Albert Breer’s Inside the QB Room Series: Joe Burrow | Jordan Love | Jared Goff | Trevor Lawrence
Early on in camp, not everyone picked up on the little detail.
The rest of the Commanders’ coaches and players knew, of course, that Dan Quinn was ratcheting up the intensity and pace of training camp from his first two years, feeling like his team had lost a little bit of the edge it had in 2024. They saw him pack the practice schedule with “call-it” periods, where new coordinators Daronte Jones (DC) and David Blough (OC) were calling plays unscripted, to create more game-like situations for everyone.
But it wasn’t until veteran backup quarterback Marcus Mariota pointed it out that most realized that things didn’t just seem sped up. They actually were. Jayden Daniels, the Commanders’ 25-year-old franchise quarterback, was operating on a 38-second play clock.
“I wanted the stress for everybody,” Quinn said. “So, it’s for David and Jayden, so why not make it as hard as I could at practice?”
Daniels was already adjusting to a very different presnap world, with Blough, an internal hire, bringing an entirely new scheme to the table. No longer would Daniels be lining up, ready to snap the ball with 20 or 25 seconds showing on the play clock. With so much more on his plate, early on, there’d be times when he’d look up, in the midst of his cadence, and see the clock behind the goal posts ticking … 5 … 4 … 3 …
This is the next step in Daniels’s development.
This is why the Commanders, and Daniels, are jumping out of their shoes to show the world what they’ve been working on over the past five months.
This is how Daniels, the breakout star of the 2024 season, regains his career trajectory.
Last year was hard on everyone in Washington. A promising 3–2 start led into a season-crushing eight-game losing streak. That start came despite Daniels missing games against the Raiders and the Falcons with a knee sprain; a hamstring injury short-circuited his Week 5 return; and a dislocated left elbow in Week 9 against the Seahawks ended his season. As all of that was happening, the age of Washington’s roster, the oldest in the NFL, averaging 28.1 years, started to show up. The Commanders finished 5–12, after going 12–5 the year before.
In the wake of all that, Quinn made tough decisions, including turning over his staff and making things tougher on everyone in camp. The play clock, the competitive periods, the grind of the schedule—all of it played into the bigger goal. And after two years of trying to transition Daniels to the NFL smoothly, that meant challenging Daniels in about every way possible.
It’s a challenge Daniels has wholeheartedly bought into.
Daniels’s football IQ
Daniels’s challenge happened inadvertently last December, after the Commanders’ quarterback was shut down, and before he knew Blough, then his position coach, was going to become his coordinator a month or so later. At the time, Daniels was digging into some tape of the 2024 Lions, when Ben Johnson was still there, knowing Blough had been in Detroit the year before with the guru who’d become the Bears’ head coach after that season.
“I had so much time on my hands, so I’m going back; I’m just watching the Lions stuff from my rookie year,” he said. “I’m watching all that, and we’re talking, and he’s just telling me about the systems he’s been in with Jared [Goff]; he’s seen [Matthew] Stafford, Kirk Cousins, KOC [Kevin O’Connell], those guys. Just having conversations.
Daniels then said, “So when he got hired, it was kind of like, Oh, O.K, this is real.”
Their conversations went deep enough, as Daniels was working to satisfy his curiosity and the football craving that his injury created, for the quarterback to recognize that Blough wasn’t just going to run back Kliff Kingsbury’s offense (which ran at a high level when Daniels was healthy) in 2026.
Indeed, the foundation of what Blough is building is based on what he learned under Johnson, with influence from O’Connell and Kingsbury mixed in. The Commanders will be under center a lot more. They will huddle. They will give Daniels more responsibility, and command at the line, which the quarterback himself thinks leans into one of his strengths.
“[Blough] has been with me for three years now,” Daniels said. “So, he knows I pride myself on my football IQ. He knows how to challenge me, and he’s been challenging me. There’ll be times I’ll be mentally exhausted. You’re exerting all that energy. You’ve got to memorize a lot of stuff.”
And in the way Quinn chose to set things up, that was just the tip of the iceberg on the challenge that the coaches were going to present their third-year quarterback.
Learning a new system, with longer, more verbose calls and more variables before the snap, is one thing. But applying it is another, and the call-it periods, where Daniels couldn’t see what was coming on a script, were built to accelerate his ability to do that. Quinn also hired a Brian Flores disciple, Daronte Jones, to run a system that might be the NFL’s most complex, which only adds to how difficult the summer was going to be for Daniels.
The response from Daniels? As the coaches saw it, he looked like a quarterback who couldn’t get enough of it, and wanted to be pushed the way he was.
“He does have a really high football IQ—he and Kliff spent a lot of time together, too,” Quinn said. “And I thought, after a year, he had a good handle on those things, these concepts he liked, and he could get into that. And so to see that expand even more, as these guys are getting together, I think that’s a big deal because David and Jayden, both of these guys, are relentless competitors. They hate to lose. And so, that’s Jayden at practice.
“I like the vibe that they create together because they push one another in a way of, O.K., I don’t know if we can get all this, and, of course, Jayden is like, Put the play in, the protection in, everything. I like that they are hungry in that way together.”
And the results, in the quarterback’s eyes, are already showing up.
Mastering the play clock
The play clock challenge was one that had to be surmounted before Daniels could really get rolling and see what the offense could do for him—and that wasn’t easy.
“I’d just spend more time at the line of scrimmage with Kliff, where he’d call a play in; I might have 22 seconds to diagnose everything,” Daniels said. “And that’s a good thing about being on the ball. You have time, the defense is set, and you have time to diagnose if they’re going to bring a blitz. Now, I might get to the line at nine, eight [seconds]… I’ve got to get set. And if I’ve got to get a kill out [canceling a play and switching to another], sometimes I might not have a chance to send the line the way I know the blitz is coming, so I’ve got to be able to play and beat the blitzer with the throw.
“Little stuff like that has helped me grow in this game where I know I’ve got to beat this blitzer; let me get the ball out; let me be accurate with the ball, and give my guys a chance. Or let me check to something else.”
In a nutshell, he has more room to talk in the huddle. The reward? He has the autonomy to put his own twist on whatever the call is.
That’s something he had an idea was coming, based on his own conversations with Blough, and was reinforced in the offseason when he spent time working out at 3DQB in California—where he shared a practice field with Goff himself. Daniels had a slew of questions. Goff was forthcoming. Conversation ensued.
And Daniels got excited about the possibilities when Goff started to take him through it.
“As long as your eyes and your mind are on time, it’s not really a matter of what type of drop you take with your footwork,” Daniels said. “That’s what I’ve seen on tape. Early on it’s like Blough and them want to drill it; this concept might be a three-[step drop]-to-hitch. And I’m going back and seeing the concepts, and we’ll see two or three different types of plays from different games.
“I’m like, Well, Jared took a three-to-hitch here, and then this one he did this footwork, and it’s all on the same concept. [Being free with that] is the best advice that Jared gave to me.”
The flexibility there, Daniels learned, extends to actually being able to change things on the fly—which, philosophically, should allow the Commanders to go to unscripted things right up until the snap, based on what the defense is showing the QB. The offense has a lot of answers baked in, and gives Daniels the latitude to come up with his own.
That, of course, would be another thing Daniels is fired up about within the scheme, and something he was able to test-drive during camp because of the nature of the practices.
“I’m getting more comfortable, where I might call a play and I know the final formation, but I might put a little shift or a motion on it beforehand, and [Blough] doesn’t know that I’m doing that,” he said. “So we break the huddle, and honestly, he’s thinking that we f—ed up; I might have called a play wrong. And he’s screaming, and I’m just giving him one of those—I got it. And he’s like, O.K., he’s got it. He’s doing his own little thing.
“That’s the main thing, growing in his offense. Stuff like that has been fun.”
The offense fits Daniels
The main thing: The offense fits the parts of Daniels’s game that get less attention.
Daniels is long-limbed, so he’s well-suited to play from under center, because he can easily separate from the line into his drop (and he did play under center during his final year at Arizona State in 2021). And because he presents such a run threat, the Commanders should be able to do a lot off the bootlegs and keepers that are central to the Johnson-inspired scheme.
Then, there’s this intangible: Daniels will be able to use his mind and his experience to manipulate a defense, and really, in time, open up the playbook for Blough.
“In a new system, it doesn’t feel as new to him as it might with someone else because of the work that he’s put in,” Quinn said. “So I’m excited to see him get going. And let me tell you, there’s not a system he wouldn’t be good in. But this player and this system seem like an ideal fit.”
Daniels agrees.
“The balance of play-action passes, the bootlegging, stuff that we’re able to run to marry up with our run game, get those guys moving laterally, it’s going to help out to be able to get some shots in to showcase what I can do with my arm,” he said. ”I’m a passer before I’m a runner. God just blessed me with legs, and the ability to do both. He blessed me with legs a lot of people in this league don’t have. There are some guys that can do it.
“But I look back to the year when Josh [Allen] won MVP but Lamar [Jackson] had that year, and he was still Lamar, but I think he threw for like 4,000 yards.”
In 2024, Jackson averaged less than nine carries per game for the first time in his career—his number was at 8.18. And he had by far his best season as a passer, throwing for 4,172 yards (Jackson’s first 4,000-yard season), 41 scores (his first season with 40 touchdown passes), only four interceptions (a career-low, outside of his rookie year, when he became a starter at midseason), and a career-high 119.6 rating.
As Daniels said, Jackson was still Jackson, rushing for 915 yards and averaging a robust 6.6 yards per carry. He was more effective using that part of his game to open up everything else.
And that’s what has Daniels most juiced for 2026.
“Honestly, how we look as an offense, I’m super excited to see how Blough can call a game,” Daniels said. “You get 60 plays in the game, so how he schemes up a lot of different things, because there are times where [Sean] McVay or the guys like Ben Johnson, KOC, they scheme people open based on what they’re watching and tendencies. So I’m excited for that.”
It’s all about Daniels’s health
So if all of this is about improving on 2025, then the elephant in the room is Daniels’s health.
He had, again, the knee injury, the hamstring, and then the elbow. A knock on him coming out of LSU was that he tended to put himself in harm’s way and take a slew of cartoonish hits (there’s actually a Looney Tunes reel of it on social media). He stayed healthy, for the most part, in college, but the thinking was that his competitive, breakneck style would catch up with him. Last year, it did.
I asked him if, in the aftermath, he regretted any of the 206 carries he had, designed or not, over his first two years as a pro.
“Not regret,” he said, thinking over the zone-read keeper on which his left elbow got bent back, where he just fell wrong, against Seattle in Week 9.
“That’s the most glaring one,” he continued. “Even though that happens many times where you fall and get right back up, that’s probably the most glaring one. I don’t regret it because everything happened for a reason. And, obviously, it helped me to get to this point where I’m at right now. So maybe if I hadn’t gone through that situation, my mindset wouldn’t be switched.
“Like, O.K., don’t take away your superpower because you’re still going to be there; you’re still going to have to run; you’re still going to have to scramble and get some yards. But be super smart about what you’re doing. Basically, protect yourself.”
Daniels knows it won’t necessarily be easy to make these decisions when the bullets start flying, and real blood is shed—that’s the one thing Quinn and his reshuffled staff couldn’t do as much to replicate in practice (nor would you want to with a quarterback).
But Daniels does have a plan. He pointed to a Week 17 game against the Falcons as a rookie, in which he had 16 carries for 127 yards, where, “I had to run a lot to win the game, and that was a big game to win.” It was the Commanders’ playoff clincher. On the flip side, he says, there’ll be other spots where he’ll try and be more judicious.
“I can’t live off of what was done in ’24. Obviously, salute to the other guys in my class. Drake did what he did. So did Caleb. So did Bo. Hopefully, down the line, we can go down as the greatest QB class. I know we have a long way to go, but shout out to them, honestly.”
Daniels
“It’s situational,” he said. “Early in the season, games are lost more than they’re won. Guys are getting in football shape and feeling things out. But when it gets to November, December, when everybody should be playing their peak football, you build up all those reps through time, and those games come down to the one yard or one possession, so every possession, every play matters.”
So, when you put it all together, it isn’t about bringing back the electric, scintillating Daniels of the fall of 2024.
It’s, again, to find his next level.
For Daniels, it will be different. But it’s also a chance, after his 2024 draft classmates Drake Maye, Caleb Williams and Bo Nix took center stage from him last year, to reiterate to everyone who he is and what he has the capability to become.
“Out of sight, out of mind,” he said, smiling. “A lot of people, what they last saw was me getting hurt, so what can I say? I can’t live off of what was done in ’24. Obviously, salute to the other guys in my class. Drake did what he did. So did Caleb. So did Bo. Hopefully, down the line, we can go down as the greatest QB class. I know we have a long way to go, but shout out to them, honestly.
“So I have a chance, when I get out there, in Week 1, to showcase my talents once again, and remind a lot of people.”
And he’s pretty confident, after all that’s transpired, that he has the tools to do just that.
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