Josh McDaniels on Drake Maye 10/29: "His approach has been tremendous"

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

How are we doing? Good, good.

I won't ask the first question today because I stumbled so badly last week.

Josh McDaniels (0:08)

That's all right, try to get it up to the plate. Swing again.

SPEAKER_1 (0:13)

Thoughts on the matchup against Miami? How's that?

Josh McDaniels (0:16)

That's great, that's a great question. That's good, that's just all Miami today. I like it.

I've known Jeff for a number of years, and he's a really, really good football coach. And you can see what they're doing. It's a different scheme, obviously, than what we played last year, using their players in a lot of different ways to create negative plays, negative situations.

Aggressive at times, sound, mostly his own team, play with tremendous effort. You can see the culture that he's trying to instill in their defensive unit. They're going to run and chase at a ball. I don't think we've seen one team this year try to punch and hammer the ball out from the ball carrier as well as you see Miami do that. Specifically, the two linebackers are elite in that regard, Brooks and Rodriguez. So, I mean, every time you get tackled, you're going to get, somebody's going to swing to try to get the ball loose. So, trying to create turnovers and takeaways that get guys that can rush. I've always had a great deal of respect and admiration for Seeler up front. He does so many things well, does a lot of dirty work to let other people produce linebackers. I mean, Brooks we've played against many times. He's tremendous, plays with great effort, an excellent blitzer, probably as good as we'll see. Secondary is young, but super opportunistic, have their eyeballs on the quarterback, and then they start to challenge you in situational football with different packages and things that you're not going to see on the rest of the first and second down snaps, but you're going to start to see them on third down, in the red zone, low red zone, goal line, short yardage type situation. They have a lot of scheme that's apparent.

So, like I said, you can see the culture that he's trying to instill down there. They've played with great effort this season, played a lot of really good offensive football teams that we've been able to watch here now for the last so many days. So, big challenge, always down there is different than playing them up here. Just because you know you're going to deal with heat, you're not going to deal with potential rain, you know, those kind of things. So, big challenge for us on the road.

SPEAKER_3 (2:44)

Josh, I know that sometimes it's different with the work you've had to produce. What's allowed you, Larry Eridan, to acclimate to the offense so quickly?

Josh McDaniels (2:52)

I think his work ethic, he's mature beyond his years in terms of the way that he approaches the game. I think he has as good a mentor. He's kind of like I talked about with Mac Collins in the receiver room, Hunter Henry's pretty much the same. In terms of how unselfish he's been with Eli and all the young guys in that room, just giving him his time and attention, helping him with little things when they're in there.

Eli's a sponge. He's a very quick learner. He processes a lot of information. He's a very bright kid.

He's been out there, you know, save for a couple practices here and there when he got dinged up a little bit. I mean, he's out there all the time. He gives us an opportunity to rep and make a mistake and then correct it. And then he's not an air repeater. So young players that don't repeat errors have a chance to improve quick. And I think that's what we've seen. And I think he's given us a lot of confidence in the things that he does well. And I think you see that in the quarterback's willingness to go to him in critical situations and he's earned that.

Phil (4:01)

AJ, two games and five days after four weeks in on the IR. How is he holding up physically?

SPEAKER_5 (4:06)

And how close do you think he is to being the number you want?

Josh McDaniels (4:09)

Yeah, I wouldn't be able to comment on where the number he is and all that. Look, he's played eight quarters in almost two months and had four practices, I think.

So, I'm certainly in the mode of, you know, this is a process of building into our best football. We've seen that with pretty much every player that's come here, you know, starting last year. And then obviously, we've seen that already this year with different guys. So, I think there's things that we can work on to do better. And certainly his health is going to be a big part of that. So, you know, when they tell us he can do A, B, and C, we'll do A, B, and C. And if there's some element of thing we need to wait on, then we'll do it, you know. So, love his attitude and his approach. He's been here working his tail off to try to, you know, put himself in a great position to help our team. And I know he's going to do that.