Usually, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and right now, there’s a ton of smoke around Jayden Daniels being the Commanders’ selection at No. 2 – including Adam Schefter saying ‘the prevailing consensus opinion is that Jayden Daniels is the second best quarterback in this draft.’
“He said he's not talking to anybody with the Commanders, but he's obviously talking to somebody who he feels good enough about the intel that they're providing to make it pretty clear that he thinks Jayden Daniels is going to Washington,” Grant Paulsen said after playing some audio of Schefter saying that on a recent podcast. “And look, he's been saying this everywhere for a few weeks, and I'm not suggesting this is the only evidence of Daniels to the Commanders, but the betting markets right now have him going there, which is always pretty telling. Sometimes everybody's wrong and there is a surprise, but are you buying the rumors and hype that the Commanders have settled on Jayden Daniels?”
GP is thinking so, but there’s no smoke in Danny Rouhier’s chimney because maybe, just maybe, he’s trying not to overthink things?
“I think you want them to take Daniels if you have your druthers, and you're not necessarily believing that that's what's happening, where I would take Maye over Daniels but I do think that they're going to take Daniels, which is just kind of interesting to me,” GP said.
“I don't know if it's like a pessimistic viewpoint or how I've arrived at this conclusion, and to be honest, if I'm self-evaluating here, I feel like I'm probably overrating what happened with the coaching search and trying to apply it to something else,” Danny replied. “I just know how jaw-dropping and crazy that whole thing was, when it wasn't just some, ‘hey, this makes sense this might happen;’ the whole world ‘knew’ that this wasn't how the coaching search gonna go, and then it did. I think I'm putting way too much stock into that as it kind of applies to this draft, and I think this regime has marched to their own drum here. I don’t think this group is going to do the thing where they come down from on high and Josh Harris is going, ‘it would be really easy for us to market the Heisman Trophy winner.’ They're not doing yacht picks, they're gonna let the football people do the thing, and the football people have their own criteria for and they've got a plan. And it just feels to me like this group likes Drake Maye.”
So where does that come from?
“It comes from how quiet it all is, which by the way is not a great argument, but that's my feeling again,” Danny said. “It wasn't until they were like, ‘oh my God, we need to plant some stories and let people know that we like Dan Quinn and it might be him before we even consider that an option,’ you know what I mean?”
“If I really want to do a tinfoil hat thing, the only thing I could come up with is if Drake Maye is definitely their guy, they could get the word out as best they can to anyone and everyone who will listen that they like Jayden Daniels by any means necessary,” GP replied. “They do that hoping that, say, New England loves Jayden Daniels, and then all of a sudden they call New England and go, ‘hey, we're willing to move back one spot if you want to come up.’ And if they really want Daniels and the idea is that Daniels is going to Washington now, maybe you could still have your cake and eat it too, where if Maye or even JJ McCarthy is their guy, you move back to three and you can get him. That's the only thing I can come up with as to why the team could benefit from all the noise on Daniels if, in fact, they aren't in the Daniels business.”
That said, GP still believes Daniels will be the name called when the Commanders select No.2, and Danny still thinks that’s very reasonable, but he can see it going the other way.
“Again, I'm trying to figure out exactly why I think what I think and I know it's not a great case, but it's that feeling that, as a matter of policy, not sometimes, this front office is not saying anything to anybody about anything,” Danny said. “I don’t think they're gonna bend the rule for the draft, or spill the beans on anything as a matter of course. They're trying to do the thing where if we do it right in April, we're gonna do it right in September and so on down the line; it just feels to me that secrecy is the name of their game.”