Daniels Ready to Lead the Charge! Commanders QB Has the Right Mindset to Take Down Buccaneers

Everyone knows Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels is a different player entering this weekend than he was during the opening week when he first faced the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The question then is really about how the Commanders’ rookie has grown and, more importantly, how that growth will impact the Wild Card game against the Buccaneers this Sunday night.

According to the quarterback himself, he may have changed but the most important part of it hasn’t, even as he takes Washington into recently uncharted waters.

“Going back and watching the film, you could just see you learn a lot more as the season goes by,” Daniels said this week when asked where he feels he’s grown during his first NFL season. “Obviously, that was my first game, and I’m just trying to go out there and learn some more experiences. But I mean, at the end of the day it’s still football, it’s still going to be a challenge to go up and compete against those guys once again.”

That’s how it works for Daniels. No matter what the Commanders are up against, he always comes back to center, never letting any one failure or success get so deep into his psyche that he can’t eject it so he can focus on the task at hand.

His ability to do that is something we’ve witnessed him not only possess but learn to harness as one of the things head coach Dan Quinn refers to as superpowers–or, in this case, his X-Factor.

“There’s an X-factor that he has and compartmentalizing, it’s an accurate term to see, can I put it in the box and go on to the next play?,” Quinn says about his quarterback. “There’s a real discipline about him where sometimes we’ve heard the motivation can be up and down, but discipline is the day after day things. And he’s a really disciplined player as well. Routine, the practice habits, the things to go through. So, I would say there’s probably the compartmentalization, but there’s also a rock-solid, disciplined approach that he takes to performing, to practicing, to preparing.”

One may come before the other, but at the end of the day, the result is a quarterback who has impressed even offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury, whose resume of passers he’s worked with is long and impressive.

“I think that’s probably one of his strongest traits is that he can process it really quickly and be onto the next play,” Kingsbury says. “He wants to be perfect, he wants to play great, he wants to win every rep, but once the play is over, he’s onto the next one really quickly. And that’s not easy to do as a young player or (even) an established player.”

That ability makes Daniels his biggest critic, Kingsbury added, but it is also something that makes him incredibly easy to coach at times, knowing that whatever may weigh other quarterbacks down isn’t likely doing the same to this one.

“That’s who I am,” says Daniels. “You got to learn to not let bad plays stack on top of the bad plays. If you have a bad play, you move on to the next play. And you can’t really focus on anything that’s in the past; you got to worry about the present, be where your feet are.”

So, despite the fact that the last time Daniels and the Commanders’ collective feet were on the Raymond James Stadium surface, they were walking away with the first of their five losses this season, this game truly is different in just about every way.