This weekend, we're going to find out something. Monday Night Football on the road against a struggling Cincinnati Bengals team was one thing, but this is a different animal. This is a Baltimore Ravens team – with an offense led by Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry – coming off three consecutive wins.
This will be the most pressure Washington Commanders rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels will face entering a start in his young NFL career.
"We're gonna find out just how well Jayden Daniels deals with pressure," Craig Hoffman said on Team 980.
"And depending on how that goes," Hoffman continued, this could be the final weeks of talking about the best quarterback Washington has seen over the last 30 years is Kirk Cousins. "And the idea that the rest of these [Washington QBs] can't even get into pressure [situations]" the rookie QB and the "Commanders have gotten themselves into some form of pressure about as much pressure as you can get into in October," he said.
Real pressure could come in the later months – and we're still a long ways from that – but this matchup between a pair of Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks.
"Lamar Jackson vs. Jayden Daniels," Hoffman said, a headline that reads more true than normal when talking about players who won't directly face off as they'll never be on the field at the same time, "but I do think in this game on Sunday, the game flow is so obscenely important."
"For all of the tests that the Commanders have passed, they have not in the second half of any game had to deal with – especially defensively – being down," he said, adding what happens to a team when the opposition lines up to ram it down your throat? What happens to the offense and Daniels and the play-calling when they know are in a situation where they no longer feel like they can be quite as balanced in run and pass?
"We know that this [Commanders] team would rather be run-first, play a lot of the short stuff and then wait for their opportunities to take shots down the field, they don't want to force anything," Hoffman said. "So what happens if they're in a game flow situation where they're not up or tied in the second half? Or where they're chasing a game. That is one of the tests."
In that way, the Daniels vs. Jackson matchup headline is apt because both offenses are trying to push the other into a position that they do not want to be.
Plus, for a complete look at Washington's offense under Kliff Kingsbury, talk about how the revamped Commanders offense can impact Sunday's game, Daniels vs. Jackson talk and much more, ESPN's Ben Solak joined Craig for a very enlightening conversation.
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