Micah Parsons still isn’t ready to play after last year’s knee injury, but he still knows how to mix things up.
Parsons recently said on his podcast, The Edge with Micah Parsons, that quarterback Jayden Daniels is to blame for the game-clock clusterfudge at the end of overtime in the Giants-Commanders game.
“Jayden Daniels probably cost my man Dan Quinn his job, to be honest with you,” Parsons said, via Nicki Jhabvala of The Athletic. “To be honest with you. And, like, I’m a big Jayden Daniels fan. But the reality is, he probably cost a lot of people their jobs this past weekend. . . .
“All respectfully, we get coached so much on these situations that, like, I’m a defensive player, and this shit’s programmed to me. I even know what to do in those situations. There’s no way I’m taking a sack with 14 seconds left and no timeouts. . . . And, mind you, it’d be different if Jayden Daniels was a rookie. This is your third year. This is your third year. You’ve been to the NFC Championship game. You’ve been in big moments before. And to me, like even after a sack, you’re casually getting up.”
Parsons made it clear that, in his view, quarterbacks are expected to always know what’s going on.
“This is your job, bro,” Parsons said. “This is your job to be prepared to understand the game and understand situations. That’s in your job profile. And you’re telling me, ‘Oh, we’re gonna want to pay this guy eventually $6000000? This cannot happen. . . . I’m a big JD5 fan, but that’s inexcusable, bro.”
Parsons said that the Packers work on situational football “every day,” What happened at the end of the Giants-Commanders game should have required no discussion, frankly.
“This is a lack of preparation, a lack of mentality, and a lack of urgency,” Parsons said. “That just can’t happen.”
Parsons isn’t wrong. The fact that it did happen raises plenty of questions about the level of preparation and attention to detail, as created by the coaching staff. It speaks to potential cultural flaws, perhaps one in which Daniels hasn’t been challenged or held as accountable as he could have or should have been, given his standing in the organization.
It would be a lot easier to make sense of all of this if the Commanders had recorded and preserved the relevant communications. And Daniels surely will face even more questions on this topic the next time he speaks to reporters.
The fact that the outcome was so bizarre, so jarring, and so downright surreal becomes a horrible moment for everyone involved. As to the ultimate consequences, Parsons hit the nail on the head — Daniels’s failure to take charge of the situation in the moment will probably cost Quinn his job.
But Daniels will continue to be the starting quarterback because, even if he made an inexcusable mistake as to one of the easiest parts of the job, he does the hard parts better than most of his peers.