The Jayden Daniels Question Isn’t Whether He’s Good Enough Anymore

Nobody is questioning Jayden Daniels’ ability and nobody should be. The question after another significant injury to his non-throwing elbow is whether the Commanders can count on him being on the field often enough for all that ability to matter.

That distinction gets blurred pretty quickly in [a roundtable The Athletic published this week ](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7622005/2026/09/23/jayden-daniels-elbow-injury-franchise-quarterback/?source=dailyemail&campaign=601983&userId=3099627&source=dailyemail)after Daniels dislocated the same elbow he injured last season. Nicki Jhabvala noted that five of his last eight starts have ended with an injury. Barry Svrluga acknowledged that durability is now going to follow every conversation about Daniels for the foreseeable future. David Aldridge was more definitive: Daniels is the franchise quarterback. “Period.”

Daniels has already shown he can play quarterback at an extremely high level in the NFL and that isn’t really up for debate. What is becoming harder to ignore is the amount of time he’s missed.

Svrluga pointed out that other quarterbacks get hurt too, citing Caleb Williams and Jaxson Dart going down in Week 2, Joe Burrow missing 16 games over the previous three seasons and Lamar Jackson missing at least four games three separate times as evidence that Daniels’ situation isn’t unique.

All of that is true. It also doesn’t offer the Commanders much comfort.

There are quarterbacks in the league who have been notably durable. Josh Allen started all 51 regular-season games for Buffalo from 2023 through 2025 and Jared Goff did the same in Detroit. Baker Mayfield started all 51 for Tampa Bay. Even Jalen Hurts, whose legs are a big part of what makes him dangerous, started 48 of 51 for Philadelphia over those three seasons.

So yes, quarterbacks get hurt, but plenty of them also stay remarkably healthy and saying the problem isn’t unique to Daniels doesn’t change the Commanders’ problem. The Commanders aren't trying to determine whether injuries happen in the NFL; they're trying to figure out whether the quarterback they intend to build around can stay on the field.

Maybe this recent stretch really is just bad luck. Daniels could come back, stay healthy and make all of this look like an overreaction a year from now. Everybody in the DMV would happily take that outcome, but the Commanders still have to account for the possibility that it doesn’t happen.

Aldridge then used Stephen Curry as an example, which was interesting. Curry had serious ankle problems early in his career, rebuilt his body, found the right support and eventually made those early durability concerns look like a footnote in a Hall of Fame career. It’s a great story but it’s also Stephen Curry’s story and doesn’t tell us how Daniels’ story ends.

Daniels’ frame and durability weren’t concerns that arose after he reached Washington. They came up before the draft. Daniels has also worked to get stronger since then, talking openly about adding more “armor” to withstand an NFL season. This isn’t a player ignoring an obvious weakness; Daniels knows it, the Commanders know it and they’ve tried to address it.

And yet, he’s still been hurt often enough that the focus on Daniels isn’t about his play on the field, but whether he can stay on the field long enough for his talent to matter.

There’s another part of The Athletic discussion that deserves some pushback too: whether the Commanders have given Daniels “enough to work with.”

The easy answer probably is that they could have done more. The offensive line isn’t deep enough, some draft picks haven’t developed and the roster still has holes. Laremy Tunsil being unavailable matters and so does the lack of proven depth at a few positions.

But this didn’t seem like quite as urgent a question in 2024 when the Commanders went 12-5. Daniels, as a rookie, started every game, threw for 3,568 yards and 25 touchdowns, ran for another 891 yards and helped take the Commanders all the way to the NFC Championship Game.

Who did he do it with?

Terry McLaurin was terrific. After him, the passing game featured veteran Zach Ertz, Olamide Zaccheaus, Noah Brown and Dyami Brown. Brandon Coleman was a rookie playing left tackle. Even Svrluga in The Athletic piece pointed out that this year’s offensive group, despite its problems, is at least comparable to what Daniels had during that 12-win season.

That 2024 team wasn’t loaded and Daniels made it look better than it was.

That should be part of the standard for a true franchise quarterback. The great ones raise the floor around them. They make an average receiver useful. They survive stretches when a starter at a key position on the offense is hurt. They win games when the offensive line isn’t having its best afternoon and when the roster around them doesn’t look like a Pro Bowl team.

Daniels has already shown he can do that and there shouldn’t be much doubt left about his ability to elevate the people around him. And that’s why “give him more help” isn’t much of an answer to what is happening now.

The Commanders should absolutely keep improving the roster, and general manager Adam Peters hasn’t exactly ignored the offense. The Commanders traded for Tunsil and used a first-round pick on Josh Conerly Jr. They’ve taken swings at receiver, tight end and running back. Some have worked better than others and Aldridge rightly points out that Peters’ offensive draft record has been spotty.

That criticism is fair. Washington can build a better roster around Daniels, but a better left guard still isn’t going to make five of eight starts ending with injury less concerning.

And yes, the defense is bad. Really bad. The Athletic roundtable of Jhabvala, Aldridge and Svrluga highlighted Washington’s inability to create turnovers, its problems in coverage and a unit that has again put the offense in terrible situations. All fair points, but that also doesn’t have much to do with Daniels getting hurt.

The Commanders need to fix the defense if they want to seriously contend. They also need to decide how much uncertainty they can live with at the most important position on the field. Those are both significant problems. They don’t need to be turned into the same problem.

Which gets to the part the Commanders eventually have to deal with.

The Commanders can pick up Daniels’ fifth-year option and, as Jhabvala noted, they probably should. They can continue building around him and operate under the belief that he is still the best chance this franchise has had at a championship-level quarterback in a very long time, but that doesn’t mean they should stop looking at quarterbacks in the draft.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean using another first-round pick on a quarterback. Maybe there’s a quarterback they like in the second or third round, or maybe someone expected to go much earlier starts to slide on draft weekend. At that point, taking one isn’t an indictment of Daniels, it’s taking advantage of an opportunity to build depth at the most important position in football.

Washington has done something like this before, albeit under a different team name, different ownership and a different front office. Back in 2012, the Redskins traded a haul to move up and select Robert Griffin III with the second overall pick. One hundred picks later, they drafted Kirk Cousins at No. 102 in the fourth round.

Griffin was viewed as the franchise quarterback and there was no ambiguity about that on draft night. Yet Washington still saw value in taking another quarterback and developing him behind RG3. Griffin’s run as Washington’s starter fizzled out while Cousins remained with the team through 2017, made a Pro Bowl and set the franchise’s single-season record for passing yards.

There’s no reason to force the comparison beyond that. Daniels isn’t Griffin and the Commanders don’t need to spend a draft pick just so they can say they have another young quarterback in the building.

But quarterback depth doesn’t have to mean another veteran whose only job is to keep the season afloat for a few weeks. If the right player is sitting there in the second or third round, or if a quarterback the organization likes falls farther than expected, there’s nothing wrong with drafting someone they like. Drafting somebody with real developmental upside, letting them learn and giving the organization another possibility should at least be part of the strategy.

In an ideal scenario, Daniels gets healthy, stays healthy and none of this becomes necessary. The other quarterback develops behind him and eventually becomes a valuable backup, a trade asset or somebody else’s starter. That would be a good problem to have and probably better than the one the Commanders face now.

The worse outcome is still having conversations about Daniels’ availability a year or two from now and realizing Washington never developed a serious alternative because drafting one might have looked like a lack of faith.

There’s no mystery about what Jayden Daniels can do when he’s on the field. He showed it in 2024, when a roster that wasn’t designed to elevate a rookie quarterback instead got elevated by one all the way to the NFC Championship Game. He was showing it again this past Sunday before his latest injury.

Now the question is how often Washington gets to see that version of Daniels. If the injuries keep happening, the Commanders need something better behind him than another stopgap veteran and the hope that next year will be different.