We are nine days away. We are finally getting there. It has been the conversation for months in Washington and we are getting closer and closer to seeing the Commanders on the clock at No. 2 overall in the 2024 NFL Draft.
Kevin Sheehan was joined by NFL Draft analyst Lance Zierlein to go over who Adam Peters and Dan Quinn will make the newest member of the Commanders and how the rest of the draft will shake out.
In making his latest mock draft, Zierlein wrote that he tries to venture "into each general manager's headspace and hypothesizing what the thinking could be relative to draft capital, needs and the board in general" and looks at the team's draft history for potential clues about their organization's priorities and which kinds of players fit inside that building.
With just about everything new in Ashburn after the dismissal of Ron Rivera and most of his entire coaching staff, how does that work for this season?
For Peters, in his first year as a general manager, Zierlein tells Sheehan that he looks at how he learned and who he learned from: John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan with the San Francisco 49ers.
"You want to look at how they prioritize because, typically that particular team of all the teams, they are very set in what types of players – defensive players they look for like Chase Young, for example – big, long, good lean mass. You can see that along the defensive front," he said. "Offensively, things have changed under Kyle Shanahan, it's not as easy to put them in nice neat categories as it was when you look at outside zone teams."
So when it comes to quarterback, Zierlein tried to piece together who Kliff Kingsbury had in his past now that he was hired to be Washington's offensive coordinator this offseason.
This led to his prediction of LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels as the No. 2 overall pick over Drake Maye. (On the UNC passer he said: "After watching tape, I'm like, 'why are people saying Drake Maye as quarterback two? This doesn't make sense off the tape.")
On Daniels, Zierlein added that he has the Heisman Trophy winner "very close" to USC quarterback and likely No. 1 overall pick Caleb Willaims, saying "it's basically neck-and-neck" between the two when looking at on-field play.
"I was really disappointed with Caleb's tape, if I'm being hoesnt," he told Sheehan. "When I turned the tape on I was expecting to see this 'generational player'... and he's not generational when you watch tape, [that's] just a term people throw around all the time."
He added: "When you watch Caleb Williams you see all the talent, you see the arm talent, you see the ability to extend and make special plays, you see the big splashes. But you also see hanging on to the football forever. You see too much hero ball. Now, I could also say I saw some of that with Pat Mahomes when he was coming out."
Overall, Williams' "desire to win on every single play with a big play" is not a way in which you can "survive" in the NFL, Zierlein said. "I think that's something that he's gotta get away from."
With Daniels, who spent five years in college to "get to this point," he has a thinner frame and is a runner, but what "shinned" in Zierlein's eyes was the Tigers quarterback's ability to work against zone defenses.
"He made anticipatory throws in the middle of zone patches, he worked with confidence in getting through his progressions, I think he was a full-field reader, he had two excellent wide receivers, without question, I think that certainly helped him," he said. "But I also thought he played within the structure of the offense. You want to see him maybe sit tighter a little bit longer... maybe extending with his legs behind the line of scrimmage looking to hurt people with his arm because it's hard to make a living running as much as he did in college."
Overall, "on tape," Daniels had better year than Williams.
After making that first selection, Washington – with all this draft capital including six picks in the Top 100 of the draft – Zierlein sees Peters to "be very aggressive" and with how San Francisco operated recently that points to "links at cornerback, I'm gonna look for wide receivers who have run after catch ability because that's a direction that Kyle Shanahan started to go in."
The full conversation from The Kevin Sheehan Show – including a sneaky JJ McCarthy rising in the draft, Maye needing to "sit for a year" with a low floor and high ceiling – and much more on the NFL Draft on the audio player above!