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Washington Post (paywall)
The second-year quarterback, recovering from a dislocated elbow, has not yet been cleared for contact and is not expected to play against Denver on Sunday night.
Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels will return to practice this week but is unlikely to play against the Denver Broncos, Coach Dan Quinn said Monday.
Quinn said Daniels already has been cleared to return to the practice field, just three-plus weeks after he
dislocated his left elbow in a Nov. 2 loss to Seattle. But the quarterback has not been cleared to absorb contact, which is a necessary precursor to him playing in a game.
Assuming he does not play Sunday, Daniels could return as soon as Dec. 7 at Minnesota or Dec. 14 against the New York Giants.
With Daniels sidelined, the Commanders have continued losing; their six-game skid has left them with minuscule odds of returning to the playoffs. Together, those developments have sparked a debate among fans about whether Daniels should play again this season, even if healthy.
Some have argued that the team should effectively punt on 2025 and preserve Daniels’s health for 2026. Others believe that sitting Daniels would run counter to the competitive culture that Quinn has sought to instill. Quinn said team brass did not consider shutting down Daniels.
ESPN
Quinn said they did not discuss internally shutting Daniels down for the season. At the time of the injury Washington fell to 3-6. The Commanders are now 3-8 heading into Sunday’s matchup vs. Denver (9-2) but have lost six consecutive games.
Quinn said he’s still not sure when Daniels will return.
“It’s important that Jayden’s getting going, learning to play this position at the highest level competitively,” Quinn said. “Also doing it safely. Those are reps that you develop as well. It’s a skill just like throwing and processing. All those things are important.”
If Daniels returns, it would help him to have a full complement of receivers. Washington opened the 21-day window for receiver
Noah Brown, who has not played since Week 2 because of a groin injury. He missed most of training camp with groin and knee issues.
Terry McLaurin, who has missed seven of the past eight games because of a quad injury, could return soon though Quinn said he’s not yet sure when that might happen. McLaurin accompanied the team to Madrid, Spain to continue his on-field rehab work.
The Athletic (paywall)
Receivers Terry McLaurin and Noah Brown, safety Will Harris and defensive end Drake Jackson also participated in Monday’s jog-through and continue to make progress in their recoveries.
For McLaurin and Brown, it was the first time they had done any on-field work with the team since their latest stints in recovery. McLaurin suffered a quad injury in Week 3, then aggravated it in Week 8 in Kansas City.
“It wasn’t like a full-speed, hauling-ass day, but that’s kind of what we’re hoping the progression for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday looks like for him and some of his teammates,” Quinn said of McLaurin. “He’s really worked hard and … we’ll see where it takes us, but it was awesome to have him out there today.”
Quinn declined to make any projections about McLaurin’s availability for Sunday but said he’s “excited about the possibilities because of the speed and how he’s moving.” He said he just needs to see those things repeatedly from McLaurin in a full-speed practice to know he’s ready.
Harris is also getting closer to returning from the fractured fibula he suffered in Week 3. The team opened his 21-day return window while practicing in Madrid, ahead of its loss to the Miami Dolphins.
“We’re very optimistic heading into this week for him and all that he’s done to get himself ready to go,” Quinn said of Harris.
Commanders.com
Brown, who originally joined the team prior to the start of the 2024 season and re-signed with the team this past offseason, has played in two games this season and recorded three catches for 36 yards. He last played in Week 2 against the Green Bay Packers before sustaining a groin injury that kept him sidelined up to this point. He was placed on IR on Oct. 15 after going through a limited workload in practice leading up to the Commanders’ game against the Chicago Bears.
Brown can be activated at any point during his 21-day window. If Brown were to reach the end of this period, the Commanders would need to decide whether to activate him or return him to IR for the rest of the season.
Commanders.com
— Quinn also fielded questions about the team still trying to win and keep their playoff hopes alive. He understands the questions; the team is 3-8 with a narrow path towards the playoffs is narrow. However, he wants to do what’s best for the players, which means doing whatever he can to end the team’s losing streak and keep the standard of being a Commander.
“We know what we’re looking to do and how we want to do it, but by no means are we careless about that. And so, it’s important not just for Jayden, but important for our entire team. These are the standards and things we want to go after. And so, collectively we do think of that. Our sport only has 17 of these and that’s different than some of the other sports where we really want to dig in. And these are your best, the very best of spaces to improve and get better. And so, anytime we can do that, we should certainly try to do that. But I recognize the question, no doubt.”
Riggo’s Rag
Commanders could draft Jeremiyah Love
- Running Back | Notre Dame Fighting Irish
Taking a running back in the top 10 is rare these days. Ashton Jeanty was the latest this year. But unfortunately for him, he landed on the lowly Las Vegas Raiders.
Jeremiyah Love looks set to add his name to the list if he declares in 2026. The Notre Dame prospect has taken college football by storm this season, rushing for
1,306 yards and 17 touchdowns, somehow topping his extraordinary 2024 numbers along the way. He’s also enhancing his route-running out of the backfield, making him a significant dual-threat capable of taking the NFL by storm from the moment he steps onto the field.
Love’s vision, patience, and explosiveness make him a rare prospect. His contact balance is already elite, and he has proven credentials when it comes to putting a team on his back. He’s not going to last long in the first round, but whether the Commanders have the means to pick a running back with so many holes elsewhere is another matter.
Commanders could draft Mansoor Delane
Finding another prolific cornerback should be high on the Commanders’ agenda once again this offseason. Not exactly ideal considering the investments already made, but it is what it is at this point.
Marshon Lattimore has
likely played his final snap in Washington. The jury is still out on Mike Sainristil. Second-round rookie Trey Amos flashed glimpses of immense promise, but Noah Igbinoghene and Jonathan Jones might not be back. The Commanders don’t have enough, so examining some of the better draft prospects would be prudent.
Mansoor Delane is arguably the best cornerback in this class. His transfer to LSU was a smart move. He’s handled SEC-level competition superbly, bolstering his draft stock along the way. The competitive corner also thrives in press coverage, which is precisely what the Commanders love to run under head coach Dan Quinn.
#Commanders CB Mike Sainristil has struggled a lot this season after an impressive rookie campaign last year. I reviewed his play so far this season to see what his issues are and if the Commanders can help fix them:
https://t.co/uFkji25pws pic.twitter.com/zh6hqaA7bR
— Mark Bullock (@MarkBullockNFL)
November 24, 2025
NFL.com
This is a look at the first-round order for the 2026 NFL Draft heading into Week 13 of the 2025 NFL season, along with the top five needs for each team. The order is determined by record, using strength of schedule as the first tiebreaker (
click here to see a full list of the draft-order tiebreakers).
Pick 7 – Washington Commanders 3-8
Strength of schedule: .500
Remaining SOS: .545 (10)
Week 13 opponent: vs. Broncos
Biggest needs: Edge, WR, CB, LB, IOL
Although I wouldn’t expect them to target an off-ball linebacker this high, the Commanders need a clear succession plan for defensive leader Bobby Wagner. The perennial Pro Bowler turns 36 this summer and is due to hit the open market.
Podcasts & videos
With Nicki Jhabvala: What’s up with the young players? | JOHN KEIM REPORT
Too Early 2026 Mock Offseason: Brandon Aiyuk Target? Caleb Downs in Round 1
NFC East links
Bleeding Green Nation
The rookie is likely headed to injured reserve.
Philadelphia Eagles rookie safety Andrew Mukuba suffered a fractured ankle late during the team’s loss to the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night, according to
multiple reports.
The injury is said to require surgery and it’s possible his season is over.
This development is really bad news. Mukuba, the Eagles’ second-round pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, has shown promise this season. They really needed him to stay healthy, especially with Reed Blankenship also getting banged up in Week 12.
The Eagles currently have one healthy safety on the active roster: Sydney Brown, who’s struggled when he’s had to play defense. Woof.
Andrew Mukuba suffered a fractured to his leg, NFL sources confirmed
@MikeGarafolo and
@RapSheet.
The
#Eagles rookie safety is headed to IR. Safety Reed Blankenship injured his thigh and didn’t return vs. the Cowboys. His timeline for return still TBD.
https://t.co/coejQcg0ag
— Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane)
November 24, 2025
The Athletic (paywall)
The Eagles’ run game has fallen from fifth in yards per carry last season to 25th in 2025.
Hurts is facing trickier zone defenses. Coordinators across the league are attacking offenses with diversified versions featuring late safety rotations and match principles.
Dianna Russini’s report that Hurts’ offensive teammates have grown “frustrated” with his play against zone, and with his hesitancy throwing into tight windows, makes greater sense with this context.
“When it’s man, which people like to get into against (Hurts) to get another player in the box for the zone reads, they have better players than the defense on the outside, so the first read wins a lot for them,” an opposing coach said. “When you are in zone, you can take the first reads away and make the quarterback progress to other things, which is not his comfort zone.”
Philly might need to lean on its own defense, which ranks second in EPA per play but had to perform significant juggling in the secondary as injuries mounted Sunday.
Bleeding Green Nation
The run game is dead.
The Eagles are 8-3 and, for the most part, have failed to establish any kind of consistency on offense. It’s incredible they’ve had the success they have thus far with the offense struggling. Much of that is due to the running game’s inability to be even above league average, let alone the No. 1 rushing unit we saw a season ago.
Point the finger at Saquon Barkley if you must. He admits he’s in a “slump.” Point the finger at Kevin Patullo. Point the finger at Jeff Stoutland, the running game coordinator. Point the finger at Howie Roseman, for not re-signing Mekhi Becton over the summer. Point the finger at Jalen Hurts for not running the ball enough. Point the finger at Nick Sirianni for being the driving force behind all of it. It’s on all of them.
Their 1,215 rushing yards are 21st in the NFL this season, as is their
EPA/rush. Only five teams have a lower yards per attempt (3.9) than Philadelphia’s. That has led, in large part, to the percentage of drives in which the Eagles score to sit at 34.2%, 27th in the league. The teams behind them? The Jets, Saints, Titans, Raiders and Browns. Those teams have a combined record of 10-45, and it’s possible those five squads will hold the first five picks in next April’s NFL Draft.
That’s not the company a Super Bowl favorite should be keeping.
Big Blue View
After the Giants blew a lead and lost a game for the sixth time this season on Sunday against the Detroit Lions, interim head coach Mike Kafka decided to move on from the heavily-criticized Bowen.
Bowen was hired by former coach Brian Daboll before the 2024 season to replace Wink Martindale, a popular, extremely aggressive coordinator. Bowen’s more conservative, four-man rush philosophy is a sharp contrast to the “pressure breaks pipes” blitz-oriented schemes Martindale employed in two seasons with New York.
The Giants have lost five games this season in which they held a double-digit lead. Sunday’s game marked the third straight week and fourth time this season the Giants failed to hold a fourth-quarter lead.
Blogging the Boys
Cowboys injuries: Tyler Guyton (ankle) not expected to play this week
Tyler Guyton suffered a high-ankle sprain against the Eagles that will keep him out for some time. He didn’t participate in practice today and is likely to miss the game against the Chiefs.
Also, listed as DNPs today were Osa Odighizuwa (elbow), George Pickens (knee/calf), and KaVontae Turpin (shoulder/illness).
NFL league links
Articles
The Athletic (free article)
I am a lot like my dad; we both watch games on the biggest TVs we can fit on the wall, listening to commentary the mainstream broadcaster has provided for our subscription money.
My children, however, do it very differently.
Sure, there are games they will still watch with me from start to finish, but not many, and they are often looking at their phones as much as the TV. And while I still want to hear what Roy Keane and co have to say at half time, my kids have their earbuds in and are listening to influencers.
Is that it, then, for football on TV as we’ve known it? Are all our favourite sports just “highlights-based” products now, as
NBA commissioner Adam Silver described his own league earlier this year?
Peter Hutton, who has worked for established broadcasters such as the BBC, Eurosport and Sky and disruptors Meta and the Saudi Pro League, puts it like this.
“There is no one way of speaking to your audience anymore — you need different editorial voices across different platforms,” he explains. “It’s about accepting that it’s not always about the live game. Clips might be the most important offering. But when you boil it down, it’s pretty simple: you’ve got to get people to care.”
The risk with pieces like this is that you end up writing something that makes you look as daft as 1985 film Back to the Future’s predictions for the technology we would have by 2015 — all flying taxis, hoverboards and self-tying shoelaces.
Here, however, are six predictions for 2035 that I am confident in.
More, more, more
Let us start with the safest forecast of all: we will be able to watch more sport and sport-related content, in more places and more ways.
Just last week,
Paramount+ won the rights to show Champions League football in the UK for the first time, displacing TNT Sports. But it is not just the platforms that are mushrooming: the volume is, too.
In the last week, I have watched live football from BBC Sport, TikTok and TNT, NFL on DAZN, school rugby on YouTube, and major World Cup news play out on X. All on my phone. But this was only a tiny fraction of what I could have watched.
Hyper-personalisation
When actor Bill Murray filled in for the Chicago Cubs’ famous but ailing announcer
Harry Caray for a game against the Montreal Expos in 1987, it was a hit. Despite being unashamedly biased to the Cubs and offering little in the way of insight, nobody cared, as it was funny and Caray would be back for the next game.
But what was once a one-off is already common.
When Amazon Prime Video started streaming Premier League games in 2019, one of the surprises it delivered was the option to turn off the commentary team and have “stadium atmosphere” instead. In 2021, children’s TV network Nickelodeon simulcast CBS’s coverage of the Chicago Bears-New Orleans Saints play-off game,
but with added slime and SpongeBob SquarePants. There have been five more NFL games on Nickelodeon since then, with more planned.
Next month, ESPN2 and various Disney Channel options will simulcast a Monsters Inc.-themed version of ESPN’s Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Los Angeles Chargers.
“The big trend is hyper-personalisation,” says Stagg, who now advises companies on their digital and fan engagement strategies. “I call it ‘skinning’ your content because it is similar to how gamers customise characters with skins they have bought or earned.
“A super fan might want a feed with loads of data, heat maps and xG. A more casual fan might want to watch along with their favourite YouTuber.”
For many, it will be more expensive
If there is one thing we can be absolutely sure of, it is that the good stuff will not be getting any cheaper.
But while the super fans will get hit hardest, more casual ones are likely to find they can get all they need without paying much at all, or certainly no more than they already do.
This year, we have already seen DAZN, flush with new Saudi investment,
stream FIFA’s expanded Club World Cup for free, while the BBC has started publishing the same highlights packages it uses in Match of the Day on its website, hours before the flagship TV highlights show runs. The Saudi Pro League has been sharing long highlights packages of its games on YouTube for two seasons.
And if all that is not premium enough for you, DAZN teamed up with TikTok last week to stream
Southend United versus Carlisle United, with 70,000 unique viewers enjoying that clash of the titans free of charge.
“
Pirate fans are valuable fans, too,” he says. “Sport will have to accept the reality of their existence and build in commercial content to monetise them.
“If you think about it, they are examples of fans who care, as they have sought out pirated content. So how do you bring them back into the fold so they contribute? Some leagues have started to put L-shaped advertising around live feeds, making the adverts part of the stolen content, so the pirates’ eyeballs are monetised.
It will look like gaming
Electronic Arts, the company behind some of the most popular video games of the last 40 years, announced something during the NBC broadcast of the recent
Detroit Lions-Philadelphia Eagles slugfest that would have gone over the heads of half of the TV audience.
It said this season’s edition of its
EA Sports Madden NFL Cast, a collaboration with NBC’s streaming platform Peacock and data firm Genius Sports, is moving to primetime on Thanksgiving, when the Baltimore Ravens host the Cincinnati Bengals. It also said the main coverage angle will come from a “hi-sky camera located behind the quarterback, the view most familiar to Madden gamers, rather than television’s traditional sideline camera location”.
This live stream will have its own commentary team, a combo of former players and broadcast veterans, while a former NFL quarterback will use graphic overlays to discuss and predict play options. So, while most of the family will be semi-comatose on the sofa, trying to digest half a turkey, the gamers will be watching and playing the game at the same time.
Smart glasses are the future
Whether these people will be wearing helmets or not might depend on where they live.
It feels like people have been saying that virtual-reality headsets will be this year’s must-have Christmas present for 30 years. Santa has not delivered one yet.
“One in 10 households in the U.S. have a headset and they are very popular with gamers.”
Some of these headsets are made by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and you can use them to watch NBA games from a virtual “courtside” seat.
Hutton admits this is still a niche market, but there is real growth in smart glasses and AR (augmented reality) specs, as “they give you added info without having to look at a second screen”.
… but the old ways won’t die completely
Two Circles’ view on these things is similar to mine.
“We don’t believe there will be any major platform shifts in the next decade that see mass adoption,” says Balch. “Even optimistic predictions on how VR and AR are being used in 10 years shouldn’t see a displacement of the continued growth of mobile and TV consumption.”
Like the other experts consulted here, Balch thinks the real innovation “will be in personalisation of broadcast feeds to more closely align with what audiences get on social media and better production of vertical video” (video shot in portrait mode, i.e., the way kids do it because that’s how TikTok, Insta Reels and YouTube Shorts want it).
But Balch also believes in something that cheers me up no end.
“We’re confident that live sports consumption will retain its value and position in the next decade,” he says. “Gen Z spends more time consuming sport than older groups, but much less watching TV or streaming. This will recalibrate, though. Data from the last decade and beyond has shown that younger audiences do grow into live consumption habits.”
“Watching live sport is still a communal experience and, if you can’t be in the stadium, the next best place is with friends or family,” he says. “I suspect in 20 years’ time, when nobody is watching linear TV, the last thing we will all watch together on a flat screen, live, will be sport in the pub.”
Discussion topics
ESPN
The Vikings will have a new starting quarterback in 2026
It’s hard to imagine McCarthy not getting a chance to finish out this season as the Vikings’ starter. The damage to their playoff hopes is done, and their only other QB option right now is undrafted rookie
Max Brosmer, who could be even more raw than McCarthy is. McCarthy clearly needs experience, and he’s not going to get it on the bench. He’s probably their guy for the remainder of the 2025 season unless he gets hurt again. But 2026 could be a different story.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
If nothing else, the Vikings will want to bring in a veteran quarterback to add to their young QB room. Think about
what the Colts did this offseason, signing Daniel Jones (who, ironically, finished last season with the Vikings) to compete with Anthony Richardson Sr. for the starting job. Jones
beat out Richardson, and the Colts are a first-place team.
Bringing in a veteran doesn’t guarantee a similar result, and it’s possible that McCarthy could make enough advancements this offseason that he would win a competition against an outside veteran. But unless the final six games of this season look a heck of a lot different from the first six games McCarthy has started, Minnesota is going to have to look at every potential option going into 2026. The Vikings can’t throw another season away while waiting for things to click for their 2024 first-round pick.
aBit o’Twitter
We have opened the 21-day practice window for WR Noah Brown
pic.twitter.com/YSZ6rn1COT
— Washington Commanders (@Commanders)
November 24, 2025
He also just said Kam Curl might be the best tackling safety in the game right now….
#RaiseHail tho
https://t.co/IAMirxjXyg pic.twitter.com/9BnJiaRwaR
— Cory (@Cgass_21)
November 24, 2025
JOIN US!
@trapordive x @deangelo_ent_ present
THE CRIB: COMMANDERS RALLY
We’re turning up for Black Friday before Sunday Night Football as the Commanders take on the Broncos!
Hosted by the Lady Commander Fans
Black Friday Warm-Up for HBCU Night
Pull up this Friday,…
pic.twitter.com/ERZCLZzeT9
— Saint (@SaintWah)
November 24, 2025
call!
(@karl_diesel) 
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