Breaking down clips from Commanders training camp

Taking a closer look at a few plays from the first few days of Commanders training camp

The Washington Commanders are nearly through their first week of training camp and things are set to ramp up. At the time of writing, the Commanders have had four training camp practices, but none with full pads. On Monday, the pads come on and we’ll finally get to see some real contact. This is when things start to get interesting and the real camp battles, especially in the trenches, get underway.

So if you’re going to any of the training camp practices coming up and record footage of practice on your phone, send me the footage or tweet me any clips of practice you might find and I’ll gather them up and break down what we can learn from them. 

In the meantime, I’ve rounded up a few clips from the first few days of camp to take a closer look at. The first clip I wanted to break down comes from Commanders reporter Zach Selby on twitter. 

https://x.com/ZachSelbyWC/status/1817555369175941190

Note: Tweets still won't embed on substack, so you will have to click the link to see the clip

Earlier this offseason, I wrote a post looking at how the Commanders are running warm up drills now under Kliff Kingsbury. Rather than just having one or two quarterbacks throw individual routes, Kingsbury gets every quarterback on the roster to take a snap at the same time while having multiple receivers running routes at the same time too. Each quarterback will have a designated receiver that they are throwing to on the play, but they are trained to progress through reads and play on time, so the first quarterback gets the ball out straight away to the first read while the second quarterback throws next to the second read and so on. 

You can see that here on this rep. The Commanders are practicing what Kingsbury calls a “Follow” concept. 

On this Follow concept, the offense has three receivers to one side of the field in a trips set. The inside receiver runs a quick slant designed to grab the attention of any immediate coverage and drag them inside. The slot receiver then runs a slightly deeper slant route that can break off at different angles depending on the coverage. The third receiver on the outside runs a delayed under, where they get to the same depth as the slant routes but pause at the top of the route to enable the inside receivers to vacate space first. The receiver then breaks directly inside at a 90 degree angle rather than at a 45 degree angle like a slant route. 

In this example, Jeff Driskel hits tight end Zach Ertz on the inside slant before Sam Hartman finds Jahan Dotson in the slot. Jayden Daniels is the final quarterback to throw, working all the way outside to Dyami Brown on the delayed under. 

This is a fairly common quick game concept that is used around the NFL. The Commanders actually used it fairly often under Eric Bieniemy last season. 

Under Bieniemy, this concept was called “Missile”. You can see Sam Howell initially work inside as McLaurin runs the first route. He progresses to the slot but finds Curtis Samuel cut off by the slot corner, so he moves all the way outside where he finds Jahan Dotson. It’s a nice concept to have installed and a versatile one too because it can be run by any combination of any three receivers. You don’t necessarily need a big tight end inside or a speedy guy outside, you can line up any three receiver profiles in a trips set and run this concept successfully. 

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The second play I wanted to look at was sent to me on twitter by Lucas Landry (@LucasLandry19 on twitter) He sent me a clip of Daniels keeping the ball on a read-option run. 

This play is a great example of just how much the read-option can help the run game. We don’t get a fully clean look at the entire play from this camera angle, but what we can see is that the Commanders are running what appears to be an inside zone concept to the right with Daniels reading an unblocked defensive end off the left side. The defense has linebacker Jordan Magee walked out over the slot to the right, but he rushes off the edge at the snap while defensive end Andre Jones Jr. stunts inside the right tackle. Another linebacker, Anthony Pittman, quickly emerges in the A gap between the left guard and center to plug a lane inside. So if the ball is handed off on a normal run here, the defense probably has a big tackle for loss on the cards. 

However, Daniels reads the unblocked defensive end on the backside, Dante Fowler Jr, who crashes inside on the running back. That tells Daniels to pull the ball and keep it himself. With Fowler crashing inside and the other linebackers committed inside already, there’s nobody free to account for Daniels as he pulls the ball and runs to the edge. Daniels takes off and shows his speed as he bursts through the defense for a nice run. That is the power of a quarterback with Daniels’ athletic ability. The offensive line hadn’t particularly blocked up the run well and the defense would have stuffed it had it just been a normal run. But because Daniels can even up the numbers in the run game, he was able to pull the ball and turn it into a big gain instead.