Grant and Danny
Does Kingsbury Expect Jayden Daniels To Run As Much?
Cliff Kingsbury met with reporters, discussed Jayden Daniels debut. That's a debut that netted him the Rookie of the Week award in the national football. He's the first of 17 Rookie of the Week award winners for week one with the 88 rushing yards and the two rushing touchdowns. But we hadn't yet gotten into Kingsbury on the number of rushing attempts. I want to do that here. He was talking on cut seven, Darris, about Jayden Daniels running the ball 16 times. This was Kingsbury with reporters today. There's a couple calls, you know, where we thought we had premier looks that ended up hitting inside that you'd like to have back. You know, if he walks in, then it looks really good. But a lot of those, he did a great job. I'm not sure how many I actually got contacted and taken to the ground on, but he does a great job of finding the saw spot, finding out a bounds. But we understand like he has to take care of himself and we want him to continue to grow and you can't do that if you're banged up and on the sideline. So my translation there from Kingsbury is 16 attempts is not too many. That wasn't the problem. The problem is, are you taking hits? Are you in harm's way? And his point is he mostly wasn't. He did a good job avoiding contact or getting to the sideline. He said there were a couple he wants back, which include the goal one runs at the end, I think when he got walloped a couple of times, maybe one of those powers. If I had to guess where they thought they had looks defensively where they were going to catch him with that draw was basically like direct snap. They pull a guard. They get him going with power, a draw look and they played it really well and they stuffed him at the line of scrimmage. He probably thought he'd fly through there into space and be able to fall forward. They found some sort of design flaw. They'd be able to get something big, but you and I went back through the 16 runs before the show today. One of them is considered a run on that pass on the first play of the game for minus 15 yards because it was backwards. It was a fumble. So it's a rush attempt. Another was the kneel down before the half. So really now we're down to 14 runs of which seven were true scrambles and seven in quotes were designs when you count the read option that he could have kept or could have handed off, which I don't know if that makes you feel a lot better, but still 14 instead of 16 is a truer way to talk about it. And then there were only seven designed runs, so to speak, but he did not seem regretful of how many runs there were. I didn't think I didn't either. It's the, it's one of those things where I think of a basketball coach, right? Like you got a really good player, a guy that can really score. And if he makes the shot, even if it's a difficult one for everybody else, you go like, we got to live with that. Like he's got to shoot it versus if he misses it, yeah, when he better shots than that, like it's an after the fact coaching point. I'm not criticizing him. I'm just saying this is human nature, right, where it's a good shot if it goes in. It's a bad shot if it does. You agree with my logic, which I think is kind of what you were just alluding to, which I've been saying since you drafted him, which is you drafted Jaden Daniels. Don't be surprised when he shows up. Jaden Daniels is coming to DC. That's a good thing, by the way. Not a bad thing, but he's going to run. If you don't want this guy to run, if someone's going, man, he ran a lot, you shouldn't have drafted him. If you're bothered by that, he should run. It's what he does brilliantly. It's what he does amazingly well. It is his elite trait. You know, if you're a hitter in Major League Baseball and the thing you do really, really well, is hit home runs and you're trying to bunt all the time, that's a poor use of your skills. For me in radio or you in radio or stand up comedy, if you go away from the, your best bullet on the stage is probably impressions in Barkley. If you never use those, that would be silly. You don't go do a set or bring Danny Ruya in and tell him, hey, don't do any impressions tonight. Right. Why have him? That's happened before, by the way. But seriously, yeah, it's, it's a thing I'll tell you about it during the break. But the, the, the point is obvious. I mean, to me, like you're the, the, the player that's here, you're trying to work the faders. Fader number one is, you know, uh, making plays when nothing is there. Fader number two is just straight up runs. Fader number three is the passing game intermediate, short passing game. You're trying to work all these faders to get the biggest total number, trying to get the best balance, the best, everything. So fader number one for week number one was when all hell breaks loose run, design runs also. So it's like a third of the offense, basically, was Jay Daniels running in terms of number of plays around and executed. And I think we'd all probably agree that's, that maybe a bit much that's probably not sustainable, just in terms of the number of hits and impacts and, you know, you need something else. You can't just ask, ask the rookie quarterback in this first month of football to be the hero on every single play every time. But that's the struggle, that's, that's the balance we're trying to find, right? And that's why there's no one core singular set of, it's not a recipe, right? If it was, you didn't follow it, you'd go, this guy's not following the recipe, fire him. There's no tried and true way to do this. The best way to develop a passer with it for a kid that's got this unbelievable skill set also, right? I mean, most of the time, if you throw the ball at Jay Daniels, you are a first round traffic and, you know, we'll see what happens, mate. You know, you're patting the ball in the pocket and you're doing this hitch and this read and this thing and this, whatever. Well, you had in the fact that this guy ran for a thousand yards and double digit touchdowns and could do something that only a handful of people ever to play the game can do. That's a tough balance to figure out what's best. You know, I've disagreed about that and I think that's reasonable. But for, I, there's a process part of this that I feel like this coaching staff is sort of glossing over like Dan Quins. Again, as helmet falls off sometimes and yeah, we'll teach them to decide, we've got a national out there. They don't have the right level of concern for me. Maybe that's my, my issue because I live through what we all live through here as fans of teams in this town. But to me, there needs to be a little bit more process concern. You might get hurt in the pocket and make it hurt somewhere else. But there needs to be more of a, we're going to do the best practice, not just sort of joke about it and say, oh, shucks, he's a dog, I can't have that.