The whole “Jayden Daniels never practices sliding” thing could be anywhere from a nuisance to a fiasco, but it made for some GREAT radio on Tuesday when Brian Mitchell and Barstool Nate got INTO IT about the subject!
Maybe it started when Nate told BMitch ‘you might be too old for Colorado right now’ in discussing his trip to the Rocky Mountains and the Red Rocks Amphitheater recently, but this is what Nate said when asked about the sliding situation:
“I did some research, and I don't think we're overstating how important it is for him to learn how to slide. I think it is more important than anything,” Nate said. “I’m not convinced that he is comfortable enough, as a starting NFL quarterback for how mobile he is, with sliding. Everything shows he knows how to, but it's not natural, and that’s what worries me; this isn't high school or college, everybody in the NFL is fast and the hits come at you faster. You have to be able to get down on a moment's notice, and I wish that sliding was not something that he did automatically, like it was second nature to him.”
JP said that ‘if you wanna say I want him to work on when to slide, I think that's a fair conversation, but I think there is a misnomer if it's like he's got to learn how to slide,’ so the conversation is apparently knowledge vs. application vs. timing?
They can find middle ground, because ‘those kind of go more hand-in-hand than we're realizing’ in Nate’s eyes, but when he again said he needs Daniels to not think about sliding, BMitch had to swoop in.
“Who practices sliding as a quarterback? If you’re practicing sliding, when the hell are you ever going to be hit in practice to learn when to slide?” Brian asked, and when Nate said ‘you know better than us,’ Brian had to say that “that’s why I’m trying to tell you all you make too big a damn deal out if it!’
And then there was the tackle Daniels took Saturday night, where could’ve gotten out of bounds at least, which harkened back to his collegiate injury against Alabama – caucing Nate to say that ‘it sounds silly how long we're talking about this for, but we wouldn't be talking about it if we weren't worried about it.’
And in came Brian again.
“We're talking about it because we're worried about what happened to somebody else. That’s why we're talking about it, not because of something happening with him,” B said, “and that’s where I get to a point where I get so sick of hearing people talk about stuff based off somebody else, because nothing happened with him. In college, he didn’t miss games because of getting hit running the football – you get hit more in the pocket. So if his body frame isn’t changing when he's running it in the pocket, then why are we sitting up here having this long of a discussion about this damn topic? This is something he has to work on no more than anything else in his game of football. If him running the ball was such a problem, they wouldn’t have made him the starter – and we hear how he works his ass off and they praise everything he does, but we’re going to take this one thing and make it the big thing?”
Listen to the whole exchange above!