Head Coach Todd Monken (8.1.26)
You had both quarterbacks today we talked to them, and they’re obviously going to be a hot topic today. As you look at the first three full days of practice, how would you say those guys are each doing, and how is the competition coming along?
“Doing fine. I don’t think you’re really going to know until you get through all the installs, because we’re not game planning against our own defense. Each day has been a different part of the pass game, so it’s hard to really [tell]. And one day you go with the ones, the other day you go with the twos, certainly that matchup is going to be different depending on who you’re going against. I think the most important thing is, from a process standpoint, how are we operating at the line of scrimmage, where are their eyes, have they taken command of one the huddle, and then cadence, and then understanding the concepts. I think they’re all doing good, they’re all fine. All of our players are working through mistakes and fighting like hell to get better.”
Is this the last day of install today?
“Oh no, we’ve got eight. Today’s day four. We’ll go through next Thursday for our main installs. We’ll go through eight installs so we’ve got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Gap scheme is going Monday for a reason, that’s the first day of pads. The other days, the first three days, when you’re in shells and helmets, you really want to stay in wide zone and tight zone rather than getting in the gap schemes. Next week we’ll get much more of the gap schemes.”
Todd (Monken), six practices in a row next week. Is that something you did in Baltimore? What are you hoping to accomplish from that?
“Well, it all depends on how you look at six practices in a row. I think after you get through the six practices you look at well, was day three the same time or were they in full pads? Obviously next Friday we’re going to be in helmets. So it’s six days in a row, but the players get one day off a week. You can either spot it or just say we’re just going to make it every Sunday; they want to go to church, they want to spend it with their family, they get Sunday, it’s consistent. We did the same thing with family days, here in the organization; every Monday is family day. You just try to make it consistent. What does that do? It makes one long week. But let’s say we’d had the day off on Thursday or Friday next week, well then when do you give them the next day off? It’s just the planning part of it. We don’t intend on going six straight days of contact, hitting first; you can’t, okay? Or the length.”
You ask a lot of the quarterbacks pre-snap before each play. How have you seen them adjust to that fire hose of information you’re asking of them before the ball even snaps?
“First of all, all four are highly intelligent and want to be perfect, and they want to get us in the right play or protection. At times they can try to be too perfect, and that creates anxiety at the line of scrimmage. We’ve got to get up, get down, run the play right, learn from our mistakes, and then we can take it from there. But all of them are trying to do it right, get us in the right play, and I’ve been really impressed. Yesterday was our best day in terms of that, certain things not as good, but yesterday there were a number of quarterback-controlled situations that they were exceptional at.”
As far as being in pads, would Monday be a half session, or will you go the full length?
“Monday has to be 90 minutes, mandated by the league. So, it will be a padded day and 90 minutes. These early practices are mandated in terms of when you get through the first six are mandated in terms of the amount of time. It ramps up from 90 to 105 to 120 and then works back down as you work your way back up. Then after that, if you want to go for two and a half hours, you can. We’re not going to do that, there will be some days we will, but it is allowed.”
Yesterday you talked about Deshaun’s (Watson) interceptions in the earlier practice, but what did you see on the throw that Quincy (Williams) picked off?
“Similar in the fact that we were in a slot formation without an open one, and we’d talked earlier in the day about that specific individual route and how you have to be careful of all the traffic that could be in there. And what was really cool about it was that we talked about it earlier in the day. I’ll be damned if he didn’t go in there, and there was traffic in there, and he threw it, and we got an interception. To me, that was really cool. Not at the moment; it wasn’t really cool, but looking at it now, it’s really cool that it was able to back up what we’d talked about. Je has to be careful of that route and the spacing that’s not created when we go to it.”
On the topic of cadences, you said you want up to 10 eventually in a game. Are they numbers? Does the quarterback call out a cadence number in the huddle, or how are they identified?
“It’s in the huddle, we’ll tell him. We rarely just say, ‘Call whatever you want.’ They’ll understand when and where we’re thinking of certain cadences. We’re going to have wristbands, and it’s on the wristband telling them what to do, but only the quarterback sees that, and then he communicates that in the huddle. But there’s so much more to it, you get to the line of scrimmage, there’s communication, there’s talk, there’s blocking assignments. It’s easy to just kind of not stay dialed into what the cadences are. That’s why you have to continue to fight to work it every day.”
Was it better yesterday?
“It was better yesterday. Not on defense. I think we had 14 penalties yesterday, which is not ideal. 12 total were pre-snap, offense had four, defense had eight. Not ideal, but again, some of that’s the cost of doing business if you want to be in an attack style front and crowd the line of scrimmage, you’re going to have a few of those. But now’s the time to work it and get better at it.”
We see Deshaun (Watson) and Shedeur (Sanders) with such different personalities. How are they in meetings?
“They do have different personalities, as Dillon does; every human being is unique. Everybody else is taken, so they definitely have different personalities, but both are very sharp. Obviously, Deshaun, based on his experience in the NFL, is going to have a little bit better grasp of what’s being asked of him just from an operational standpoint, from a cadence standpoint, from an offensive-system standpoint because there are still going to be some similarities from system to system right. Changing plays, cadence, it’s called one thing here and another. Well, Shedeur is just at the early stages of that. Dillon has been in three different programs and now this is his fifth offense, so he’s probably got a little bit more experience at that. Every player works at a different speed or pace; it’s our job to – by the time they play to really get them up to speed so they can play at a high level where they can play fast and that’s part of the system.”
Two-part question: Have you given any thought to letting each quarterback get consecutive days running with the ones to see if they can get a little bit of a rhythm? And when you put out the second- and third-team units, is the defense running a more vanilla defense, or are they running the exact same stuff as the starting defense?
“Well, they are installing. The scripts are the same from field to field, allows us to communicate that. So you’re getting the exact same look other than the personnel may be different on both sides of the ball. We have not really gone back-to-back with the ones. Doesn’t mean you can’t. Whether you went two days with Deshaun and then two days the other way, you could say they’d get in a rhythm, but then you put them with the twos for two days and that could break the rhythm. We’ve made the decision to go every other day just to try as best we can to give each quarterback an opportunity with the ones. Is it going to be ideal? No, right? Because you’re installing, and you’re going against the ones and twos. Ultimately, whichever way you decide to divide the reps, even its practice within the practice it’s not always ideal.”
Todd, Gabriel and Taylen (Green) are getting many more reps than they did in the spring? Is that because you have more practice time, or did you ramp things up?
“Well, we have more practice time, we have more reps and it’s not even and we didn’t get other in minicamps, we didn’t get a walk. We two-spot our walk you guys aren’t here, so we get 35 reps in our walk. So they each get full reps, and we’re going two-spot, so they’ll get reps there when we two-spot on the field, which we’re able to do because we have more bodies. We had some guess not here, we had more guys banged up, which allowed us to go two-spot. That’s the point of going two-spot to get as many reps as you can, not equally, but as many reps as we can. I just thought of it – What happened yesterday was when the other field, say with Dillon, the other field was a little bit behind, that gave us a chance to get ‘Okay, let’s get all the plays. Dillon, go back up there with your group,’ let’s get as we can get, right? Especially for the quarterbacks. Not it always ideal that’s the hard part is to get all those reps with the quarterbacks. It’s hard because it taxes everybody else. The quarterback are never taxed besides maybe their shoulder outside of that their not staggering up the line of scrimmage after 20 straight plays. That’s the hard part, how do you balance your players’ reps and trying to get your quarterbacks reps.”
Todd, Deshaun talked about how practice is sometimes the best time to take some chances — you mentioned squeezing the ball into certain areas — and test it out as well and that certain sessions are better for that than others. How do you communicate to them when those opportunities present themselves, and how do you evaluate them, as you go through this whole process, knowing sometimes they were just trying something, you don’t want interceptions ever, but how do you balance that?
“It’s a combination of all that. Great question by the way. Now is the time to push the envelope in a lot of ways to see where they’re at. We certainly don’t want the interceptions and too many of them are beyond being a teaching tool – at some point you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m beyond being taught here. Stop throwing the ball to the other side.’ But it is part of the process of just working through it, and interceptions are part of the game, unfortunately. But again, did you learn from that? Now we’ll find out as we keep moving. Are we making the same mistakes, are we learning from that and moving on? Because you’re never too old to learn. I get a kick out of it when people say, ‘Well, you’re this far along,” – hell, I’m 60, I’m not done learning. That never ends. Learning and getting better.”
Kind of going off of that question, how much do you, percentage-wise, is it what you see on film — the mental side, the processing and everything — when you’re comparing the two, what you see on the field, and what they’re doing process wise, compare to the physical side of that?
“Yeah, that’s part of it. There’s a mental aspect of the operation; does it look like you want it to look like. Just start before the snap, that’s why we do perfect operation. How does it look before the snap? And then there’s the physical part of it. At this point when you’re installing, when I’m scripting, I really am not scripting on who is at quarterback, they each have a different skill set, so as of right now, I’m not evaluating any of them. I’m not making a decision on any of them until we get through all the installs, and we get to where the practices are the same, we’re scripting it based on who’s taking the reps. And we’re playing the preseason games, and we’re going against the Bills. I’ll take that back. We are evaluating, but not to that extreme, nothing’s going to be decided over these install practices. We’re just getting it in, letting the guys compete, see where we’re at, that’s at all positions. Once we get further along in pads, the full install in, we get to compete against other people, that’s really when I’m going to be able to see it because I haven’t coached any of these four quarterbacks until now, I haven’t been around them. I don’t have any preconceived notions of who they’ve been or where they’re going. I just take it day to day, we install, and as we get further along, we’ll have a better idea.”
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