Grant and Danny

Washington Loses 37-20, What'd We Make Of Jayden Daniels Debut?, Game Balls & Gassers

9.9.24 Hour 1

1:00- It's a Misery Monday here on the fan as the Commanders dropped week 1 to Tampa.

20:15- We got into Jayden Daniels debut as he made his first NFL start, what did we make of it?

33:15- We give game balls to the best performances, and gassers to the worst.

Broadcast on:: 09 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. What's up and welcome and it is a misery Monday on Grant and Danny. We are keeping you company and taking you all the way up to six thirty today on the fan. On Mondays after commanders game all season long, Jay Gruden is going to join us. Jay will be on the show throughout the season at five o'clock. He's actually going to be with us today at six though, for this one time only because Tony Gonzalez, the pro football Hall of Famer who you see on Amazon Prime's telecasts on Thursday nights, is going to join us at five o'clock to go around the NFL and to break down the commanders. Jay Gruden at six. The local 53 is 0 and 1. They were trounced in what was a very disappointing debut for the Dan Quinn regime. And Danny, while I found the game to be dispiriting and I was trying to think of the perfect word. Like what was yesterday dejecting maybe dispiriting. I mean, any of those, I think people were excited to see if even though the expectation is this team's not going to be that good, maybe I'll be surprised. Maybe this coaching staff will wave a wand over some holdovers and make them better automatically. They got a lot of work to do. Dan Quinn said all off season. They've got to find north. They need to get a compass and they got to get started. It's going to take some work. Everyone should be freaking out. I'm going to say that again. Everyone should be freaking out. Not because, oh, no, they lost the game and may not be that good this year. Jayden Daniels will not get through the season doing this crap and I'll blame the kid. I mean, he's just trying to make some plays. You cannot have this wrong. Copy them. Immediately. Get this. Now we're joking about helmets coming off. It's never been a problem for me. No sliding anywhere. Sixteen carries more than half of their offense deep into the third quarter. Was his scrambling wrong under talented on offense? Not a particularly good plan from Kingsbury and company. Oh my God. Forget about a whole season. We'll be lucky to get half a season if that trend line continues with the amount of shots that he's taken in the secondary and running for his life, et cetera, there's got to be a better design and needs to start right now. I was a little bit surprised, honestly, that that was not more of the story after the game. Both last night and so far today from what I've heard, to be honest, just how unsustainable sixteen carries is. Heck, Lamar Jackson ran the ball sixteen times in week one for the Ravens. Now he isn't able to practice today for the record. He's not on the practice field as he took some shots as well, but that was the national narrative after that game was Lamar's not going to be able to live that way and you can't have him run sixteen times and get through a season. I remember in 2012 with Robert Griffin in his debut year, Danny, when I was on the beat and in September, the entire discussion, when I would come on with you and Danny, and at the time it was LeVar and Dukes, they kept saying, like, really, is this what Kyle and Mike Shanahan are going to do, is have him run it ten, eleven, twelve times, just for context. For the record, Daniels ran it sixteen times yesterday, Robert Griffin never ran it more than thirteen. Yeah. You remember how everyone thought it was so crazy and amazing and reckless and what are they doing and what are they thinking? He never got within three rushing attempts of what Jayden Daniels did yesterday. In fact, if you know, it's not going to be this way, he's not going to run it sixteen times every game. It's one game I understand that, but there's such a thing as contextualizing just to make the point. And that's what I'll do here. The record for rushing attempts in a season by a quarterback is LeVar Jackson with 176, Jayden Daniels after one game's on pace for 272. Yeah, it's more than running backs had last year in the enemy system. And I know that's, you know, kind of a dubious honor. But I mean, to me, this, what it looks like is 2012 without the innovation. This is 2012 without the stuff that nobody has seen before. By the way, there's no hidden card trick from the preseason. There's no wait till you see it. We saw it. There's no mystery. Like you guys, he's got all sorts of crazy stuff that's going to come out. Nope. There's no motion. There's no, there's no intriguing design. There's nothing dynamic. This is, you know, sideways passes, you know, and running for your life. It's basically what Colin Murray was doing a couple of years ago, which is go make a play, dude. Let's see what happens. Unsustainable. So I am okay with sideways passes just to pick up there for a second for the record. I've jokingly called Cliff Kingsbury's offense, the horizontal raid. And I think that's what it's going to be. As a passing offense yesterday, the lowest completed average depth of target in the National Football League, and it wasn't particularly close. They had six completions of a total of 17 that were behind the line of scrimmage. I think 10 of them were then four yards or less from the line of scrimmage of their 17 completions yesterday. So that tells you a lot. I think throwing to running backs can be smart, checking the ball down, getting into space. Some of their explosive plays came from throwing it to Echler, throwing it to Robinson. Yeah, I'd love to do that, by the way. I love Austin Echler to have more than, I don't know, one target before garbage time. Again, their, their best offensive play was a, as a third down give up where Echler just made plays. Then they just said, no, that's enough of that Austin goes to down on the sideline. We got to go a two yard trap to a, to Brian Robinson, where he takes on a million, a million hits. Oh man. It was a frustrating day on both sides of the ball. They all phases, cause we could add special teams into the equation. They took a turn tonight. Where their kicker went over to and kicked the ball out of bounds on a kickoff and had a bat on side kick. But other than that, I thought, Kate York was fantastic. Great debut. You take the two field goals and the on side kick that went poorly and the kickoff that went out of the bounds. And you dismissed those. Kate, you might be in the running for special teams player. I bet you got to eat from the post games, Fred. You probably had a nice afternoon. I, I'm not as upset as you are. I can tell already, which isn't to say that I'm not disappointed because I totally am. I thought it was a pretty dreadful debut defensively. I've got really high hopes when you go higher, the defensive minded coach and he and Joe Whit come in here that they're going to make a lot of these guys that were held over better. And they picked a lot of these players knew, I mean, there are 30 new players here. So as much as people are going to want to make this a big Ron Rivera bash fest all season long, and plenty of that is deserving and will happen, don't, don't get it twisted. A lot of these guys are handpicked. I mean, there's 70% of the roster is new. They had an off season with a lot of money, right? And a full draft. And so they're going to have to get production from their guys as we go on. But just, I guess as an aside, what I would say off the top today, you've already come from the top rope. I'm going to take my turn dropping some elbows at times is twofold. Number one, weak ones can be very misleading. The amount of times in this league where you see something in week one and you think you know something and then there's no bigger change in the NFL, in my opinion, from the first week to the second week often. So it's very, very possible. They come out. They whip the Giants and we feel very differently or they just looked a lot different. It's a week to week league. So I'm leaving that open as a possibility. That's first. Nothing is necessarily gospel yet. And I'm not a small sample reactor generally. The second thing I want to say is we're going to break this game down as a single entity. What people like to do sometimes is extrapolate that out into what you guys are saying is you don't believe in this player. You don't believe in this coach. You don't believe. Uh-uh. I'm talking about a football game. 60 minutes of football was played. It's all we got so far and we're going to analyze it from as many perspectives as possible. So if I say this guy had a bad game, it doesn't mean he's a bad player. If I say this guy didn't do this, well, it doesn't mean he never will. But I think those are two important caveats out of the shoot just to make sure to start the season. Everyone gets off on decent footing here. Let's start at the top and work our way down. Okay. Okay. Dan Quinn. My fear when he was hired is that he's Ron Rivera with a backwards hat yesterday from a coaching standpoint didn't feel that different than that. He kicked the field goal on a fourth and three from the 29 with a kicker that nobody trusts. They miss from 47. You should almost never be kicking from in that situation when you've got the best athlete and playmaker on the field with his feet running around like Daniels was because you could see what they thought when, Hey, we need it. We need something shortish yardage. We got it. We got a cheat code and they do. They can run that read option and they're going to get it most of the time to have this score. They're touched now. Fourth and three from the 29 you kick a field. Uh-huh. They were down six. Nothing. They missed next time they got the ball. They were down 13 points on the road. Uh, the extra point over the two point conversion. I didn't have as big a problem with 155 to go in the third quarter, but just the math didn't math. It didn't really make sense. If you don't get it. It's a 10 point game. Still very much in play. If you do get it, it's a one possession game. You're right there and they decided to kick the extra point there and keep it a two possession game. Not sure how you could have watched what was happening and felt like that was the best idea. So I'm even more extreme on that one. I'm never as bothered as some of the analytics folks on this. It's one of my weird, I don't say anti analytics takes, but I think too much happens in the league where I'm going. It was the third quarter too. Right. I'm going. If I've, the only time I would go for two mathematically is when I had to. Like in other words, I mathematically, I will not get enough possessions to come back and tie this game. In general, I default to taking the points. That one I don't hate as much, but totally understand the argument against my view. Don't understand why they didn't call a timeout at the end of the first half. This one I can't get on board with. Yeah. Save some time. Please go get points. Sometimes the best way to get your passing game in rhythm and get your quarterback going is that end of half hurry up where they give you the middle of the field because they're protecting the sidelines. You can make some easy throws and for chunks, even if you don't get anything out of it, it's worth doing. Exactly. Right. But, but I think oftentimes teams do at least get completions out of it, even if you can't get down with spikes and kick a field goal. And they just decided to not call timeout and then take a knee and go to the half didn't really get that. One other coaching issue, they call the timeout at the very start out of halftime. Of the next drive when they were trailing in a game on the road, the misuse of clock management to the point where you're burning those timeouts irrelevant yesterday, I would say Danny, but just big picture, not a great sign. And maybe it's as simple as if you talked to Dan Quinn, Hey, I got a rookie quarterback. We were trying to sort some things out. He couldn't quite get it said at the, you know, the time that was needed. But those types of things you don't see when you watch the real good teams like last night Detroit and the Rams, that kind of crap's not happening. Yeah, that's, that to me is so unacceptable. If it's a, if it's a fourth in one, I guess I can get behind that. It's still like my ducks in a row. It's a third in 10 where it wasn't some genius play call out of the, out of the timeout. It was a, this one's busted. He ran out of the sideline and they got lucky, they got bailed out by defensive holding. They'd go on to score on that drive. So people are going to say, well, I didn't end up working out. It didn't. They were beyond fortunate. That is a waste of a timeout in a game that at that point, by the way, was still pretty close. It was, you know, I think it was a nine point game at, at that juncture. But I, I could be wrong, but the point is it was still not out of reach. You cannot squat those second half timeouts, especially are so unbelievably precious. Right? Like, and it wasn't like the play clock was running down either. It was like, yeah, this isn't going to work, whatever. You can't have that. This is the NFL. Another thing on Dan Quinn, before we move on, I haven't heard anybody talk about this yet necessarily, but all I've thought about as it pertains to coaching decisions from this game really is at the very end of the game. They were down 37 to 14. So that is quick math here, 23 points. There's two minutes left. They're doing that two minute drill. Number one, I was a little surprised Jayden Daniels was even still in the game, but okay, no problem. Let's go on. Like I said earlier, what you should have done at the end of the half, a two minute drive. Let's get some confidence. He went five of five 55 yards against the, you know, shot off the fence, like whatever. He falls into the end zone for that one yard touchdown, but he took multiple shots on goal line runs, like between the tackles down at the goal line down by almost 20 points. Why? Why is that happening? Oh, sorry. More than 20 points, almost 25 points. Why was he like slamming the football into the line of scrimmage for his 15th and 16th carries of the day, taking shots against the goal line defensive front, trying to make a stop in front of the end zone. That's Brian Robinson territory, Austin Echler territory. I hated that they were even allowing that to be a possibility at that point of the game. Yeah. If you're in a close game next week against the Giants and need one to win the game in the fourth quarter, dial it up. Different story. I'm with you. Yeah. You were down 37 to 14 with a minute and a half to play. And he is lowering his shoulder, trying to push the pile, getting slammed by 300 pound defensive tackles in week one of an 18 week marathon. Yeah. And again, that's all 206 pounds. Yeah. Again, the game that's over. Yeah. It's, uh, that was, that was peculiar to me. Again, it's one of those where we're, remember Ron Rivera, one of those times and it's hard to not to compare that to, I apologize, but there was, uh, they were getting the doors blown off by somebody. It made was the Baltimore game during his first year, whatever it was. And they kicked a field goal to avoid the shut out. Like, I just don't do that kind of crap. Like you wanted the scoreboard to look a little bit better or like try to pretend for some positive reinforcement for the kid or make a stat line look, uh, you know, more interesting with, with a second touchdown. It's just not for me. All right. So that'll be enough on Daniels from a coordinating standpoint. Well, we, we talked about the defense being just utterly outplayed Baker Mayfield looked like Baker Manning, uh, I think 13 completions on 14 attempts to wide receivers Godwin and Mike Evans, the manual Forbes got benched and hurt or both or, or I don't know which order it was, but he had two 15 yard penalties on one play, which I've never seen where he interfered by grabbing a face mask to save a touchdown when he was beat Benjamin St. Tuesday actually had really good coverage on one touchdown. He gave up and gave up two touchdowns to Evan almost had a pick on a really nice play. He did. He made a nice play there, but just overall, I thought in the secondary communication issues as if we hadn't heard that before, like if I, if I hear community, oh, it's just communication again, I'll, I'll just start driving and won't stop until I get to the sun. Like doesn't matter who the coach is, doesn't matter who the position, uh, coaches as has a matter of defensive coordinator is it was the same with Josh Norman. It was the same before him when guys are wide open or just jogging in the secondary, uh, for huge gains, touchdowns, et cetera. Oh, it's just communication. We'll communicate then, then just communicate to each other if it's that simple. I bet you it's not though. I bet you have terrible personnel and no scheme is going to cover. You could say whatever you want to. You can't keep up with good receivers and manual Forbes stinks. So talk all you want to each other. You can let each other know whose fault that one was when the big game happens where third and 10 is like first and one. It's too easy. I think that's what the communicating is by the way is, Hey, who screwed that one up? You did, right? No. That was me. That was me, dude. The community. It's just communication. Oh, respectfully kiss all of my butt with that the same song and dance there. Uh, and then on the offensive side of the ball for talking coordinators, you mentioned this, you know, this idea that maybe they were keeping a secret. That was what I was holding out for. Yeah. Was preseason. You see one thing and then week one is going to be something else because that's the last time they had the number two pick Heisman Trophy winner, dual threat, new toy. They kind of designed this whole thing around him. That was certainly not the case. Kingsbury's plan or the offense, whether it was his plan or not, basically in the first half was a Jaden go make a play. I don't know if Kingsbury liked that or didn't. They didn't design any runs for him in the first half yet he broke the record for rushing yards by a quarterback in the first half for a Washington QB, just all on pure scrambles, but that was their entire offense, essentially, and we'll get into Jaden Daniel's performance and more detail coming up in just a few minutes here, but from a cliff Kingsbury standpoint, the stuff that I hated about his offense in Arizona for at least one week packed in his luggage and came to Washington and he brought it with him to the nation's capital. Very little motion. You look at what the Rams and so many other really good teams do. Cooper Cup last night caught 12 balls on motion, 42 snaps, 12 catches on motion, 30 of 42 snaps for him. He was put in motion. Terry McCorma's in motion once or twice. He was lined up in the same spot in the formation, essentially every single play, which just sound the alarm and tell the defense where the only good receiver is going to be pleased. Yeah, there he's going to stop. Never really stacked him up, never really got him free releases like all the stuff I worried about. Again, it's one game and we'll see if it changes. But four year sample in Arizona said this is how he's going to do it and he did it that way in the first game. Yeah. And now listen, there's there's there's no like, I don't think there's any sort of like white knight coming in later either. I don't think there's any kind of rescue plan. No, Brown. I mean, well, I suppose I guess he's an active. Maybe it was going to be Byron Pringle, but they cut up so we'll never know. But you know, it's a couple gimmicks here and there. I think I think it was Aaron shots who said Zach Kurtz is a catch and fall guy. What did you see Zach Kurtz do three times caught it and fell? Not a lot of separation. It's tough and traffic. It's useful. He can help, but not that much. There's no way to make teams pay. You know, there's no yards after the catch that that to me is the hallmark if my offense is good, not every play because it can't always happen, but guys catch it and they're able to run and you and that's how deep that's like how you get some of your big plays. If you're not going to be able to block it up, have a double move, go and connect 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 yards down the field, you need some of that dynamic stuff. There's nothing there. That to me is an OC epidemic or a kind of a symptom when there's not much that puts the defense in jeopardy yesterday, didn't go the way anybody was open. There was this glimmer. Clary made a point in our pre-show meeting today is a guy, this little voice in my head telling me maybe they were going to be really good. I think we all have that voice and as you get older and you're around this team longer, that voice dies out more and more and more. But if you're a young person, maybe that voice was pretty loud going into the game. I used to have a voice. I'm 37 to 14 with Minna 15 to play yesterday before the touchdown late. Let's get into Jaden Daniels next. Again, it's not all bad. We've got some things that were encouraging as well in this first game. It is the beginning of a rebuild. They don't want to call it that. They're calling it a rebrand, retooling, finding North recalibrate is the word they use. Well, the calibration was not correct quite yesterday. That's for sure. I'm going to call it a rebuild. They can call it whatever they'd like. This is officially a rebuild after yesterday's performance. You're listening to Grant and Danny on the Fan. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance, too, with the name of your price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. 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It's your girl, Tasha McKeea, and I need you to join the sharpest rides for their fall into savings event, where they're offering incredible prices on their massive inventory. That's right, everything is on sale now. Shop from sleek sedans to rugged SUVs and sporty convertibles. The sharpest rides has the perfect ride to match your fall adventures, plus with their exclusive financing options, getting behind the wheel of your dream car has never been easier. Log on and shop online at the sharpestrides.com right from the palm of your hands. Or check other massive inventory in person at the sharpest rides, located 2250 South Sea Home Street in Inglewood. Either way, you will fall into savings. Don't miss out. Head on over to the sharpestrides.com today and explore the deals that make every season better. And tell them that your girl, Tasha McKeea sent you the sharpest rides, affordable, sexy, sharp. Man, a lot of lessons to take away tonight. And I wanted this one badly for the players, and that's why it stings, you know, certainly a story tonight of missed opportunities. And I think third down, if I had to look back on it right now, that was the biggest and certainly the story of the game. So a lot to work on and Tampa was a better team today. You need the struggle to see the identity develop. You don't want it, but you do need it. And that part, you know, is is hard and that struggle happened tonight. So we'll take these lessons and we'll work on Dan Quinn post game after a 37 to 20 loss in his commander's debut. Welcome back, Grant and Danny on the fan. He mentioned the third down woes defensively, Washington allowed nine of 13 conversions to Tampa Bay on third down, including a third and 17 offensively. They were just two of eight moving the football for a first down on third down. And those two were Jayden Daniel scrambling and picking up enough to move the chains. But when you can't throw the ball, you're not going to have a lot of success generally on third down and they couldn't for the vast majority of yesterday. So why don't we, with that in mind, get to Jayden Daniels? You go first, there's some exciting things, right? They don't make guys that are that athletic very often who are that big and tall. The color Murray can run around that way and he's five seven, you know, the more Jackson and he's a couple inches shorter and slider, even not slider, but you know, not as big and tall as Daniel doesn't have that rock and arm that Daniels has. So you still see some of the signs, some of the same things. But man, was that hard to come out with a great taste in your mouth after that week number one? Again, he's making something out of nothing a few times. I don't know how many nothings there were that he turned into some things. In other words, I don't know if someone's running free and he just missed him. I think we'll find out as more and more data comes out. I've got some early thoughts on that, but I don't know. It's kind of too early to be definitive. But pretty discouraging, honestly, week one performance in terms of this offense, his fit, what they're going to get out of him and him throwing the ball. So I think people are mostly a lot more positive than that. And I would say generally wouldn't have come away having watched that game being discouraged necessarily. I think the average fan, at least the people I've been talking to liked what they saw in that you've got the best athlete on the field in this Lamar Jackson, Esquay. I know people don't like this comp at all. I'm not telling you this is what Jaden Daniels is going to become. So please save your defensiveness and your anger. But in the way that Justin Fields is an elite rusher as a quarterback and is a game changer when he pulls the ball down and takes off. And so you have to defend Chicago and now Pittsburgh 11 on 11 and he's the ultimate pain in the butt. That's what yesterday was. They were not a fun team to have to defend because Jaden Daniels can run. And in fact, if you take away a couple of the times where he just needed a yard or two, they went naked on a designed run on a fourth and one, which I loved by the way. That was a great, great call. It was greatly executed by JD to get to the sideline, but you take that one away. The read option one yard touchdown, the other one yard touchdown run, you know, the one where he didn't get in. So like four of those, basically it was 12 for 88 yards. I mean, he was explosive. He made some big time plays with his feet. He ran for two touchdowns. He became the second quarterback in the history of the league to rush for two touchdowns in his first game. But he was the entire offense and frankly, his feet were the entire offense. I mentioned it earlier. It just kind of felt like a cliff. What are we doing here? Uh, Jaden, go make a play. Like if you've looked at his little I hop menu, he's calling plays with instead of all the pages and the lines and the things you normally see for Andy Reed, it just said like Jaden's feet and that was kind of their entire offense. Now, was that Cliff Kingsbury's problem? Was that Daniels isn't letting things, you know, develop, we'll find out over time. But the rushing ability gives him a high floor. And this was kind of my point all off season. It's not going to be a disaster for him. It's never going to look terrible because the worst case scenario is he is a game where you don't throw the ball at all effectively. You don't involve wide receivers and he runs all over the place, AKA yesterday. And most people aren't coming out of that game watching it, even though your 30th in the league and completed area yards and 29th in area yards to sticks and 29th in expected completion percentage, nobody's really going, well, that was bad because it doesn't look bad because you're making plays with your feet. So he's better than Caleb Williams yesterday. He's better than Bonix. Yeah. He was the best of the rookie quarterbacks because the great buoy is those legs. They're going to allow him to make a ton of plays. So just looking at a couple of numbers, you mentioned some and trying to take a deep dive into things because, you know, it's always, you're trying to quantify what we just saw because if you're, you know, you take your bias out of it, you know, it wasn't particularly good. They weren't effective on offense. Full stop. That was it. Again, the stuff that they were able to accumulate on a driver to here and there was nice and then the garbage time touched and that didn't really matter. But no Washington receiver, that's anybody that's running back, tight end, wide out was in the top 60 this weekend and expected yards after the catch. What does that mean? A guy's open. He's got the ball and he's got room to run. Think of the catch and runs of Jamison Williams and Dallas Goddard, Jayden Reed and Jalen Waddle, Tyree Kill, offenses that are getting guys open. They catch the ball and they got running room. That's, they were no Washington receiver in the top 60 of all the guys that got past yesterday. Nobody in the top 60 in separation scores, meaning guys aren't open. So either we got to have a referendum, the Terram McCorran stinks and isn't really any good or you wonder if something else maybe is a mess. I mean, that was a big complete last year with Eric B. Enemy, right? Where you had really small offensive minds going, I'm not sure what the concept is here. I'm not sure what we're going for here. I'm not sure what the reasoning is or why you call that route combination or this doesn't fit with that. There's some of that going on here as well, but again, Daniels needs to have some, some culpability and it's a rookie and his first start, you already mentioned it's game one. Yeah, a lot of bad passing around the league yesterday, not just rookies, either. A lot of good quarterbacks with Celts on the wall were awful yesterday or over the course of this weekend. So in that regard, I'm not putting, you know, make any referendum just yet, but it just did a point. So now this is part of why I read at the start of the show today I said, we're going to talk about this game. If you want to make this into some big referendum or endorsement every time we talk about someone on a season long basis or for their career, you're doing it wrong, right? We're talking about a game. That's what they've played so far. But in this one game, it was him scrambling or nothing was really doing that they could not throw the ball at one point in the middle of the fourth quarter. He had run the ball more than they had completed passes. And I'm not talking about like downfield or two wide receivers. I mean, period with all the checkdowns and all the stuff they were doing to running backs. He had more rushing attempts in the fourth quarter at one point than he had completed passes. And in fact, the final drive against a basically a preventative defense, he went five of five for fifty five yards when they were down almost twenty five points. Before that, like in the competitive portion of the game, if you want to call it that, it was twelve of nineteen for a buck thirty four as of two minutes left in the game. So those are realistically more than numbers than the five for five for the fifty five that got added on that final drive. But the wide receivers were utterly uninvolved as you just pointed out. Fifty five of their one hundred eighty four yards passing were two wide receivers. Think about that. Yeah. Fifty five of one eighty four. And that's even misleading because only nineteen yards had gone to wide receivers before the final garbage time drive, nineteen all game long. The famous Terry McClellan quote to run back was, I was doing cardio and so was everybody else. You know, Diami Brown had this big hour long YouTube thing that he put out on Friday night. He did not catch a single pass. So the transition from his big camp in preseason that we've heard so much about so far, a lot of football ahead of us, but oh, for one on the stat sheet. Alameda is the key has caught his first pass in the fourth quarter on a fifteen yard out, the longest throw completed by Jaden Daniels in the game by far. And it was again against a, you know, just a defense that said you can have that if you want it. No problem. We don't care anymore. I just hope we get to a point though where he does the thing that he does so well to set up, throw in the football. Here's what I mean. He was pressured twelve times. It wasn't a bad day. I didn't think from a pass rush standpoint against Jaden Daniels, but he was pressured twelve times. He did a really good job avoiding the pressure, didn't turn a lot of those into sacks. I thought that was really encouraging, but he only completed one pass on, on those twelve plays. He only threw it four times. He mostly immediately just pulled the ball down and ran and going back and watching every single throw from the all twenty two already today on every single scramble on a third of those, at least there's opportunities to reset at the sticks and now you've got a guy that's open. And to me, that is going to be the Kryptonite for defenses. That's where he's going to be unbelievable is when he can get out of the pocket, use that speed, now reset and your quarterback throwing the football. Those are those back breaking place that not, not talking about the guys with that level of athleticism, but that's what Rogers did to teams, what my homes does to teams, what, you know, I think Caleb Williams is going to be able to do and Colin Murray at times. By the way, he was awful yesterday. Certainly was. Again, with all the weaponry in the world. So Daniel's like a Hall of Famer compare. So if I'm in Chicago, I'm going, Oh my God, we didn't score an offensive touchdown. We won and that's awesome because we blocked the punt and had the worst pick six in the history of mankind from Will Hartding, but the rest of it was so nubs, I'd be panicking over there. Good Will Hartding. The movie where based in Boston, I think, just writing equations on the board and throwing bad picks. But when you say you're discouraged, I'm not necessarily, it's, it's kind of exactly what I anticipated early in the year, at least where him running the football is just way ahead of the other stuff. Yes, as a passer, maybe you could be discouraged, but I would just say in the passing game, right? Not him. Like I'm not going to sit here and say, Daniels is a dot of 1.5 on completions was lowest in the NFL, but as a passing game, one and a half yards depth of target for completions was worse than football. As a passing game, 86% of their yards came from yak, highest in the league, meaning just checking the ball down and hoping Austin ever made a play. B Rob runs at 25% adjusted completion on passes 10 plus area yards downfield. That's last among 30 quarterbacks, 30 QBs played so far in week one, 30. Only three didn't complete a single pass to the middle of the field beyond 10 yards. This was one of the big knocks on Daniels coming out. He's one of the three that didn't. So there's still a lot of things that need to be answered, obviously, but at least you can feel good about for the first time in the post Griffin era and, and if you take him out of the equation, maybe ever that you got maybe the best athlete on the field as your quarterback every single time you take the field. So here's why I was discouraged deep into the third quarter. You mentioned this, more than half of their offense entirely was a Daniel scrambles zero targets from a Corin and, or zero catches from a Corin and two targets for Echler. So the two best pass catching weapons you have were not utilized from nearly three. But you're discouraged in Daniels for that. That's not a Daniels thing. So I'm going, I'm saying in Daniels and talking about the offense. And yes, and well, here's, but to me, they're very correlated. I'm going, here's how I could make it helpful for Daniels. Here's what will give him a chance to, to thrive and survive. And they went, nope, we're not doing that. Oh my God. So that's why it's sort of, to me, it's, it relates directly to, to Daniels, his development, what to expect, what to hope for is Echler takes a check down for 22 yards on a, on a third and long and he right back off the field. Let's make sure we get Ryan Robinson back in the game to, to plot it and power run in the center or maybe to have Daniel scramble again or something else. Like you need to involve the guys that are any good that can do something with the football in their hands. And they didn't for three quarters and wouldn't you know it, they were down big. If you guys want to join us, we will open up the MGM national harbor listener lines for the first time as we close in on the end of the hour here, 800 6361067 to line them up 800 6361067. So we've gotten to the head coach, the coordinators, the quarterback, working our way through some of the big storylines of the commanders debuting in 2024 and they're lost to the bucks. Let's get to game balls and gasters next on Grant and Danny. [BLANK_AUDIO] He's Danny. I'm Grant. This is the fan and we are live in our half street studios on a misery Monday. The commanders are 0 and 1, but they're coming back home and they get to take on perhaps the team that looked the absolute worst in all the NFL this weekend in the New York Giants. No such thing as a must win and in a rebuilding year early in the season, the record not the end all be all frankly, but it sure would be nice to come out and look a lot better and a lot different against the Giants team that at least according to the week one performance they put out on film against the Vikings is not going to be particularly good this year. Now we have long been the get right game for all Daniel Jones, who a third of his career stat compilations against Washington and they are 8, 3 and 1 against Washington over their last several seasons. But yeah, I mean, it's soft to landing spot as you can find. I think a few teams, one we expect to be good in Cincinnati, but a few teams looked horrendous in week number one. The Carolina Panthers, the New York Giants, a couple of the teams are horrible. This is a soft landing spot as you can have a home game against a bad team, which is why I think it's actually a bit of a high stakes game just from a, oh yeah, energy within the fan base standpoint, a rhetoric and discourse standpoint going into next week. If they look pretty good and, you know, we could talk ourselves into the box being two and oh and on their way to maybe six and three or something through nine games. That's a really good team. It was a bad matchup. You can feel very differently a week from today as opposed to if they play poorly in a loss to the Giants and our own two looking up at New York in the division. And as you said, New York's dreadful offense got right against Washington, but we'll get to the Giants later in the week and much more detail. We are still diving in and taking out a shovel for the law topsy and inventory on the loss to the box. We're opening up the phones at 800-636-1067. Now if you're new to the show, thank you and get ready for what should be a really fun football season here on Grant and Danny were fired up about it. We'll have Jay Gruden every Monday at five. He's with us today. Actually, it's six because we've got Tony Gonzalez today at five and we'll have Austin Echler all season long at five o'clock on Tuesdays, which is really, really cool. We're excited about that. We're also going to be making some road trips with listeners to games this year, which were jacked up about. We'll have an announcement coming up this week on that here on Grant and Danny going to some road games this year. So there's a lot of things cooking we're very excited about. Now we just need the football team to play some decent football. That'd be nice. And we'll be cooking with Greece. We'll be really, really happy about that. But what we always do end of our first hour on GND after games on Mondays in the football season is game balls and gasters. We give game balls to the best performers performances and we give gasters to the worst. So let's start with a game ball, Darras. Austin Echler, the aforementioned running back, who will be on this show tomorrow. We wondered. Like a lot of people wondered, Danny, does he have any gas left in the tank? It is worst year last year. I thought he looked really shifty in the open field. He needs the ball more. That was going to be my game ball as well. Ten yards per touch. Please take advantage of him. Four carries for 52 yards. He also ran the ball twice for 10 yards for six and four. I thought he was just underutilized six touches. I'd like him to get twice as many as that against the Giants hopefully. But he looked to me like old school Austin Echler with some wiggle and elusiveness was able to evade tackles in the open field. So liked what I saw there. Jam and Davis. I'm reaching here a little bit, but not that much action. I think just over 20% of snaps flashed a couple of times had a tackle for loss was flying around the line of scrimmage is kind of a, an energy, you know, maybe not like a, I don't know, like a big pile moving type defensive end, but you know, a guy that can maybe knife through the defense and have a nice little play here and there and be disruptive. I was pretty impressed, man. Pretty good debut with the defensive end spot for jam and Davis. Emmanuel at my fault, Emmanuel Forbes, new season, same guy, two penalties on one play. He just doesn't look like he belongs hard to defend him or try to make any case for why this is going to work. All he can do is keep grinding and I hope for the organization sake, he continues to improve. They got the right guys to coach them up. There's no doubt in my mind about that and Quinn and Whit and their legacy with defensive backs. He's very, very small and it just doesn't seem like he's able to do it at this level. Cliff Kingsbury, if you turned in your homework to me and it says, with your really handsome face and deep baritone voice that's very intimidating, uh, I have got a plan that gets Terry McClellan, two catches for 17 yards for the game. I go, go back into your room and do it again and he comes back and says, I got three catches for him. Do it again. More. I can't do this again, Cliff. I can't yell at my offensive coordinator into the void every Monday or Tuesday, depending on when they play, that you have to get the best players on the football team, the ball more. This has got to be intuitive, big cat. Come on. You're so handsome. Just write down some little moves and little plays and little stacks, maybe hand it off to him. Do something to get him the football before the fourth quarter, please, like best friends with Sean McVay and that group of guys, they all hang out all the time. Do you never talk about football? Like, do you guys never discuss what it's like to throw to a receiver and get someone open? How are you in all their weddings and you're in all these parties hanging out and drinking and carrying on? I know those guys. They're good dude. You're doing the toast for each other. If you've been in the same room as Matt LaFlore a couple of times, have you ever talked about football once to any of those guys? You and Mike McDaniel have never discussed motion and why it's important and why people do it. Don't take it from fat old gross, gross old me. Take it from him. Take it from them. You drink with these guys. You party with these guys. Talk about football. Learn about football. Anyway, gasser, please. The secondary. Have we talked about them yet? Not much. 13 throws to Chris Godwin and Mike Evans and, excuse me, let me redo that, 14 throws to those two guys and 13 catches. It was very, very easy for them on the outside. One more gasser for me, please. The first play of the season. Hayden Daniels has drafted second overall months of practice. This guy's automatic. He's never nervous. There's, you know, you're, you're not going to believe how good he is. You're not going to believe what you say. First play, we got a little swing pass to a running back in the backfield. We drew it up because it's the easiest thing anyone can do. Pick a listener. They'll make the, make it happen. I'm not trying to zone. It's just, it's just funny. Let's all have a little sense of humor here. The first play of the career, the first play of the season, that's a minus 13. That's minus 15. Those are hard to do. That's tough. You miss your running back so badly because you throw it so far behind him that like he comes back and touches the ball just barely and it goes the other way for 15 yards. First play of the season, at least you can't say we weren't warned of what was to come on the first play of the day for the Washington offense. Yeah. First play of the preseason was a 96 mile an hour fastball on a screen and the first play of the regular season, Breyer Robinson like didn't even know the ball had been thrown. Like he got his head around. It was so far away from him. He was like, wait, seriously, it's loose. At least in the preseason, the next throw was that 40 yarder dropped in the bucket to Deami. Yeah. We didn't get that one. No, we didn't get that one. Terry wide open. First play of the second half. He's still running downfield waiting on that throw. All right. Game balls to the best. Gasters to the worst. We're granting Danny your thoughts next on the fan. This episode is brought to you by progressive insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the name your price tool from progressive. It works just the way it sounds. 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