Sometimes, Craig Hoffman just gets so mad he has to rant…and after discussing Jayden Daniels with John Keim on Monday, Craig, host of ‘Never Read the Comments,’ read the comments and had to be petty.
Had to be petty in CRUSHING the Jayden Daniels trolls, especially one who said in the YouTube comments verbatim: “YOU wanted Maye, Hoffman. Get over it!”
“There is very silly part of this fan base that heard me say something nice about Drake Maye once and refuses to give it up – so I'm gonna look dead into the camera and I'm gonna say this as clearly as I can: y'all suck. You're the worst. You make my days, and the days of everyone else who is a part of the Commanders’ universe, miserable. You suck. Stop doing this. What is wrong with you?”
Damn Craig, don’t hurt ‘em! But wait, there’s more.
“I talk about this team by and large; from February to April, we do five shows a week, mostly three hours long – that’s 15 hours of radio a week, 150 hours over 10 weeks. In 2 ½ months of draft talk, I was very clear that this was an ongoing evaluation, where I was gonna be honest and transparent with where I was at different points of that evaluation, which involve looking at different factors,” Craig said. “And yes, there were times that I was like, I really get it with Drake Maye – and by the way, the other part of this, the other reason y'all are terrible, is because you can't hold two thoughts in your head at once, which is to say that maybe there are multiple correct answers to the test. Maybe Maye, and Daniels, and JJ McCarthy, and Michael Penix could have all worked out here, maybe they actually have the infrastructure being a good organization now that any of those could have been right. Which, if you listen with regularity, was a big point I made along the way: it wasn't so much about getting it right as opposed to making yourself right, because what you do post-draft with Jayden Daniels would be different than the others because of how you'd want to build around each of their skill sets – so, I avoided giving definitive rankings.”
That didn’t stop the haters, though.
“In my power rankings along the way, there was a very short amount of time that I had Drake Maye atop those. It was right after the Combine, when I heard a lot of different stuff about why so many people were so high on Drake, and heard some of the questions about Jayden,” Craig said. “I started to watch a little bit more All-22, and the stuff that I could get my hands on at the time, a couple of games that I watched I was like, dang, that's a big take up in what I think of Drake based off being able to see the film – which is why you guys listen to the show: to get insight that's a little deeper than just talking amongst yourselves on the internet, because I've actually been a reporter who does this. So yeah, I'm being petty as hell right now, but I'm just sick of it.”
After this rant, Craig is never going there again, and will just delete ‘dumb comments’ – but not before he’s done here.
“I refuse to have saying a nice thing about another player at some point in the draft process be held against me by some people for the rest of Jayden Daniels’ career, because I want to be able to think with a clear mind about Jayden Daniels – who, by the way, I ranked as either 2 or 1B by draft day,” Craig said. “Yeah, I like JJ McCarthy; guess who else did? THE COMMANDERS! He was the other guy they were considering, but ultimately, they took the upside swing of Daniels, and I think it's probably the right decision with where they were in the draft. I even said that as I ranked McCarthy higher in my own personal rankings; I said I would probably do what they're doing and take Daniels, because the upside is higher, and how often do you get to swing like this?”
Craig asked this particular troll for proof to back up his claim, but of course, crickets – and that’s why he’s going to be crickets on the topic from now on.
“Maybe he had tuned out by then, but no response, and that's what always happens: they like to throw bombs and be a little troll and then disappear when confronted with the actual information, and I'm just sick of it, because it makes it worse for everybody,” Craig said. “So I'm standing up for everybody here, not just my own. Yeah, I'm being petty, but I had time today, and I'm doing this for everyone else so that everyone else doesn't have to say what I just said, which is some of y'all that like Jayden Daniels made that your entire personality, and if anybody said anything nice about any other quarterback, you launch like a pack of rabid dogs on them and never would let go, even though they're like, ‘hey guys, we like Jayden too.’ Y'all suck. Do better please. For the love of God, don't make that the entire existence of Daniels’ career in DC; just be a smarter person, be less dogmatic about who you like in a quarterback class when we all know the the difficulty of doing that kind of evaluation. The best in the world don't know, so why do you think you do, and why do you not allow people to have full thoughts and to actually explore the space, especially if they ultimately land exactly where you do? What point do you have to prove? Because I'll tell you the point you proved to the rest of us who have critical thinking skills: you're not nearly as smart as you think you are. That's it, that's my petty rant, and I'm literally never talking about this again.”