If you saw JP Finlay’s tweet, or Nicki Jhabvala’s repost of it, from JP’s post-game interview with Jonathan Allen Sunday afternoon, you know that Allen did NOT hold back – and we are not reposting only because of the graphic language involved.
The Junks played a bleeped out version prior to Allen joined them Monday, as he does every week presented by MainStreet Bank, and in that appearance, he sanitized the language (thankfully for our FCC license) but was just as fired up about the loss.
“I'm still pissed off as much as I am yesterday, but at the end of the day, I mean, it's still a long season ahead of us and still a lot to play for,” Allen said. “So, we got to turn around, like right now, there's no more time to wait or mess around. We got to get this thing figured out moving forward, and my job is to go out there and help the team do that to the best of my abilities, and that's what I'm gonna do.”
The locker room was, as you can imagine, ‘very frustrated’ Sunday afternoon, but Allen reiterated several times that the group has to come together, and stop the one thing that plagues them most.
“I would say the inconsistency, I think the thing that's so frustrating about this team is one week, we'll have a week where we look really good, and the next week we just come out flat. There's just the ups and downs and good teams do not do that,” Allen said. “You cannot win football games in this league by playing inconsistently. Some games the offense shows up and the defense doesn’t, or vice versa. We have the players and the coach to do it, but we just have to go out there and put it all together, and that's the frustrating part. It would be different if we didn't have enough talent and we just weren't a good football team, but we are and we're just not executing, and that's what's frustrating.”
Allen believes in Ron Rivera and Jack Del Rio, as he said when asked point blank, but EB wondered why the D-line just wasn’t more effective against a patchwork Giants line, and why they struggle against the run so much?
“I don't know; I think I have to do a better job of making sure I'm ready to play earlier, and do everything I can to help the guys be ready,” Allen said. “I'll say this: for a defense, the most dangerous plays are always the first 15 that the offense has scripted; those are the plays they rehearse all week in practice and usually run the most clean. They know how we're probably gonna line up in certain situations based on what we've been doing all year, and it’s the first thing that's always hard for a defense.”
The defense did struggle there, but ultimately, Allen believes they settled in, made plays, and kept the Commanders in the game – but as he said overall, “we gotta be better, because we can't put ourselves in these holes and expect to come back every game.”
What about, then, the other side, where the offensive line allowed a Giants team that had five total sacks on the season to sack Sam Howell five times in a half?
“That definitely wasn't their best game, but the only way this season is gonna work is if we circle the wagons. So, it might not have been their best game, but we still had opportunities to win the game,” Allen said. “We gotta take the good and the bad, understand what we didn't do good and what we did do good and move forward. Obviously I don't think anybody played as good as they wanted to, so it’s just frustrating because I know we're better than that.”
EB agreed that inconsistency is what’s frustrating from a fan perspective, and Allen understood, but said the team needs to use the frustration in a positive way to come together and get it fixed.
“I just have to make sure I'm doing my job and doing it at a higher level, and each guy also has to take a hard look at themselves,” Allen said. “That’s what I’m going to do moving forward, and we all have to see where we can improve and help this team get better.”
Take a listen to the entire segment, where Allen also dishes on some prep for the Eagles after facing them (and nearly winning) in Philly a couple weeks back – and gets Valdez’s solution for the “tush push” play – as well as thoughts on the Commanders maybe adopting a similar blitz-heavy scheme as the Giants and more!
