HUGE news broke during Grant & Danny’s show today, almost hidden in kind of a news dump of a series of roster moves: the Commanders released Jamin Davis, ending the tenure of another of Ron Rivera’s first-round picks in DC in an unceremonious way.
“That is a significant development…he certainly has not been a factor at the defensive end position, hasn’t been on the field much at all,” Grant said, “but to hear that he’s being cut as a former first-round pick in the Rivera era, who went in the Top 20, after five games with this Dan Quinn regime, is pretty massive – the team made the announcement, and nobody broke it?”
“This is a pretty big deal, and it’s not just ‘guy that's not playing is released by team,’” Danny replied. “Think about what they did when they moved on from Jahan Dotson; not to impugn him, but basically, at a position that they weren’t real strong at, as evidenced by the fact that they went out and got somebody that was cut at the 11th hour by another team who’s not probably the second-best receiver, they were willing to let him go. This is not a position of strength now, nor has it been desperate for help, but the fact they were willing to let Dotson go kind of showed you they're not real concerned about missing out on him.”
Seems, to Danny at least, that the same can be said for Davis, especially given how thin the team has become on the defensive line and the edge due to recent injuries.
“No Dorance Armstrong for some time, an opportunity was going to be there for Davis to be part of a rotation, at least maybe for the short term, because there’s not a lot of depth,” Danny said. “There were plenty of opportunities there, and they’re not concerned about it.”
Grant quickly went through the edge depth chart – key word quickly, because it’s a short list – and agrees with Danny.
“They think so little about how much Jamin Davis can help them, that at their lowest point of depth this entire season, they are cutting him,” Grant said. “Number one, this is a massive referendum, once again, on Ron Rivera and the Marty Party and what an absolutely horrific, terrible drafting operation they were. They swung and missed in the biggest at-bats in the early part of the draft over and over and over again, and it's shocking that the team stunk when they got their first-round picks wrong over and over and over again, and their big free agents that they would spend money on didn't pan out.”
That last part was sarcasm, but it is kind of shocking how Davis went from Top 20 pick and starter under one regime to needing a position change and then cut in seven weeks by another.
“This group we hoped would be able to get something out of Jamin Davis maybe; he's only 25, he’s got speed, he's physical, maybe they can make him better than the last group did,” GP continued. “They immediately changed his position, looked at him and said, ‘you can't play off-ball linebacker for us.’ Maybe somewhere else he could, maybe he'll go somewhere and he'll get back to playing on the second level as an off-ball linebacker, but with this group, they said we got Frankie Luvu, who's better than you, we got Bobby Wagner who's better than you, they thought Michael Davis or mid-round rookie Jordan Magee could be better, so we don’t need you in the linebacker room.”
Davis did flash during the preseason, and he’s known to be good in the locker room (traffic mishap notwithstanding), and he made the roster – but here he is, now a free agent before Halloween.
“Maybe they feel like nobody will pick him up and they'll get him back to the practice squad, but he just seems like the kind of guy I think someone should take a flyer on,” Grant said. “A lot of teams probably had round two or three grades on him, and maybe you think with a change of scenery, playing linebacker again, maybe it could work out. I’ll root for him, but what a terrible pick that was.”
“That goes without saying, and I hesitate to speculate wildly, but the timing of this is pretty stunning, and leads me to wonder if something else is going on,” Danny said. “They don’t have bodies to play these positions! Maybe they’ve seen enough, and they’ve earned the right to not have me bother with my questions, but he can't play 10 plays a game? I wonder if there’s some sort of ‘hey we need you to do X, Y, and Z’ and that didn’t happen, because it’s not like they have a bunch of dudes waiting to replace him at this point. At a minimum, it tells you this guy simply cannot do it, and we did everything we possibly could to try to figure it out and we're not gonna waste our time anymore. It’s another terrible reminder on how poor this previous regime was that these guys are digging out of the hole of.”