The center conversation was always going to come up when Adam Peters and Dan Quinn sat down with reporters on Monday, and Peters didn’t waste much time getting to the heart of it.
Washington held its press conference at 4 p.m. ET to open the regular season after training camp wrapped up, the preseason games were finished, and the roster had been trimmed to 53 players. Quinn and Peters took questions from the local media, and the first topic was the state of the offensive line.
“Are there any concerns about the interior?” Peters immediately joked that he was “not prepared and had no idea that question was coming.” He then pointed to the work the team had already had to manage without Nick Allegretti for much of camp.
“Not having Nick (Allegretti) for most of camp was something we had to work through, but we have a ton of confidence in him. He has played, I think, 3,000 snaps in this league, and he's played good football for us before.
He went through the offseason. He is not a guy that needs a ton of reps, especially from a mental standpoint.”
Peters also made clear that the team feels good about rookie backup center Matt Gulbin.
“That’s why we drafted him. He’s really passed all of those tests that we thought he would. We see a really bright future in him.”
He also brought up Julian Good-Jones, who has been added back to the practice squad after logging plenty of work during the offseason and preseason.
“And we’ve brought Julian (Good-Jones) back on the practice squad who played a lot of snaps for us throughout the offseason and preseason too. We like that group, and if there’s somebody else that we feel would add to it, we’re not afraid to do that.”
The follow-up question from Nicki Jhabvala of The Athletic went straight to the future, asking how the Commanders planned to determine their center for the 2026 season. Peters said he felt he had already addressed that in the offseason.
“Yeah, I mean that’s something we’ve already covered a little bit, I think in terms of, I don’t wanna go back and talk about Tyler [Biadasz] and all that, but certainly, we feel very confident in Nick and we have and that’s where we went into this offseason, feeling that Nick could be our starter and still do feel that way. And who we went for and who we did or didn’t get, I don’t think we wanna get into rewriting history or talking about six months ago, but we were able to get a lot of really good players in free agency."
That answer pointed back to Washington’s February decision to release Tyler Biadasz, who had started at center for the past two seasons. It was a move that caught plenty of people off guard at the time, and Peters may not want to revisit it, but the results of that call are still something the Commanders will be judged on.
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