Five months after the Commanders made him the highest-paid offensive lineman in football, Laremy Tunsil is looking at surgery and a season on the shelf. Washington signed him to a 2-year, $60.2 million extension this offseason, the first deal to ever average $30 million a year for an O-lineman, and now the guy protecting Jayden Daniels' blindside might not play a single meaningful snap of it.
The injury happened in a 1-on-1 pass-rush drill at practice, the kind of rep that happens a thousand times a training camp without incident. Not this time. Adam Schefter followed up almost immediately with the grim framing everyone in Washington was bracing for.
Laremy Tunsil’s regular season now is in jeopardy. The team still is gathering information on the exact injury timeline, but it will be a while.
"In jeopardy" is doing a lot of work there, and it's not hedging for nothing. Triceps injuries are brutal for offensive linemen specifically because the whole job is punching and extending your arms into 280-pound humans trying to run through you. Dr. David Chao, who's been tracking NFL injuries for years, laid out exactly why this one is so bad for a tackle.
Triceps (push off) strength vital to hold pass rushers at bay. Miss most if not all season.
That lines up with the outside reporting: torn triceps recoveries typically run 4 to 7 months, which puts Tunsil's return anywhere from midseason to not at all in 2026. For a guy who's made 5 Pro Bowls and started 125 straight games going back to his Dolphins days, missing extended time is new territory. He was a first-round pick out of Ole Miss in 2016, spent his prime years anchoring Houston's line, and got shipped to Washington in a trade last year that cost the Commanders multiple future picks specifically because they wanted this exact kind of stability up front.
So now Washington has to figure out who protects Daniels without its $30-million left tackle. Schefter's reporting has bounced between two names — Andrew Wylie, who's spent most of his career on the right side, and Brandon Coleman, who actually started 12 games at left tackle as a rookie back in 2024 before getting bumped to guard when Tunsil arrived.
Andrew Wylie is an option to be the Commanders’ left tackle. But Brandon Coleman was Washington’s left tackle in 2024, and he also could be moved back.
Either way, it's a shuffle nobody wanted heading into a season where Washington is trying to build on last year's playoff run behind Daniels. Losing your blindside protector to a freak practice injury before Week 1 is about as bad a break as it gets, and until Tunsil's actual timeline firms up, the Commanders are stuck bracing for the worst while auditioning replacements they didn't plan on needing this early.