Tashan Reed returning to Washington Post Commanders beat

Five months after the Washington Post erased its own sports section, one of the beat writers left in the wreckage is coming back.

Tashan Reed announced on X on Monday that he’ll rejoin the Post next week to resume covering the Commanders.

“This has been a challenging year professionally, but I’m excited to have the opportunity to keep doing what I love,” Reed wrote. “It’s time to get to work.”

Starting next week, I’ll be back @washingtonpost covering the Commanders. This has been a challenging year professionally, but I’m excited to have the opportunity to keep doing what I love. It’s time to get to work.

— Tashan Reed (@tashanreed) July 20, 2026

Reed had barely settled into the beat when the layoffs hit. He joined the Post in September 2025 after seven years at The Athletic, where he spent five of them covering the Raiders and created Between the Lines, a five-part narrative podcast on the NFL’s history with race. He came in decorated, too, having won the Pro Football Writers Association’s Terez A. Paylor Emerging Writer Award in 2023.

None of that mattered on Feb. 4, when the Post laid off roughly a third of its workforce and took the unusual step of gutting its sports section almost entirely. Reed went down with it, alongside Commanders colleague Tom Schad, NFL writer Mark Maske, columnist Candace Buckner, and a long list of Nationals, Capitals, and college sports staffers. A handful of reporters were reassigned to write about sports only when it intersected with politics or culture. Everyone else, Reed included, was simply let go.

What happened next said as much about the industry’s relationship with these reporters as the layoffs themselves did. Commanders coach Dan Quinn left three chairs empty in the front row of his next press conference, the seats normally occupied by Reed, Schad, and Barry Svrluga, and told the room their absence was “missed.” Nationals president Paul Toboni volunteered similar praise for the paper’s departed beat writers without being asked. Capitals coach Spencer Carbery did the same for Bailey Johnson that same week, calling her excellent at her job and predicting whoever hired her next would be lucky to have her.

As it turns out, “whoever” was the Post all along. The paper spent the weeks since quietly reaching back out to some of the staffers it cut, and Johnson was among the first to accept, returning to the Capitals beat not two months after Carbery’s comments. Danielle Allentuck was brought in separately to cover the Nationals beat that had sat empty since February. Reed is the latest name on that list, and the first of the three reporters Quinn honored with those empty chairs to get his old beat back.

Schad and Svrluga didn’t wait around to see if the Post would call. Svrluga joined The Athletic as a Commanders reporter/columnist within weeks of the layoffs, and Schad landed at ESPN on its investigative and enterprise team the following month. Reed’s path back to the Post, by contrast, took five months and a decision on his part to return to the beat rather than build somewhere new. He’ll have a few weeks to settle in before training camp, ahead of a season where Washington is looking to rebound from a 5-12 finish in 2025, with Jayden Daniels entering his third year at quarterback.