Ron Rivera on Jayden Daniels and Caleb Williams play, thoughts on starters playing in preseason | 'G

August and we know you can play. Hey welcome back to our show. This is Ron Rivera. You just heard him. Kyle asked him a question. He's a former head coach. He's a Super Bowl champion. We love to ask Ron questions about everything that's going on. Let's circle back to Chicago. Well, you know, very excited about the play of the quarterback I really am. But not just the quarterback but the whole unit, the team as a whole. To be honest. Because when you look at them, they're kind of working their way already into into regular season shape because a lot of their defensive guys are playing a lot of those guys are getting geared up, and that's going to help the young quarterback out an awful lot. It really is. Well, listen, Akbar made a great point to start the show that there's a lot of hype about Caleb Williams deservedly so. He's got his own show on HBO and his USC the number one pick. Meanwhile the guy drafted right behind him. So the commanders looks really, really good. Doesn't have as much hype. Does he deserve it? Coach, how are you feeling about Jayden Daniels? Well, Jayden has done a very nice job. If you watch what they're doing. Kliff Kingsbury's offense, he's spreading the ball out already and you really haven't seen the whole offense because when you watch the things that they did, especially last night against the other night against Miami, there was no real red zone offense being shown except for the quick throws getting the ball out of his hands quickly. So he's hiding those things a lot of quick passes in this game against Miami. That one was to Terry McLaurin, who's a tremendous offensive player and a big, big target for Jayden. So you're going to see him throw the ball to him an awful lot more. Coach now that you're here, do you feel like sometimes he's like the grown up at the table? Sure. Can you write us a permission slip to be excited about the rookie quarterbacks? Is this are we allowed to do it? Yes I really do think so. Just because there's a number of them that are playing very, very well. I mean, Bo Nix, we just talked about who's having a phenomenal start. But another guy that's kind of quietly going along about it has been Drake Maye. You know he's done some real nice things in New England. You know it's a new offense there. They brought in Jacoby Brissett who is very very familiar with this offense. You know it's one of those things that when you have a young player and you have a guy like a Jacoby Brissett who loves working with young guys. This this guy Drake Maye is going to make an impact at some point. This season okay. So while we want to lead with optimism and excitement about the rookie quarterbacks to circle back to Caleb Williams, though, some of the things that you do read at times is that he's throwing too often out of the pocket. He's holding the ball, holding on to the ball for too long. Are we leaning too much into the too much this too much that? What are some things that maybe he could fix by the regular season? Oh, exactly that. And I think the thing that everybody has to understand is the style of offense they're going to play. They really haven't been showing a lot of it. Again, you know, you look at what they do and it's very much what they did with McVay and a big part of it is just because of the reason of the of the offense. It's about spreading the ball out, getting the quarterback moving outside the pocket every now and then. And it's about making the plays downfield. He has the whole package. He really does. This young man has the skill set to move the ball throwing it quickly, making good decisions, holding on to the ball, extending the play in the pocket, throwing the ball downfield and making those explosive plays. And then on the move, he can improvise. He's very patient. You pointed it out during this early in the segment about a guy that has the ability to make people miss and then throw the ball downfield. Yeah, coach, let's talk preseason because there's been a lot of chatter too, about, you know, we had a good conversation last week about starters playing in the preseason. We know Nick Sirianni. He was saying you know look they get a lot of work in practice. You know we get a lot of these joint practices where they get to see some of that work. And then on the flip side, you get a guy like Antonio Pierce, Antonio Pierce, he goes out and say, look, if you're healthy, you're going to play. You're going to play. Where do you sit on that? Well, you know, again, there are certain players that you got to be really aware of and really careful with, and those are the guys that don't play as often okay. But they get a lot of work during the preseason. So I see what Nick is saying. But the thing that you want to see is you want to see, especially when you have a new coordinator, what these guys do, you know, do they do they react very well to this new coach? So we got to play the starters to find out if they come to the sideline. Do they have rapport with this guy. Can they tell them what they're seeing on the field. And does he understand them. And does he put him in the best position to win. So playing young guys, playing veteran guys a lot of it is dependent on your team. You got a veteran team. You're not going to play them as much. You got a younger team, a new coaching staff. You should play them a little bit more because you've got to find it out exactly who they are. I can remember one time when I was a coordinator back in San Diego, and I did this one year, we didn't blitz at all, didn't blitz at all in the preseason, okay. We wanted to hide what we were going to do. Sure. It took us three weeks before we started blitzing well, so the next preseason, every game we blitz, I mean, we blitz. I got confronted a couple of times by other coordinators on the other team that came and said, what are you doing? Yeah, it's the preseason. Take it easy. Yeah. We're practicing. We're learning to play the game. So to me, that's what it's about is what do you need to do? Do it for your team. Do it for your reasons, not for anybody else's. If you want a blitz blitz, if you want to throw the ball deep, throw the ball deep. You know, I'll say this too. When you watch the way Sean Payton is coaching right now and he's coaching Bo Nix to win. Sure he's playing. He's he's he's using his offense. He's giving this young man an opportunity to grow within his system because he's doing those things. He played his starters in the preseason. The idea is to give this kid an opportunity to grow and develop. That's what you've got to do. It's about your team. Yeah, it's a rhythm. It's a dance. It's a it's a it's a cadence. It's a movement thing. And if you're not doing it until the lights are on, until the regular season. Yeah, it can take some time to get into the rhythm. Right. I think it's amusing that maybe some of the younger viewers only know you as a coach and you're this gentleman, this erudite, thoughtful football man. They don't have memories of you as a player. I do make no mistake, Ron was a linebacker and the greatest defense of all time and would take your head off if he needed to, across the middle to that point, we saw over the weekend, Patrick Mahomes threw an around the back pass against a professional defense to Travis Kelce. How would that have played in the 85 bears locker room? Or maybe in another era, in another era? Well I'll tell you right now, buddy, Ryan would have called everybody up on the defense brought him in and said, don't ever let him do that to us again. Next time he does something like that, he better be. I mean, that was the mentality and you know it because you you cheered for guys. Definitely for whatever reason, you you're insane about that very therapeutic. Yeah. But I actually did think that afterwards when they were talking about it, they were all joking and saying, I actually think they were covering it up because there was a level of potential disrespect that you're out there doing that to us. But I feel like any other team, especially a team that had it done to him, be like, we're not ever seeing this BS again. Like, somebody's got to do something about this, right? Oh without a doubt. And you know, you can feel that sense from the defense when you watch him after the play happened. They kind of look around at each other and you can see they're all thinking, you know, if there's a chance, man, we're going to get we got to hit him. We got to drill him. Well, how infuriating is this as a defender? Because now you're chasing him and you're not just going after his body anymore. You are trying to have your arms out like a basketball defender because it is a behind the back pass and you got to have your wingspan out to maybe tip something that you might not know is coming from from back there. Absolutely. And again, that's what's happening is quarterbacks today are so nifty okay. I mean they have they have the ability to make people miss you know they're no longer the stand back be the target in the pocket anymore. That's kind of what this game is coming to. Is that again, your quarterback has to have the ability to move around, extend plays and then be creative enough to make plays. Patrick Mahomes just took it to another level, throwing the ball behind his back. You know what this is like. This is kind of like and tell me if you agree with this. It's almost like being up 60 points in a game and you go for a touchdown, another touchdown. And it's just like it's just it is a level of disrespect that's like like what are we doing here? Do you agree with that? Like it was it was lightweight disrespectful. It really was because but but again people always say, well if you don't want us to score, stop us, stop us. You know, it is. It's like it's like these these cocky