Blog
The Burgundy Wire's Completely Unqualified 2026 Season Preview
Wed, Aug 26
Ask me right after the draft what I felt about this season, and I'd have sold you 10-7, maybe 11-6, with a straight face and a full chest. Jayden coming back healthy. An offensive line that was going to be a "strength" (quotes very much intended, because even in April, some lizard-brain part of me knew better than to say that sentence without air quotes). A defense that finally had teeth again, anchored by a rookie linebacker everyone was ready to crown early. It was a good speech. I meant it. That guy from April deserves better than the guy writing this in August.
Because here's the present tense: injuries are stacking up like it's a hobby. We've lost our franchise left tackle for possibly the entire year, and I didn't even flinch when I heard. That's how numb this camp has made me. Sonny Styles looks like he needs a handful of live reps before the lights fully come on, which is fine for a rookie and still not the August I ordered. I'm not a preseason panic guy, high or low, but the eye test says this defense is legitimately, noticeably better. If we climb from "one of the league's worst" to "respectably mediocre," that alone papers over a lot of offensive sins. And the offense, bluntly: we go exactly as far as Jayden Daniels can carry us, and he can carry us a long way, if the offensive line doesn't get him murdered first. That's the entire season preview, one sentence, no charge. Everything below is just me finding 17 increasingly unhinged ways to restate it.
Game by game. Buckle up.
Week 1, at Eagles. Philly's still loaded, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But losing AJ Brown is going to sting them a lot harder than the league seems to think, and they bled real talent on defense too. That's a roster trending down, not up, no matter what the preseason hype cycle says. Ripe for an upset. I know it. I still don't trust our pieces to mesh in Week 1 against a division villain on the road. Loss. Sadly, and with feeling.
Week 2, Cowboys. Ugh. Genuinely, physically, ugh. By every account they got better, and, shocker, they drafted the exact player I wanted us to take and did not want anywhere near their building. This is a curse at this point, a documented historical pattern: every time Dallas has a down year, they turn around and land the next DeMarcus Ware, the next Dez Bryant, the next Micah Parsons. It just never stops. Another loss, and it costs me a little bit of my soul to type it out loud.
Week 3, Seahawks. Zero rational basis for this pick. None. I have no film, no stats, no argument. What I have is my dad and my brother sitting next to me in that building, and I am fully prepared to credit our combined, deeply unscientific fan energy for an upset nobody saw coming. Also, real question: was Sam Darnold a one-year mirage? I think he played the season of his life once and gravity finally catches up to him this year. Guys don't just "figure it out" for good this late in a career. Win. We shouldn't win this game. We are winning this game. Starting 0-3 sends my bar tab somewhere my bank account is not equipped to visit.
Week 4, Colts. Total fog of war on this one. Indy's solid everywhere and boring nowhere, but "solid" has a ceiling, and I don't know where it is yet. We'll know a lot more about who we actually are by Week 4, and coming off a home upset of the defending Super Bowl champs, this game is either the start of a real streak or the exact spot we no-show and let it slip. I'm calling it a win. A 51% win. The kind of win that needs a coin flip to feel good about itself.
Week 5, Giants. Unpopular opinion I will die defending: Jaxson Dart has the most punchable face in professional sports, and the Giants have been fielding a rotating cast of punchable quarterback faces going back to Eli "derp" Manning. It's basically a franchise tradition at this point, an assembly line. They'll hang around longer than they should, because the Giants always do, but we SHOULD win this. Capital letters intentional. Win.
Week 6, 49ers. It's my birthday. An away win, ideally the third leg of a winning streak, would be the single best gift anyone's given me since the wife said yes. By this point I'm hoping Sonny Styles has seen enough live snaps to actually lock down George Kittle, who has been quietly cooking rookies for a decade. If he's ready, we've got a real shot on the road. My heart says win. My head says loss, and this time I'm siding with my head, against my own birthday wishes. Loss.
BYE WEEK. Thank every football god available. The timing on this could not possibly be better, and I will not be taking questions on that.
Week 8, Eagles (rematch), primetime. Round two. If we're anywhere close to full health walking into this one, I like us at home, and I like us splitting the season series to make Philly sweat a little on their own way to the playoffs. Win.
Week 9, Rams. Oof, immediately. Is Aaron Donald even active by this point in his career, and if he is, what does our offensive line look like standing across from him? Neither answer makes me feel good. Loss.
Week 10, Giants (rematch). Another date with a man I would take out a second mortgage just to punch squarely in the face. Again, this is Jaxson Dart, a football player, not a personal enemy, though the line has blurred. By now the Giants should be in full, dignified free-fall toward another top-five pick. Win.
Week 11, Bengals. Total wild card, and I'm calling my shot early and loudly: Joe Burrow gets hurt again before we play him. It's not a hope, it's a pattern. Without Burrow, this is a comfortable win. With Burrow, and Ja'Marr Chase still doing whatever he wants to defensive backs, it's a much tighter, uglier win. Either way: win.
Week 12, Cardinals. A team mid-rebuild, and as long as Jeremiah Love doesn't turn into the latest rookie to torch us for 150 yards (we have a long, humiliating history there, a whole highlight reel we don't talk about), this is another win, and a fairly stress-free one.
Week 13, Titans. Possibly the worst roster in the league right now, and I say that with zero joy. We've absolutely no-showed against bad teams before, that's part of our brand too, but I genuinely believe the culture has turned a corner this time. Comfortable win, even on the road, even against my own better instincts to panic about trap games.
Week 14, Texans. Which CJ Stroud are we getting? The one from two seasons ago is a legitimate problem, and that defense is scary regardless of who's throwing the ball. I think we ride a four-game winning streak right into a buzzsaw and drop this one at home. Loss, and an infuriating one.
Week 15, Falcons. I genuinely can't get a read on Atlanta. Bijan Robinson is a nightmare do-everything back, and they've got real juice sprinkled on both sides of the ball, but as a whole team I don't think they have enough to finish. Close win at home, the kind that ages ten years off my life in the fourth quarter.
Week 16, Vikings. Deep in the stretch run against a genuinely dangerous team. I think Kyler Murray has himself a real bounce-back year throwing to Justin Jefferson, who remains one of maybe three people on Earth who make defensive coordinators visibly age in real time. You can't win them all. We play this one tough and still come up just short. Loss.
Week 17, at Jaguars. Loaded roster, chronic inability to put it together. That's the Jaguars, in a nutshell, for years running. We should be fully battle-tested by now, so I genuinely don't know what to expect from either side. Purely on road-game math, and despite Jacksonville's fan base numbering somewhere in the low single digits, I've got this as a tight, annoying loss.
Week 18, Cowboys, at home. Season finale. Win. That's the take. That's the whole take, and I will not be expanding on it further except to say: we are due, deeply and cosmically due, and I want this game to either punch us into the playoffs or slam the door on Dallas's. Ideally both. At the exact same moment. I haven't worked out the mechanism, but I trust the universe to figure out the details.
Add it up and I've got the Commanders at 10-7. Same number I was shouting in April. Wildly different, much more terrifying road to get there.
One last thing: if you haven't listened to the Commanders hype songs created by robots, you should! Five of them, one shared cover, zero shame. Give them a listen.