Jayden Daniels Earning Commanders’ Starting Job, Even if Coaches Haven’t Said it Yet

The Commanders have not officially announced their rookie is QB1, but the team’s plan is working. Plus, notes on Matthew Judon, Russell Wilson, J.J. McCarthy and more.

Daniels drops back to pass against the Dolphins during a preseason game. / Jim Rassol-USA TODAY Sports

Things will get real soon. Until then, here are the Takeaways for this week’s MMQB …

Jayden Daniels will be the Washington Commanders’ starting quarterback, and I think they’re confident they’re getting him the work he needs before giving him the job. This, of course, is different from what’s happening with Caleb Williams in Chicago, where the No. 1 pick was named the starter before he got his stuff at O’Hare baggage claim.

It’s just not as different as you might think.

At the practice I attended last week, the Commanders gave Daniels the majority of the first-team reps, and he responded with a smooth, impressive 90-minute body of work. It’s been that way, I’ve heard, for most of camp, and through new coach Dan Quinn’s fast-paced sessions that are focused on getting everyone a lot of reps to begin with.

So why not name him the starter now? The first thing is that Quinn can’t sell the idea of every position being up for grabs, and competition being the edge of his new program’s sword to guys like Bobby Wagner, Terry McLaurin, Jonathan Allen and Daron Payne, and then hand a job to a rookie, no matter how highly he was drafted. Which is why Washington, instead, worked creatively to prepare him to be the guy without handing him anything.

Second, developmentally, they don’t want Daniels missing anything another rookie would go through. Because no matter how ready he might look after five college seasons and 55 college starts—and he does look ready—he’s still new to the professional version of the sport.

“We didn’t want him to miss any steps,” Quinn said from his office Wednesday morning. “We weren’t setting him up just for a preseason game. We’re setting him up for his whole career. Making sure we hit all the steps and didn’t get so far ahead where, I’ve got this down. I’ve got this down. [OC] Kliff [Kingsbury] did a good job. He’d been through that process with Kyler [Murray]. Like, What are some concepts that you really like from LSU?

“We just tried to make sure the runway for success would look really good.”

The Commanders also tried their best to make what was around Daniels look a little better than what Sam Howell and Jacoby Brissett had last year. That meant, first and foremost, creating protection and a run game that’d take the pressure off him in the likely event that he’d wind up being the Commanders’ starter.

“[GM] Adam [Peters] did a really good job on that,” Quinn continues. “We were intentional and deliberate about Jayden even before it was him. Signed a center [Tyler Biadasz], [Sam] Cosmi was coming back, another in [Nick] Allegretti. That’s in place. Need a tight end in [Zach] Ertz, had a run game with Brian [Robinson Jr.] and adding [Austin] Ekeler.  It was a good job by Adam to say we’re also going to put people around this person to make sure he’s able to start off on the right foot.”

And, again, soon enough, I’d bet a bunch of money that you’ll know for sure that Daniels’s first step toward starting on the right foot will be as the Commanders’ starter.

My guess would be when Quinn names Daniels the guy, he’ll also be cementing a few other rookies as starters at their positions. Second-round corner Mike Sainristil—I had one staffer tell me he thinks the Michigan product could even wind up as a captain—will certainly be another one. Third-round left tackle Brandon Coleman very well could be, too. And in doing so, they’d be bringing Daniels up to that level with a few of his peers.

Again, so much of this is intentional and, as I see it anyway, pretty smart, given that Peters and Quinn are at ground zero in building their program (Chicago’s in a different spot). But the best part is how Daniels is justifying his draft position every day. So when the Commanders do pull the trigger, it won’t be forced in any way.

In fact, what Quinn’s been most impressed with kind of tells the tale on where the QB is.

“This is kind of a boring answer, but he’s playing the position well,” Quinn says. “Checking the protection, taking a shot downfield to Terry, knowing, I had Zach underneath. It’s the decision making of where to go with the ball, how to play the position. Seeing the arm talent, that is easy. Playing the position, that’s the whole key to it.”

And showing he can do that is a big part of why, at this point, Daniels getting the keys to the Commanders’ offense seems to be a mere formality.

You can tie the Atlanta Falcons’ decision to trade a third-round pick for Matthew Judon to their decision to take Michael Penix Jr. at No. 8. And it’s really not too complicated to get yourself there, either.

Most teams figured ahead of the draft that the Falcons would take a pass rusher with the eighth pick. The consensus was it’d be Alabama’s Dallas Turner, who fell to 17th before the Minnesota Vikings traded up to get him. It also could’ve been one of the two guys—Indianapolis Colts DE Laiatu Latu or Seattle Seahawks DT Byron Murphy II—who went right before Turner. Either way, the need was there in a very big way, and taking Penix at No. 8 left a hole in the Falcons’ roster.

To the team’s credit, Atlanta aggressively got after the issue with its next three picks, taking Clemson DT Ruke Orhorhoro, Washington DE Bralen Trice and Oregon DL Brandon Dorlus, and sinking four top-110 picks into the spot (the Falcons also gave up a spare third-rounder to move from No. 42 to 35 to take Orhorhoro). Still, the edge spots were left thin, and then Trice got hurt, and that heightened the urgency to go get help now.

So Atlanta gave up a third to land Judon, who’s 32, coming off injury and in a contract year.

Judon’s been a fantastic player the past few years. He’s dangerous enough as a pass rusher that Bill Belichick gave him the leeway to freelance more than he did anyone the past few years, knowing he had the athleticism to make up for mistakes. He had 32 sacks in 38 games as a Patriot, which makes him, by the numbers, a 14.5-sack player over a 17-game regular season. The Falcons had no one like that on their roster.

But doing this now was most certainly a big swing. They gave up the third-rounder they got in the Calvin Ridley trade to get Orhorhoro, and will go into the 2025 draft cycle without a third-rounder (for now, at least) as a result of this deal.

It’s a sign, like the Justin Simmons signing this week was, and as adding Kirk Cousins in March indicated, that they think they’re close to being a very real contender.

Which, again, calls into question the logic in using the eighth pick on a guy whom they won’t play for a year or two. And you know what? I’m still fine with it, mostly because if Penix winds up being a franchise guy, and the final result is two years of Cousins followed by 10 of Penix, no one will care about any of this at all.

The Patriots’ decision making here is a signal for where they are. To me, with a team starting over the way New England is, deciding on whether to trade a player should start with a simple question: Will this guy be around when we get good again?

Judon’s age and contract situation made it so the answer to that question was no.

That’s why it was harder to do an extension as Judon came back off a torn biceps, and why giving him a bump that’d make him whole this year wasn’t going to be easy, either. Things got worse between Judon and the team after Christian Barmore got a deal at $21 million per year (it could be argued that was a team-friendly rate). And Judon’s public display to follow—during which he showed up to practice in sweats, got into it with Jerod Mayo, talked to EVP Eliot Wolf, left, then came back—was probably the clincher here.

After that, calls started coming in. The timing wound up being fortuitous for the Patriots, in that we’re at a stage in camp where injuries pop up and holes in teams’ rosters crystallize, which creates some bidding. As recently as a week ago, when I talked in passing to other teams, the stock response I’d get was, “What do they want? A five?” So the Patriots did well to get a three. Atlanta and Chicago faced the reality of the holes they have, came aggressively with third-rounders, and then New England giving Judon the choice of which team he wanted to go to.

So the Patriots moved on, having lived out 13 weeks without Judon last year after the October injury, which gave them some confidence in the depth they have in the position. And in doing so, they showed where they are, which is now looking forward to having four top-100 picks (and counting) in next year’s draft, and hope that a young team can simply improve on a week-to-week basis before then under a new head coach.

Wilson has been ahead in the competition to start in Pittsburgh, but this is a big week coming up. / Barry Reeger-USA TODAY Sports

This is a big week for the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterbacks. It’ll be the first week that Russell Wilson can go in practice without restrictions. As such, it’ll give the Pittsburgh coaches their first real side-by-side look at Wilson and Justin Fields. And while the Steelers have maintained that Wilson’s in pole position, Fields has had a lot more reps this summer in new coordinator Arthur Smith’s offense than Wilson has.

Fields has that going for him, the flash plays he’s put on tape, as well as the demonstrated ability to extend plays in the passing game and create in the quarterback run game. Wilson, for his part, has experience on his side. But the calf injury has created some inconsistencies even in the work he has gotten, since he can’t really show an important piece of his game.

Neither of the two lit the world on fire Saturday night against the Buffalo Bills.

Now, part of that’s come because the offense as a whole has struggled, with some moving parts on the line and depth issues at receiver. The coaches are playing the starters more in preseason games as a result, to try to give the players a shot to work through their growing pains now, rather than doing it in September. Which hasn’t to this point helped make the quarterback picture any less murky.

So the three days of real work the Steelers will get between now and in their preseason finale at Detroit on Saturday should be critical to Wilson in maintaining the “pole position” that Mike Tomlin gave him after dealing away Kenny Pickett, and to any kind of shot Fields has left at overtaking Wilson before Week 1.

I feel terrible for J.J. McCarthy—but really do believe that having a redshirt year could prove to be a big-time blessing in disguise for the Vikings rookie. I don’t think Kevin O’Connell was embellishing when he said, after delivering the news that McCarthy’s rookie season is over, that the Vikings have their long-term answer at quarterback. I don’t think it was done out of sympathy for McCarthy or to placate a fan base that feels forever jinxed.

O’Connell saw what he saw this summer.

And before McCarthy got hurt, and before McCarthy looked athletic, decisive and talented in the Vikings’ preseason opener against the Raiders, O’Connell opened a window for me into how he sees his young quarterback, in ways that aren’t discoverable to the naked eye.

“It’s more of, I know what I called,” he says. “I know what you did, every single snap. I also know what was not exactly right, what was a little shaky. It might be little things. It might be calling plays in the huddle. It might be cadence at the line of scrimmage, remembering to send your motion. Every single time one of those things happens, that has nothing to do with your ability to play the position.

“That’s purely the comfort of making sure that 10 other guys in that huddle can break the huddle and run the play and be held accountable for the details of their job because I can do the baseline of mine, long before you have a ball leave your hands or make a check or an audible. That’s where I’ve seen the growth and development with J.J. He is getting better.”

Now, he’ll get a full season to watch someone else do it. To see the highs and the lows, and watch the trial and error of playing the position, and building an offense, while sitting next to Sam Darnold in what, by all accounts, is a really healthy quarterback room. (“We spend so much time together,” Darnold told me. “We have a lot of similarities.”)

You can ask Jordan Love or Patrick Mahomes about the benefit of that.

It’s a hell of a silver lining that McCarthy will now get it, too.

Antonio Pierce is prioritizing the 2024 Raiders by picking Gardner Minshew. I know that sounds like a pretty simple thing—coach put the current year’s team first. But being in the spot that he’s in, with the Las Vegas roster needing a lot of work, I do think there’s some significance in choosing to go with the surer thing at quarterback, even if the ceiling is a little lower with Minshew than it would be with Aidan O’Connell.

The reasoning I heard for the decision in the immediate aftermath? Consistency, experience and his ability to operate Luke Getsy’s offense. In other words, it’s all the things that bore fans, but will give the other 10 guys in the huddle the best chance to compete right now.

“A lot of things went into it,” Pierce told reporters. “It wasn't based off of [Saturday] night. There’s a lot of factors. So, we feel like Gardner gives us the best opportunity to get off to a fast start, and that’s what we’re going with. We support him, our team’s behind it, our staff’s behind it, the organization’s behind it.”

Now, one thing I took from having spent some time around Pierce this summer was how he was planning to, at all turns, prioritize the players. And players don’t care about your team’s five-year vision for the franchise—most of them won’t be around for that and, as such, only care about being put in position to succeed in the here and now. Again, this does that for them, while leaving open the chance O’Connell will be the better answer later in the year.

Which means this is Pierce putting his money where mouth is.

In the short-term at least, that’ll be meaningful with his locker room.

The dumb thing that caught my attention the past few weeks: the American Heritage corner pipeline. American Heritage, for the uninitiated, is an elite private school in Plantation, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale. The Patriots have become a big-time power in recent years, winning five state championships in talent-rich Florida, while establishing themselves as one of the nation’s most-respected factories for college football players.

O.K., so even after we’ve established all that, it’s still wild to look at the Patriots’ 2018 class.

The senior corners in that fall of 2017: Patrick Surtain II and Tyson Campbell. Campbell, who wound up at Georgia, became Jacksonville’s second-round pick in ’21, and just signed a four-year, $76.5 million extension. Surtain, of course, needs no introduction. He became an All-American at Alabama and an All-Pro for the Denver Broncos, and will make more, probably a lot more, than his high school teammate did.

The Patriots, as you'd expect, won the state title that year, after winning it the previous year with those two and current New England Patriot Marco Wilson at the position.

So … did they think this could happen?

“Obviously, we had dreams about it, aspirations,” Surtain tells me. “But seeing it happen? I could just remember being in high school like it was two or three years ago. And being in this position now, watching Tyson get that long-term contract, Marco balling out on the field, it’s honestly surreal because we’ve always dreamed about it. We work at it. And we’ve always talked about it, one-on-one like, This is the goal. This is the absolute destination that we want to reach.

“To be here right now, present in a moment, and seeing them ball at a high level and doing their thing is honestly a blessing, for real, because we all came in together with the same mindset. Honestly, when you have people like that, close to you, succeeding at a high level, they motivate you for sure.”

To be clear, I don’t know whether there’s a precedent for this sort of thing, at a single position. But I do think it’s pretty cool how it played out.

Mahomes gave defenses yet another thing to think about / Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

Maybe Patrick Mahomes’s behind-the-back throw didn’t count for much, but it’s still pretty cool to see someone who can pull that off in an NFL game. I don’t care if it’s preseason. For a quarterback to be able to roll to his right with an oncoming rush, and know where his outlet is, then flip the ball into that outlet’s hands while getting away from the defense is bananas, bonkers … all the adjectives.

Mahomes’s explanation was great, too. He told reporters that Travis Kelce ran the wrong route, and he threw it to him that way to try to get some revenge. (Didn’t work.)

“I was pissed off at Travis. He was supposed to run a flat route,” Mahomes said, smiling. “I’m yelling at him and then he doesn’t run it. So out of spite, I threw a behind-the-back pass, but now it’s gonna be a highlight.”

Yes, it will be.

And rightfully so.

The Brandon Aiyuk situation drags on, and I don’t have a whole lot to add on it. The San Francisco 49ers’ star didn’t want to go to New England, which offered him more than $30 million per year in its proposals, or the Cleveland Browns. The Steelers’ price point was less than $28 million, which put Pittsburgh right in the neighborhood the Niners were inhabiting—with Mike Tomlin’s presence there the drawing card.

That, in turn, pushed Aiyuk back to the table with the Niners.

As it stands, the situation is still unstable. If the Niners could’ve gotten a player via a deal with the Steelers (Pittsburgh refused to give one up, so it’d have to have been in a corresponding trade), there’s a chance Aiyuk would be in Pittsburgh now. And although things have certainly gotten sideways between him and the Niners, no doors have closed on a return.

That, in fact, still seems like the most likely conclusion to this saga.

Hopefully, one way or the other, we’ll simply have a conclusion soon. I know the 49ers would be all for that.

We’ve got your quick-hitting takeaways to wrap the week up. And we’ve got them now …

• Here’s hoping Randy Gregory is O.K. He’s had his issues, and the latest chapter, in Tampa, is a strange one.

• Mekhi Becton’s resurgence as a Philadelphia Eagles guard isn’t something I saw coming.

• Stephon Gilmore signing with the Vikings and Simmons with the Falcons, both this week, are good examples of guys waiting for money to materialize as team needs do in the summer.

• I’d pay to see Tyreek Hill vs. Noah Lyles, no question.

• Bo Nix has looked good on the game field. Simple as it sounds, when he’s out there, the Denver offense moves.

• Not a good weekend for Daniel Jones.

• I’d expect a different twist to the Baltimore Ravens’ offense, in Year 2 for Todd Monken and Lamar Jackson, and some big numbers as a result from Zay Flowers and Isaiah Likely.

• Drake Maye had a really nice Thursday night, and his progress has been steady. The plan’s been to sit him. But the Patriots need to see Jacoby Brissett run a smoother operation out there before installing him as Week 1 starter.

• The Cincinnati Bengals and Kansas City Chiefs have the two highest-paid kickers in football. Which makes sense, because if you’re contending for a title, there’s a good chance you need a reliable one.

• Only one more week of preseason games!