Why You Shouldn’t Blame Dan Quinn or Jayden Daniels for the QB’s Gruesome Injury

There was no reason for a quarterback to be in a football game down 31 points with just over seven minutes left in the fourth quarter, unless, of course, that quarterback was Jayden Daniels. After his elbow went the way of an inverted umbrella in a tropical storm, he refused an injury cart and walked off the field with his helmet on. Daniels, like most players, has tunnel vision during a game, and in the past has either asked to remain on the field or behaved in a way historically where it wasn’t even a question that needed to be asked. He’s intensely tuned in to—and resistant to—the optics of someone like backup Marcus Mariota having to take hits for him when he’s perfectly healthy. So are most quarterbacks who have signed up for the world’s most absurd job description, where self-sacrifice and martyrdom are praised relentlessly.

I honestly don’t think we can have it both ways. Societally and, certainly in the hyper-intense football bubble, we devour instances where a quarterback absorbs blame for issues that clearly aren’t his own, or stands in the pocket to get cannon blasted by a blitzing defender while still making a throw. Quarterbacks obscure anything and everything that is not related to quarterbacking, lest they be considered, for even a moment, as unserious. It is that exact ethos that probably covered up the inclination for Daniels to walk over to Dan Quinn and say: Hey boss, I’m going to clock out a little early today.

The Patriots only made it a handful of weeks last year with Jacoby Brissett as a human shield for Drake Maye before the decision was made to start the future of the franchise for the first time against a fire-breathing DeMeco Ryans defense. The sinking Bengals traded for the notoriously immobile Joe Flacco and started him with less than a week of practice against Micah Parsons. In either of those cases, the potential for injury was just as prevalent but similarly ignored because in a sport with a 100% injury rate, self-protection is nonexistent at best and a personality flaw at worst (I say just as because, while acknowledging that Daniels had already been injured this season, those were lower-body issues and he was hurt Sunday night in a freak upper-body injury that had nothing to do with hamstring or knee issues).

I’m not sure that’s the answer anyone is looking for, though I’m surprised to see as many former players as I did on Sunday night and early Monday morning calling for Quinn to be reprimanded for leaving Daniels in the game. After the blowout loss to Seattle, Quinn said that the Commanders had removed any and all zone read plays from the call sheet and that, on the particular play that Daniels got injured on, it almost never results in a scramble.

And while I am sure that most people will counter with the thought that, if the situation was bad enough to remove zone read from the call sheet, what was the point of having Daniels in the game, I would again remind the outside world that injuries are not thought of the same way inside a building as they are outside of the building. Speaking an injury into existence, or using the threat of a possible injury as a precursor to make a decision, is akin to reminding a pitcher just how close he is to a perfect game. There is a mysticism around it, and the lengths that some players go—physically, emotionally, superstitiously—to ward off the very negative thought of bodily harm would boggle your mind.

That doesn’t excuse why Daniels was in the game, but I hope it goes some length toward explaining it. The combination of forced machismo, optics and the hope that stringing together a handful of touchdown drives would make a blowout seem less sour were probably the only programs running in the brains of both Quinn and Daniels. We could spend thousands of words discussing why that is a problem, but that would ignore the realities of the NFL.

In fact, outside of Nick Sirianni benching Saquon Barkley just shy of his running back breaking the NFL single-season rushing record last year, and the handful of teams that opt to rest some of their starters in season finales with no playoff implications on the line, there simply aren’t a huge number of instances where a quarterback is pulled due to the possible threat of injury. Jared Goff was throwing passes up 52–21 on the Bears in Week 2 (and Caleb Williams was throwing passes down 45–21). Josh Allen was still in a game against the Jets that same week, up 30–3 after having nearly broken his nose. The following week, Carson Wentz and Jake Browning (the game’s starters, believe it or not), were both still in at 48–3. In the Colts’ 40–6 blowout of the Raiders, both Daniel Jones and Geno Smith were in the game with the score at 40–3. Patrick Mahomes, also in a blowout of the Raiders, was scrambling, throwing passes and getting knocked on his backside while up 28 points. Justin Herbert was getting pummeled while up 24 on the Vikings with less than nine minutes to go in the fourth quarter of their game. Joe Milton came in at the end of last week’s Broncos-Cowboys blowout, though Dak Prescott is an established veteran in his 30s and not a second-year quarterback desperately trying to prove that last year wasn’t a fluke.

Hell, on Thursday, the first time the Ravens had Lamar Jackson healthy in four weeks, the team involved both Jackson and veteran running back Derrick Henry in a majority of the 13 offensive plays Baltimore ran while already up 22 points on a team performing so badly that its general manager was fired a few hours later.

Jackson scrambled and Henry ran the ball seven more times. Why? While we can’t say for sure, Henry is from Florida and was about to break 100 yards. Jackson was also born and raised there and trains there to this day. Perhaps Henry had a particular hurdle that was integral to earning some contract incentives.

Or, hyper-intense and competitive people, who, because of their intensity and competitiveness, made it to the absolute pinnacle of the sport, simply wanted to continue playing football and appealed to the also disgustingly competitive head coach, a man who cares about winning preseason games, and who in order to have achieved his position also had to have been blinded for decades as to the societally proper way to tap out.

In short, Quinn and Daniels were never going to think like us because they’re not like us. Most of the time, that’s a good thing.