Dawson Knox is on a mission to cut down his drops. So naturally, he turned to ping pong balls.
During an appearance on the “Howard and Jeremy Show” on Tuesday, Knox talked about his training with performance vision coach Ryan Harrison, who’s worked with athletes on improving their hand-eye coordination for 22 years. While Harrison has primarily worked in baseball, he’s started training with football players in recent years, including Odell Beckham Jr.
Knox is now a devotee. He spent ample time this offseason catching ping pong balls and partaking in memorization drills.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said with Howard Simon and Jeremy White on WGR. “It was fun just to train in a different way that wasn’t super physically exhausting, but just to work on the hand-eye coordination stuff. Becoming a tight end in college, the kind of scheme we had there, I didn’t get as many looks as I might have wanted. But now, I want to be able to catch anything that’s thrown at me. I don’t want to be dropping balls. I don’t want to have that issue. Training with a guy like Ryan gets your eye working in different ways.”
Knox prioritized working on his pass-catching abilities this offseason. In addition to working with Harrison, he trained with Josh Allen in California.
He says the hand-eye workouts were exhausting.
“At the end of the day, I would feel tired just from the eye muscles working in different ways,” Knox said. “Three or four other NFL guys I was working with, they would say the same thing. It was super interesting to learn how he does what he does.”
So far, Knox says he’s seeing the benefits. He needs to improve on his 24-catch campaign.
“The biggest part is the confidence thing, just locking it in every single catch,” Knox said. “When I would get in trouble is, thinking it was an easy catch, and turning up field and trying to make somebody miss before I completed the catch. But it’s just that concentration of looking in every single ball. Thankfully, I have been able to tell the difference.”
The third-year tight end hasn’t stopped at ping pong balls. Knox also attended Tight End University, working alongside Travis Kelce and other titans at his position.
The trip was well worth it.
“It was incredible,” Knox said. “Just hearing from different guys around the league — Darren Waller, Greg Olson he’s one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever talked to in terms of football. We spent an hour on one route. Just hearing what those guys have to offer, and things they might do differently. It was jus really cool to expand your toolbox a little bit and get on the field and practice some stuff.”
With all that in mind, Knox is ready for his big third-year leap.
“I would say it’s night and day different than when I was a rookie coming in with my head spinning, just trying to learn the offense, just trying to know what formation to line up in, what route to run,” he said. “But now, I can focus on the little details of knowing when Josh is going to looking at me, and just knowing different reads on my blocking, and just honing in on the little things to take my game to the next level. I feel literally night and day different than I did during my rookie year.”
You can listen to Knox's entire interview below:
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