Sam Howell threw 19 passes in his NFL debut this past January, and 12 in his first game action since on Friday night. The Commanders offense will go as he goes, and when the Junkies were discussing his preseason debut on Monday, Cakes revealed that friend of the show Ryan Wilson from CBSSports.com had some grades for "Rookie of Year 2-ish QBs" after Week 1 of the preseason, and Howell got a B.
Better than some heralded rookies selected atop the draft this year, although that led to a discussion between the Junkies about how, on one play Friday, John Bates was wide open but Howell didn't get him the ball immediately and Bates ended up dropping it – and how he had a hot route on the play he was sacked but missed that, too, after looking at the receiver.
"Eric Bieniemy knows they are going to minor in throwing to John Bates – he's there to block. If he's wide open and can get 20 yards, throw him the ball, but I have eight guys I can think of he should be throwing to over John Bates," Cakes said.
"It's an issue with footwork, maybe, and you can listen to what Logan Paulsen had to say earlier in the show about it," JP replied. "Is he going through the progressions correctly, and fast enough?"
"To me it appears he sees the field well, and is calm under pressure. It just doesn't look like he's overwhelmed and running for his life," EB chimed in. "Maybe he will end up doing so, but right now that's not the case."
Here's an interesting one, though – in what's probably going to be the least Howell plays this preseason, JP wants to know why he didn't just throw 20 or 30 passes and see what happened?
"In the regular season, a nice balanced approach with some play-action…I'm being extreme here, but I would like to see more work, a lot more work, from Sam Howell," JP said. "We already know they're not playing him in the final preseason game, so why not?"
"They wanted to have a successful outing and they made it easy for him," EB said. "That's what I think they're going to do to slowly build him up – nothing difficult. They don't want to just throw caution to the wind and who knows what happens. The coaches see him every day and know what he can do. They put him out there in the regular-season finale last year because they needed to see more of him."
Take a listen to the entire discussion of Howell's progression (or lack thereof?) above?
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