K’Lavon Chaisson hasn’t just been active for the Commanders - he’s been directly changing possessions.
Over the last two games, the Washington edge rusher has done something he had never done before in his career. He strip-sacked Jameis Winston against the Giants, then eight days later punched the ball loose from Christian McCaffrey on Monday Night Football.
Both plays ended the same way: with Washington taking the football away. Tim Settle recovered the first fumble, and Frankie Luvu handled the second.
That two-game stretch pulled Chaisson level with his career-high in forced fumbles, which he set last season with New England. It also put him in the middle of a strange Washington statistic.
In just those two games, Chaisson helped generate as many fumble recoveries as the Commanders had managed over the entire 2025 season. Washington forced 11 fumbles in 2025 but came up with only two recoveries, a number that lines up with the staff’s repeated emphasis on turnovers during the offseason program.
The production is exactly the kind of impact Washington had in mind when it signed Chaisson in March. The Commanders wanted a disruptor on the defensive front, and through six games he has given them one: 2.5 sacks and two forced fumbles, with 11 regular-season games still to go.
Dan Quinn had already pointed out Chaisson after the Cowboys game, when the edge rusher was trying to jar the ball free while bringing down Dak Prescott. “So, we gotta continue to wreak havoc, cause disruption,” Quinn said at the time. A few weeks later, those attempts are becoming actual takeaways.
The bigger issue for Washington is whether that kind of disruption can spread across the entire defense after the bye. For now, Chaisson’s individual surge has not erased the unit’s other problems, and the question remains how much any of it will matter in the win column.
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