- 12 minutes ago
It's joint and practice season. As the Commanders welcome in the Dolphins, Grant & Danny tell you everything they want to see tomorrow.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:01Coming up in 90 minutes at 4 o'clock,
00:03tickets to see Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean
00:06going to be given away right here on G&D.
00:095 o'clock today, when Sonny Stiles joins the program,
00:12we've got My Chemical Romance tickets.
00:14They're also going to be playing at Nationals Park
00:16coming up about a week from now, later in August.
00:20So make sure you are listening if you want those tickets.
00:23Tomorrow's huge, though.
00:24In fact, just to ramp up for tomorrow,
00:26the team made sure everybody was rested up and fresh.
00:28Pretty light day at the practice facility.
00:31Here come the Miami Dolphins.
00:32So for people that often wonder,
00:34and I've gotten a lot of questions about this,
00:36certainly over the last few weeks,
00:38at Grant Paulson on Twitter,
00:39at Grant H. Paulson on Instagram,
00:41Danny's at Funny Danny.
00:42Why do we make so much out of these joint practices?
00:47Well, because teams now prioritize these
00:50over preseason games to get their work in.
00:53And the reason I've always said that that is,
00:55is because you can actually dictate
00:57what you're able to get to.
00:59So in a preseason game,
01:01there's no guarantee that you get to work on red zone.
01:03Yeah, how many third and ones from the 33 do you get?
01:06You don't know, right?
01:07You have no idea.
01:08You might not get to send out your field goal kickers
01:10or run a goal line drill, you know,
01:13session because there's never a goal line play.
01:15In a practice, Dan Quinn and Jeff Halfley,
01:18who have already been on the phone several days ago
01:19to line everything up,
01:20will go over everything that they want their teams to work on.
01:23And you get this beautiful opportunity
01:25to work on those things against another NFL team,
01:27not your own guys.
01:29So they'll have situational periods.
01:31Let's make sure we do one-on-ones with O-line, D-line,
01:34corner receiver, linebacker, running back,
01:36pass protection stuff.
01:37Great.
01:38Hey, what do you want to do?
01:39I got to get some goal line work in.
01:40Great.
01:41Good on good.
01:42My offense, your defense, vice versa.
01:43We'll do goal line.
01:44What do you got?
01:45Let's go high red.
01:46I want to do a two-minute period.
01:47I want to do a four-minute move the ball period.
01:49I want to start at my own goal line
01:51and try to get out of there on a third and ten.
01:53So they can line up everything
01:54that they might want to get done situationally
01:57and knock it all out over two hours.
01:59In a game, you might get to half of those situations.
02:03So that's the first most important reason
02:05why they're actually really helpful.
02:07But I've got another one I had not thought about
02:09that Dan Quinn's talked about this week.
02:10And I actually think this is really interesting.
02:12He has two different times, including this morning, Danny,
02:15when talking about why he loves these joint practices,
02:18he has said that teams are willing to run more stuff
02:22at these practices
02:25because there aren't 32 teams, 31 other teams, I guess,
02:28that are going to see the tape from your game.
02:30It's not televised on television.
02:33Like, a lot of these preseason games are national.
02:35NFL Network picks them up.
02:36That's such a good point.
02:37I had never thought about this.
02:38But he talked about how vanilla you're going to be
02:40in the preseason because you don't want to show anything.
02:42And he said, on the practice field,
02:44we're not quite as vanilla.
02:45Now, we try to have some rules for the media or the fans,
02:47or we'll put up signs for the people in the stands
02:49that say they don't take pictures or whatever.
02:51But when the Dolphins are here,
02:53Miami now knows some of the stuff you want to run.
02:55They might get a look at your trick play
02:57or this thing that you're not going to show in the preseason.
02:59But they're in a different conference.
03:01You don't really have to worry about them.
03:03It's not like Halfway's picking up the phone
03:04to call the Philadelphia Eagles, right?
03:07That's not how it works.
03:08So I didn't think about that until this week
03:11when Quinn brought it up.
03:12But I think it's really smart,
03:13both from what you can get done
03:15and also the stuff that you're going to get to see
03:17that you have to adjust to on both sides of the ball.
03:20100%.
03:20And the looks you can give your own team,
03:23internal practices,
03:24it's only so limited, right?
03:27I mean, there's some element of surprise
03:28if a defense has seen something you haven't run before.
03:31But at a certain point, you know personnel,
03:32you know people,
03:33and you're just trying to give a ghost look.
03:36This is other guys fighting for jobs,
03:38fighting for,
03:39I know you're fighting internally too,
03:41position battles,
03:41but it's just different when it's another team,
03:43another jersey,
03:44where they are directly competing with you.
03:46And it's just a different animal.
03:47It's team versus team.
03:48And you can get so much done,
03:49and kind of to your point,
03:50you can control so much more.
03:52And I've always said for years,
03:54as the league was starting to do this, by the way,
03:56this now is ubiquitous.
03:57This is normal.
03:58Like guys like Bill Belichick and company
03:59were ahead of the game,
04:00where they started doing this over preseason games.
04:03Now that you still play the preseason games,
04:05you go through the exercise of getting guys warmed up
04:07and going through it
04:09and checking out some of the backups
04:10and got to have an action.
04:11But for the most part,
04:12it was these joint practices
04:13where so much work was getting done.
04:15And I think at the time,
04:16you and I both said this to our credit,
04:18I really do think
04:19one of the underrated stories of last year
04:21was the Ravens canceling
04:22that joint practice at the end of the season,
04:25preseason last year with Washington.
04:26I think they really had a lot riding on that
04:29in terms of some of the work they wanted to get done,
04:31and they were sort of gearing towards that.
04:32And some of the offseason approach
04:34and training camp approach was,
04:35this is where we'll do XYZ.
04:37Maybe that was stripped away from them,
04:38and I'm not saying that's why they lost a bunch of games
04:41and went 5-12,
04:42but I do think that hurt them to some degree.
04:44Think about a teacher lesson planning,
04:46in a sense,
04:47to get you ready for a standardized test.
04:49I don't know if when you were in school,
04:51you dealt with the SOLs that we did in Virginia,
04:53but everyone's got some version of them.
04:56Ours was called a standard of learning.
04:58And so every day you'd go in
04:59and the teacher would write on the chalkboard 27.2,
05:03and if you wanted to look it up,
05:04it would tell you what that SOL was
05:06that you were satisfying.
05:08And it was like,
05:08that lesson today is about the history in Virginia
05:12of this battle or whatever.
05:14And I bring this up to say,
05:15if you have this plan laid out for your summer
05:18to get you ready for week one,
05:20and then the most important part of it,
05:22you don't get to actually do,
05:24because maybe you would have done something differently.
05:26But it's all a ramp up
05:27to those Baltimore practices, let's say.
05:29Now you don't get the Baltimore practices.
05:31So back to my analogy,
05:32if you're a teacher getting a class ready for the SOLs,
05:36but then there's a snowstorm or something,
05:37and you miss the four days
05:39where you're going to get the bulk of this SOL stuff in,
05:42now what happens?
05:43Now you're out of luck.
05:44And so I actually think there's something to that
05:48with the Ravens last year,
05:49but I think this is going to be a critical day,
05:51and I'm really excited to see how some guys perform
05:54and what comes out of this.
05:56So let's tee that up.
05:58The question being,
05:59what are you most interested in monitoring?
06:01What storylines will you care about tomorrow?
06:03And what do you think matters?
06:05And if you want to parlay this into the game on Friday,
06:07we could do some of that too.
06:09But I'm really zeroing in mostly on the practice session tomorrow
06:12because I wrote down three things.
06:14The first is the commander's offensive line
06:16against the Dolphins defensive front.
06:17That's the story to me.
06:18That's the number one.
06:19It wouldn't have been before Larry Ritonso got hurt.
06:22It would have been on my list.
06:23Of course, you want to see the offensive line,
06:24and we're going to see it go with this new scheme and new system.
06:27But now that it's no Allegretti and no Laramie Tunsil
06:30and it's reshuffled,
06:31that is the number one thing.
06:33Spotlight, zoom in.
06:35I got to see it.
06:35You'll hear from Brandon Coleman on the show today
06:37in two hours at 4.30,
06:39the new starting left tackle taking over for Laramie Tunsil.
06:43So don't miss that.
06:44But yeah, big opportunity for him.
06:46He's going to be going up against probably more Joss Uche,
06:49the former Eagles pass rusher.
06:53Trey Moore, who they just drafted in the fourth round.
06:55Chop Robinson often rushes against the right side
06:58of an offensive front,
06:59so he probably will deal more with Josh Conner.
07:01And I want to see that too, by the way.
07:03Yeah, exactly.
07:03Same with David Ajabo.
07:04But yeah, it's not just a Brandon Coleman point
07:06to kind of double down on that.
07:09No Allegretti and his Julian Good-Jones
07:10look like he's ready to potentially play in a game.
07:12He's got two snaps in his NFL career.
07:14How does Connerly look?
07:16He's got the toughest matchup of everybody
07:18against the former first-round pick, Robinson.
07:20I think the offensive line against what is a solid,
07:24maybe not a stellar, but a solid to good defensive front
07:28for the Dolphins, I think will be very telling.
07:31Because there's a world tomorrow where we're going,
07:33they looked fine.
07:34Like, that's actually really encouraging.
07:36Or they could just get worked all day tomorrow at practice,
07:39and then you and I are talking about
07:41they need to go sign Taylor Decker.
07:43Like, that's not out of the realm of possibility for tomorrow.
07:45Seriously.
07:45I mean, again, you hate to just overreact to a tiny sample
07:49or, you know, like a couple Ben standing tweets or whatever,
07:53but I will be.
07:54I mean, this is one of those,
07:56there's a lot more riding on it than just,
07:58hey, let me try to get ready for the season,
08:00joint practice, blah, blah, blah.
08:02The normal course of things.
08:02This is not normal.
08:03This is now, do we, I'm hovering over that red panic button.
08:07Do I need to hit it or not?
08:09Washington's cornerbacks against Dolphins wide receivers
08:12is the next one I've got here.
08:15The Dolphins receiver room after trading Jalen Waddell
08:18is, you know, not anywhere that it was before.
08:22It's Jalen Tolbert, the former Cowboy.
08:24Meh.
08:24It's Caleb Douglas who they drafted in the third round this year.
08:27Their number one might be Malik Washington, honestly.
08:30Like, Chris Bell, the third round pick out of Louisville,
08:33I liked coming out of school,
08:34but hasn't really stayed healthy over the last year and a half or so.
08:38So he slid in the draft.
08:39They've got the former Ram, Tutu Atwell.
08:40But it's a bad receiver room.
08:43And I say that to say, Danny,
08:44if the corners for Washington don't put the clamps on them in this practice,
08:50I'm going to be discouraged.
08:52I think Mikey Sanra still has at best had an uneven, inconsistent training camp.
08:58At worst, you could say he's really struggled.
09:00He's gotten beat a lot.
09:01And it's not always by Terry McLaurin, by the way.
09:03We're talking about Luke McCaffrey or Deami Brown
09:05or guys down the depth chart or whatever.
09:07So I need to see him look okay in this practice.
09:10I really like what I've seen from Rasul Douglas.
09:12But no Trey Amos, who's back and then hurt again and won't play tomorrow.
09:17And he's not going to play on Friday night in the game.
09:18So how are they going to stack up there?
09:22You've had a guy retire already.
09:23You've got another guy that can't seem to get on the field.
09:25That was an area that was thin going into camp.
09:28This is a team you have to be able to push around a little bit in that matchup
09:32just because you're not going to face a club
09:33with probably a worse receiver room than this.
09:36I think that's very well put.
09:38That's one of those.
09:38It doesn't mean you're great.
09:40Nobody's saying.
09:41We talk about this all the time.
09:42Remember Ron Rivera's first year, that fraudulent division championship team.
09:46You're beating up bad quarterbacks.
09:48You have to be above a certain threshold to do that, right?
09:50A terrible defense that can't get out of their own way.
09:52Doesn't matter who you're playing against.
09:53They're going to move the football against you and shove it.
09:55Just because you beat up Ben DiNucci in a couple of jags
09:58doesn't necessarily make you the 85 Bears.
10:00But in order to be better than you've been, which is horrendous in all areas of defense,
10:05you don't turn the ball over.
10:07You give up a ton of yards and a ton of points.
10:09You bend and break and don't turn anyone over.
10:12What do you say you do here?
10:14This needs to be the first step in kind of correcting that.
10:18800-636-1067 if you want to hop in.
10:22800-636-1067.
10:24The question, what do you care about the most from tomorrow's practice
10:29with the Miami Dolphins in Ashburn?
10:31What are you going to be paying close attention to?
10:33The last question I'll throw out there as above the threshold of import for me is
10:38I'm really interested to see how much they ask Diggs to do
10:42and how up to speed he is.
10:44Because to me, if you're using these as your games
10:47and you're kind of missing tomorrow if you're Stephon Diggs,
10:52then I wonder if he might have to play in a game,
10:57even if that's not their goal.
10:59In just bouncing that off people out in Ashburn over the last few days,
11:03most of them say they don't think Diggs is going to play in a preseason game,
11:05which is possible.
11:06And if Daniels doesn't play, then there's really no reason to play him
11:09because I'm talking about getting some of that cohesion and stuff down.
11:12But your chances are so limited to actually have elevated work
11:16in a non-practice setting.
11:18So limited.
11:19Tomorrow's really important as we keep coming back to.
11:22So I'd like to think you could get a lot in with Diggs in this offense
11:26to try to get him fully up to speed.
11:27But if they're still kind of easing him in
11:29or it's a handful of snaps in 11-on-11,
11:32I just wonder what the trajectory is for him being ready to go.
11:36Yeah, so he's related to kind of my bigger picture one
11:38is what does this offense look like?
11:40Aren't you curious?
11:41Aren't you fascinated?
11:42You don't think they're going to show their offense tomorrow.
11:45I think they might.
11:46Because again, to Dan Quinn's point, there's no prying eyes.
11:48There's less cameras.
11:50There's less film to be had.
11:52This is our first chance to see if we can run our stuff against an opponent.
11:56You know what I mean?
11:56It's not just the scout defense.
11:58This is not just guys that aren't going to be in the league
12:00or on the practice squad.
12:01This is teams, guys trying to take your lunch.
12:05Are we a get-the-ball-out-super-quick team?
12:07Are we a play-action team?
12:10What's the nature of this thing?
12:11We think we've got hypotheses because of David Blouse's tree,
12:14but I'm fascinated by it.
12:16And to that end, Diggs is very involved in that.
12:18How is he deployed?
12:19Is it two receiver sets?
12:21He is outside.
12:21Is it, you know, we're doing 11, so he's in the slot.
12:24What are we doing?
12:25How are we doing it?
12:25Curious.
12:26Joe Theismann in 20 minutes at 3 o'clock on Grant and Danny.
12:29And speaking of starting quarterbacks, the Vikings have named one.
12:33We can get to that next as well on The Fan.
Comments