Audacy NFL insider Ross Tucker joined The Sports Junkies Friday morning as QB speculation turned to a post-mortem celebration of the Commanders drafting Jayden Daniels – but if you listen to Ross’ podcast, you’d know it’s been a celebration of Daniels for a while now.
“I'm not one of those people that comes on shows and pretends to be like a quarterback guru and is like, ‘you know, I just don't really like his footwork’ – I love when people that never played the position are telling me about a quarterback's footwork,” Ross joked, “but here's what I can tell you: I've had so many of those guys come on my show, and every guy that came on my show was down on Drake Maye, but all of them loved Jayden Daniels, and it wasn't the running part of it – Chase Daniel thought he was the best progression reader coming out of college that he's seen in years, and they were all raving about him as a pocket passer. The most interesting thing to me is that every guy that came on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast loved Jayden Daniels and had major concerns about Drake Maye, so them going back-to-back is kind of wild if you think about it…and I’d bet that of the six guys that went in the Top 12 last night, three of them at least aren't even on their team in three years.”
Maybe ‘Maye ends up being awesome and Daniels sucks,’ which Tucker acknowledges, but how can he not be on team Heisman after months of glowing reviews?
“If I don't believe them after they all come on my show, why am I having them on my show?” Ross laughed. “If every guy that comes on my show says the same thing and I'm like, no, I'm a Drake Maye guy, what kind of clown am I for having these guys on the show when I don't agree with anything they say?”
It all comes down to coaching, system, and development now, what does Tucker think is going to be the biggest pro and maybe con to Daniels in DC?
“I feel like his unique running ability is such that it raises the floor for what he can be,” Tucker said. “In other words, maybe he doesn't end up being CJ Stroud, but because he's such a good runner, if you put a good system in place where you take advantage of that, it just makes it so hard on the defense. Even the first year that Hurts started for the Eagles, he couldn't throw at all, but they still made the playoffs. If you have a quarterback that can run like Daniels can, it raises the floor significantly, because at worst, you should be able to be a good running team and put the defense in a real bind. But, the biggest concern that people had about Jayden Daniels is the shots he takes; he's skinny and when he runs it's like he tries to run people over, so he needs to get them memo real quick about sliding or getting down, because he got absolutely annihilated. I don't know how he lasted the whole year because he took some vicious, vicious shots.”
Take a listen to Tucker’s entire visit, which looks at a possible Jahan Dotson bounce-back, his thoughts on Round 1 as a whole, his Draft weekend in ’01 when he wasn’t selected, and more!