Grant and Danny
Austin Ekeler Joins G&D To Discuss The Ravens Loss
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. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law. Amazon Fall favorites are here to make you say, with low prices on home, beauty, and fashion brands like Amazon Essentials. So hold on to your pumpkin spice whatever and save on Fall favorites at Amazon. Dear Autumn Leaves, you won't be covering roads alone this season. Toyota's lineup of cool, colorful vehicles is ready to ride by your side. Take on fall in a trail tackling Tacoma or go for the powerful tundra head to Toyota.com for more info or visit your local Toyota dealership today. Toyota, let's go places. Time as we welcome you back on Grant and Danny to get some trusted inside from our trusted insider presented by IT cadre. IT cadre makes this segment possible where DC sports insiders share their exclusive perspective. Austin Echler is on the line with us for his weekly Tuesday appointment. Make sure you listen every Tuesday at five Austin. It is awesome to talk to you again, man. How are you? Hey, what's going on? I'm doing well. Looking forward to being back on. Yeah, man. How do you guys view Sunday? You're such a pro. You've seen every up and every down. Like for us as fans, we're watching what feels like two good teams going at it. You guys came up a little short, but nothing to be discouraged about from our perspective. How do you guys feel? Uh, you know, we were played to win games, you know, so we're definitely feeling it, you know, it sucks. But there is some some good stuff within the lining there. Absolutely. I mean, you know, give the Baltimore Ravens some credit. They are one of the best teams in the league. And, you know, we were right there. We feel like we definitely could have made place to win that game. So as far as that goes, I mean, that's good, but and never really not good because we didn't win the game. So I guess take it, take it for what it's worth, you know, a good game, but we got to win games. So I don't really necessarily say we feel good about it, but it's not a terrible feeling, so to say. Four and two chance to get to five and two back at home against Carolina. We'll talk about the Panthers coming up in just a few minutes with you, Austin, but specific to the Ravens game, not a complaint, more of an observation. You guys did way less running the ball, even trying to, then you have all season long. I know B Rob was out. I wonder if that's why or was that the game plan seemingly all week? The Ravens are the number one run stuffing team in the league. The numbers eventually bared out that they did a really good job, but you didn't have some success on a couple early carries. Did you know going into the game just collectively, it would be a lot more passing and a lot less running than has been the case? Yeah, I think every game has a life of its own and every game plan also does as well, depending on how the game is going. And you know, you go into the game facing a good run defense. Okay, we know that that's from their going to hold their hat on. We don't want to continue to beat ourselves into a wall. If that's not working for us, let's get to something else and hopefully find some success. And other things that we've been doing, you know, moving, jading around, letting him use his legs, pulling the ball down the field, maybe running on the perimeter, some TV keepers, things like that. And so when we go into a game plan, yes, we have different things that we think are going to work, but then there's also things that you get to and be able to adjust away from. Okay, run games are not working. What can we supplement? Do we go to more to the screen game? You know, we were hitting on some screens and quick throws, things like that, to kind of compliment the run games and less risky throws, more higher percentage completion, things like that. And, you know, we didn't do enough ultimately to make it work and make enough plays to actually, you know, get the job done. But game plans are like fluid, they're like water. So you never really know how it's going to continue. It's never going to be perfect. So you kind of got to adjust on the fly. You mentioned the screen game, Austin, and Austin Echler with this year on Grant and Annie. Grant and I, we're both raving about this. I have never seen a flea flicker screen. Like when that's first, when that's first brought up, it's like, it's, I mean, it's almost like, like an old school, you know, something like, hear me out, you know what I mean? Like, here's the idea. We're going to, we're going to do a flea flicker screen. It sounds like the craziest idea ever. What a thing of beauty that was. Go through that play. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, that was really creative, absolutely. So I sat at the cliff for for finding that one, whoever found that one on the staff. You know, the football and the copycat league. I mean, I feel like at this point, every type of play has been run. It's really rare when you find a new place. So someone ran that at some point, might even have been in college, like they pulled up some clip. I forgot what team it was, but they ran the flea flicker screen and we're like, all right, we got this, we got this up this week and sure enough, we were practicing it all week. Actually, the first time we practiced it, I got stepped on by an offensive lineman because I went too fast across the formation and I got to realize, okay, this is going to be a long screen because we got to hand it off. Jeremy's got to run a couple steps, throw the ball back and then we got to get Jayden to throw it to me and then we have to run down the field and we can have any linemen down the field. So we went through it a couple of times. You never get the right timing with screens just because it's really hard to simulate like game style reps, but we broke it down. We ran it, I think three times during practice that week in my eye. You know, we got a good feel for it. We won't be really patient. We did three counts and sure enough ended up working out. Actually, we were accounting for a blitzer coming off the edge. So it kind of improvised where I tried to block Roquan over there. And then I kind of got stunned back and then Jeremy didn't even look at the pitch when he threw it back. No, no look throws it back. And then he goes to block zero and then Jayden grabs it, things that to me and then we gas her for like 30 yards. So it was pretty epic. Yeah, out of shouting front. That was one of my favorite plays I've seen in years. So cool. It was just so creative. And I'm not suggesting like Cliff came up with it, you know, in his dreams or something. To your point, I'm sure you saw or somebody saw it run somewhere. But you answered my next question, which is so that's not something that has been in the playbook since camp. Like that was something this week that basically you guys heard about soft for the first time and quote unquote installed. Oh, yeah, I think I told you guys this like earlier on, you know, one of our earlier interviews and, you know, for the listeners that are listening to it may be the first time you hear me. But we have now entire new playbook every week, but there's probably 30% of new plays that are specifically for this week. We have our bread and butter that we can, you know, write in our fleet that we've been doing since training camp and OTAs. But then it's like, okay, this is the game plan for this week. And here's what we're going to call these things. And so there's always a new turnover every week. 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. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive dot com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law. Amazon fall favorites are here to make you say, with low prices on home, beauty, and fashion brands like Amazon essentials. So hold on to your pumpkin spice whatever and save on fall favorites at Amazon. Doors take us to summers away, or winter adventures, and afternoon getaways. Your dedicated fidelity advisor can help you open those doors by working with you on a comprehensive plan to help you reach your wealth's full potential because doors were meant to be opened. Visit fidelity dot com slash wealth investment minimums apply fidelity brokerage services LLC member NYSE SIPC. Which makes what you guys do so much more impressive. I mean, you almost need to be like a Mensa resident to play in the national football league with all the different terminology. So play like that. It doesn't need 10 words. It's the scat left or 72 six dive or nine microphone glass. Like dude, like Philly special. Do you just have like Washington special or are there 15 words like a normal play? It's kind of both. I mean, it depends on what we have going on. We we try to have up tempo, so we try to maximize the simplicity of it of correlating things to things that make sense in our brain like left, right, call using different type of left rights. You know, you might have, you know, an R word for right and L word for the last map that word can be the entire play. So the whole play is a whole line as a whole sentence. But on the field, we're just saying one word, you know, we're saying tree tree tree. And it means that whole giant thing that yours talked about before. So we try to make it as simple as possible so we can play fast. I love that. The greatest honor of our lifetime would be on one of your trick plays, like Ben Johnson. Ask three guys, touch it. The quarterback gets it throws down field to the tackle who's eligible. And he rumbles for a fat guy touchdown. Can we call that the Grant and Danny? Just get that in the Grant and Danny is your trick play. Yeah, we got a suggestion box. Maybe I'll put something in there for you. There you go. That's what we're looking for. Yeah. I just again, just thinking about how, you know, rapidly game plans change, would you guys have to, you know, to add and learn every week, you mentioned the no huddle part of this thing. You guys lead the universe in not huddling. Now it's not all like conventional hurry up, but it's basically catching people and in match ups that you like and then going from there. How tough is that to stay on the same page? And you mentioned it, the defense could probably hear some of the things you guys are saying. How do you make sure that it's still coded and secret and how hard is that to keep organized? Oh, yeah, it was definitely a huge adjustment for me early on just for being from being in a huddle for the past seven years of my football journey. And they come into Cliffs offense where now everything is sign language and one word codes. So that was a huge adjustment. But then now at this point, pretty much used to it and can really, you know, run and stand the fly. But yeah, even our code words, you know, even the plays that we'll have from week to week will make sure to change signals. So we have signal meetings. We have different one word meetings. Sometimes stuff will get changed at practice and we're like, "Yeah, let's call this this." And everyone's like, "You everyone do with that? Yeah, all right, we're changing it. So now everyone, now that's the new code word. We got to make sure everyone's up to date. So it's forever evolving. But when you live in it and you breathe it, and this is what you do on a daily basis, it's not as clean as it seems. Because you really kind of correlate, okay, this play used to be this. Now we call it this. So it's easy to change, easy to pick up. So one more on that one, Austin. Did you ever play baseball as a kid, bunny chance? I did. I did. Yeah. So remember like a third base coach, like they had to learn all the signs. And then if they thought the other team was figuring out the signs, they would have to give a dummy sign or like they'd wipe it off or something like that to make that sign not live. Do you have something like that where if you because you might say the same code word twice in the same game, right? And then someone might, "Oh, I remember that that's this play. Do you have words like that like almost fake words or dummy words?" Yeah. So look, the NFL like we're doing everything we can to get an edge right on our opponent. So we understand that other teams are going to be looking at our signals. And so we have plays that might have been a signal from last week that is actually a different play for this week because it might be like all of our plays are kind of evolving. And so it's going to be really hard to like understand our signals just because that play, that signal met this last week. Now it's actually the counter for that or maybe it's just a totally different play from that. So I mean, good luck, you know, trying to keep up with that. And there's just so many damn signals that you're going to be wasting your time to try and figure them all out. You might as well just play up and you know, play your technique. Austin, it seems like they are very adamant about not overworking you, even with Robinson not playing in the second half last week. We saw a lot of McNichols this past week, no Robinson. And, you know, I think you capped off at nine carries. Do you appreciate that and understand it or is that something where you go, "Hey guys, you don't have to baby me here. I'll be okay. You can give me a little more work." Yeah, look, it's a long season. It's a long season and we got some talent in our backfield, you know, Jeremy's been playing well, B-Rob's been playing well. I've been staying efficient and so that's what you're going to see when it back to like this. And that's one of the things that intrigued me here was, "Hey, we do have players that can play and so guess what we're going to be able to spread as much as that love as we possibly can." And for the longevity of our careers for this season, like that's a positive. I see especially me going into year eight, like the healthier we can be, especially in the back end of this thing, the better. So at the front end, "Hey, if we can still win games and we're continuing to rotate people and people and people playing at a high level, like let's keep rolling." Austin, go back to Sunday one more for me on that. You mentioned maybe there were some opportunities or things that you guys could have done. Is there something in particular that jumps to mind where you go, "Man, that was close. We could have had that one or that was there and I didn't make a play or something to that effect. Is there one that jumps out at you?" Yeah, there's a few different plays, but it's not necessarily like there's multiple of us that are involved in things. It's always the smallest things that play themselves out or don't play themselves out. It's maybe a shallow route that actually should have sat down, but they took two extra steps and the ball was behind and we dropped the ball on third down or we didn't hand off the read or actually should have been a pull read. So it's a accumulation of small little decisions that you can't really say like, "This is exactly how it's going to go," because sometimes we make it work. It's just kind of the part of playing the game that we need to do and we happen to play at a high level, that you can't really practice. It's like when you're even like some of the scramble that James did now and places that, "Hey, you probably should have VCAT gone up, push back, and then come back to the ball and gave James a throw right here." So it's not necessarily anything specific because I don't want to say this is the play that could have turned everything around because it's not that one play, but there's small little details that we could have done better in a couple of different instances that would have made big, significant plays for sure. Austin Echler on Grant and Danny here on The Fan. What was your reaction to the news that John Allen has been so important to this organization over the years is lost for the season with the torn pack? Yeah, it's freaking devastating, obviously, man, just for what he means. I even have the players as far as on the field get that second, but let's just say in our locker room too, he's definitely one of those leaders, one of our guys that brings us up during practice, so during the game, gives us a speech really connected to pretty much the entirety of the team and the organization been here for a long time. So one of those life guys in the locker room, and then obviously on the field, you know, is definitely a tear, holds his own strong, and so it's obviously a hit to our team and, you know, we're working in the best, but definitely something that is going to definitely affect us. So now it's not necessarily the next man up. It is, but, you know, it's like it sucks because you can't really replace that type of leadership, you know? Absolutely. Speaking of guys that in Mrs. Pass, we're going to talk about Brian Robinson. Do you know when you're running makes coming back? Oh, I can't really speak on injuries. You guys, you guys know this. And so we'll see, we'll see, I'll let, I'll let that play itself out. But it's he's feeling all right for the most part. I mean, we don't even know if he's going to play or not. But I mean, you can tell. So I can't even say that. I can't, I got, I got to hold my tongue like that. No information about injuries can come from my mouth. Don't want you getting in trouble. That's right. Nobody needs that at this point. Let's talk painters for a second. When do you start watching film on the upcoming opponent? They've got a coordinator, I believe still in the Jiro Evo, who gets head coaching opportunities. Everybody seems to love around the league. Really sharp guy. The Angela Hall former Redskins been on that staff the last couple of years as well. They do a pretty good job on that side of the ball for kind of their faults and the standings. What have you seen so far? Yeah, I usually watch the highlights. You know, there's like, there's like a, I go to NFL scores on Google and then it like shows like the highlights and I watch like the 15-minute clip usually on like Monday or Tuesday and then Wednesday. So tomorrow, you know, I'm just going out live today. It's live right now. I don't know. Tomorrow and Wednesday is usually when I start diving into actual watching their film because I feel like Tuesday is like my mental reset day. Like, today's the day where I just get to kind of not think about football, reset my mind. Then in the morning, I'm like looking forward to being back in with the guys, seen the new updates on the new teams, new game plan, all of that. So I'll start jumping into it tomorrow. But for us, like, it is all about this week dominating this week, making sure we get this win this week. We're back home. So that's going to be a great atmosphere. We know there and it's about going to dominate the Panthers. So that's all we focus on this week. Austin, you mentioned you guys are coming home last one. Message to the fans, man. You guys are playing in front of a, hopefully a raucous crowd against the Carolina Panthers. What do you want to say to them? Hey, continue to bring the energy. Hey, we love you and we love what you've been doing. I'm new. I'm the new kid on the block and what I've seen so far, not even from our organization, but beyond that, just the fans around the love has been tremendous and outstanding. So we appreciate you guys. And I know things have been tough in the past, but hey, we are a new team with some new goals and new aspirations. I think you're feeling that new energy. So stay tuned for some more. We'll see you out there. Yeah, it looks very different. It feels very different and we are happy with the results at this point. Austin Echler, thrilled to talk to him every week. Always very, very good with us. Thank you, Austin. We appreciate you, buddy. Thanks, boy. Have a good one. Yeah, be good brother. Stay healthy. There's Austin Echler on Grant and Danny brought to you by IT cadre, their trusted insight, helping leaders of the nation's most important organizations understand complexity, align efforts, and make the best data-driven decisions to achieve success. IT cadre, your vision, our purpose. 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. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Amazon fall favorites are here to make you say with low prices on home, beauty, and fashion brands like Amazon essentials. So hold on to your pumpkin spice, whatever, and save on fall favorites at Amazon. Dear Autumn Leaves, you won't be covering roads alone this season. Toyota's lineup of cool, colorful vehicles is ready to ride by your side. Take on fall in a trail tackling Tacoma or go for the powerful tundra. Head to toyota.com for more info or visit your local Toyota dealership today. Toyota, let's go places. The sharpest ride, spooktacular savings event is happening now with unbeatable seasonal clearance deals. But only through the end of this month, whether you're looking for a reliable sedan, family-friendly SUV, or something sporty. Now is the time to take advantage of these frighteningly good offers. The sharpest rides are the pre-owned auto experts and have thousands of satisfied customers. And they give back for every vehicle purchase. The sharpest rides are going to make a donation to the St. Jude Children's Hospital. Listen, the sharpest rides has the best deals in town. That's why they scare the competition. Get there today during their hauntingly great deals. Plus, the sharpest ride has spooky surprises for the kiddos. Don't miss out. Hurry up before these deals vanish. Visit the sharpest rides located at 2250 South T-Home Street in Inglewood, or browse their inventory online at the sharpest rides.com. Don't miss your chance to treat yourself to a new ride at a scary good price. The sharpest ride, affordable, sexy, sharp. A lot can happen between falling in love with a house and owning it, having an advocate who can help you navigate negotiations, timelines, inspections, and more can make all the difference. That's what the expertise of a real tour can do for you, because that's who we are. Real Tours are members of the National Association of Real Tours.