coach. Second-year quarterback Caleb Williams made brilliant fourth-quarter play after brilliant fourth-quarter play right up until the end, taking the Rams to overtime before finally bowing out.
In the long term, the arrow is definitely pointing up for the Johnson/Williams pairing — and there’s room for Williams to get even better. He finished 32nd out of 33 qualifying QBs in completion percentage (58.1%) last season and just 16th in QBR (58.2) even as he led the Bears to their first division title in seven years.
Discussion topics
ESPN
NFL ended minority offensive assistant mandate before ’25 season
The NFL ended a mandate that all 32 teams hire a minority coach as an offensive assistant ahead of the 2025 season and not because of recent pressure from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who on Wednesday issued an investigative subpoena to the league over its hiring practices.
Uthmeier, who in March threatened potential civil action against the NFL over the league’s Rooney Rule, said Wednesday that the NFL had changed diversity language on its website and that it had “capitulated on some of their discriminatory hiring quotas,” while arguing that the revisions raise new questions about the policy.
He also took credit for the league ending the program to increase minority representation in assistant coaching ranks, a program started in 2022 after former coach Brian Flores sued the league. But ESPN learned of the league ending a mandate for the program this past winter.
“The NFL now contends — apparently in response to our letter — that the NFL has ‘sunset’ this mandate,” the letter reads. “Given the NFL’s history of open discrimination, however, we are skeptical that the mandate is no longer in place. And like the Rooney Rule, it violates Florida law.”
