Josh McDaniels Goes In-Depth on the State of the Las Vegas Raiders

HENDERSON, Nev.-The Las Vegas Raiders open week three of training camp today. They play their first preseason game on Thursday in the Hall of Fame Game, and Josh McDaniels delivered the lastest on his team.

You can watch the entire press conference below, as well as read the transcript:

Head Coach Josh McDaniels

Q: For somebody who’s dream was to be the quarterback at McKinley High School (Canton, OH), has it fully hit you that you are taking your team as the head coach into that stadium to go play in the Hall of Fame game?

Coach McDaniels: “Yeah, certainly for me personally, going there is maybe a little bit different than some other people because of where I grew up. I’m looking forward to seeing family and my kids and my wife and my mom and dad, and that’ll be great. I’m also excited to have our team…we’re going to go to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, so to be able to take them there and we took a poll the other day and there’s a lot of them that have never been there. They’re in this fraternity and it’s this special place and I’ve been through it I can’t tell you how many times, and each time I got through it, I see something different or new or they’ve added to it. And there is such an element of history and tradition. You just get excited because it’s such an important part of our game and so to be able to represent the league and our team going there and playing with Richard and Cliff going in, it’s just an exciting opportunity for us and I think our team is excited. I’m excited to see them compete and we’ll learn a lot about ourselves I’m sure on Thursday.”

Q: When you’re in high school and the pinnacle of football is right there in your backyard, was that inspiring in a lot of ways?

Coach McDaniels: “It was fun. I played all my games in this stadium, and it was never lost on me that this is a special place. They have helmets on the double yellow lines when you are driving down the road. You pass the Hall of Fame every day when you go to school in high school. You’re playing right there, and you can see it over the stands. Like I said, it’s a really cool place to grow up. It was a great place to be a young boy that loved football and what a blessing that I have an opportunity to come back there and do it. I never would have dreamed that this would have happened.”

Q: Do you think it will be surreal considering that your father coached you in that stadium and now he gets to see you coach in that stadium?

Coach McDaniels: “It will be really an experience. Surreal is probably a good word for it, thinking that he was coaching me and correcting me and calling plays for me many, many years ago. And then my brother played after myself and my family has spent a lot of nights there over many, many years and so it’s a special place for us and looking forward to having a special night hopefully on Thursday.”

Q: What sort of loss is Kyler Fackrell to the Injured Reserve? And how confident are you that the guys you have can step in?

Coach McDaniels: “Any time we lose a player to injured reserve, it’s a loss. But you have 90 guys on the roster that are all competing for this reason. Football is a physical game and a contact sport, so there is going to be some of these things that happen along the way, and I think the most important thing we can do is, number one, get him back to health and then secondly, we can’t stop at any point in time during the course of training camp or the regular season to feel sorry for ourselves. And we don’t, our group is really competitive. Those guys have been working really hard and we have depth at that position, and we are going to see how it plays out over the course of training camp. But guys have stepped up in some of the absences we’ve had already, and they have opportunities. If somebody goes down with an injury, it certainly presents an opportunity for others and hopefully some of those guys will take advantage of it.”

Q: Are you guys being cautious with Chandler Jones and Clelin Ferrell?

Coach McDaniels: “Everybody gets knicks and bruises at this time of the year, and so the guys that are able to go out there and work full will be out there. And anybody that’s not, we’ll just try to do everything we can to get them back to health and get them out there as soon as possible. We have a number of guys that are working through things, which we are not unique here. The league is going through the same thing. Every team battles that and our guys are doing a great job in the training room of getting treatment and do everything they can to get back on the field as quickly as possible. And they’ll be out there as soon as that’s the case.”

Q: Some coaches approach the preseason where wins are important, some aren’t worried about wins or losses? What’s your thought process on the preseason?

Coach McDaniels: “I think any time you coach or play a football game, you are going out there to do your best and compete. Certainly, there is an element of wanting to win every time you step on the field. We’re going to be ready to go out there and play and compete when we have our opportunities. There are few times when somebody will play the entire length of a preseason game, so this important for us to find out about our depth and evaluate ourselves against another team that we don’t know, that we haven’t seen in practice. We’ll see some schemes or some alignments that we haven’t seen yet, and it will test us. So, I think this is a great opportunity for us to find out a lot about our football team and each preseason will give us that opportunity and we’ll take full advantage of all four that we have this year.”

Q: Do you have a philosophy on playing your starters in the preseason?

Coach McDaniels: “We’ll try to make the decisions that we think are best for the team in terms of what we need to do and get accomplished. We’re all working and we’re all ready to play. We are all going to be ready to go. None of us have coached or played in a long time. And so, this is not something where you just jump back on and it’s easy and it takes five minutes to get reacclimated to calling plays or getting in the huddle or playing third down defense against real time, real speed opponents. There’s a lot to be gained for us. Like I said, each guy is going to get ready to play and we’re trying to do it the right way based on what we feel like we need to get doe each preseason game.”

Q: When you make decisions on playing time in the preseason, how much does having the extra game factor into that decision-making process?

Coach McDaniels: “I think all of it goes into it. We have a little extra time at training camp. We have four preseason games, we have a couple competitive practices down the road with another team, so you try to make decisions on based on the whole body of work that you are going to be able to put together. So, we’ve talked about a lot of those things, and we know there is some opportunities that are going to present themselves to further evaluate our team. We’ll take goods stock of where we are at from the health perspective and then what we need to see relative to the competition on our roster, which is significant, and try to do it that way on Thursday night to start.”

Q: What’s been your take on the Guardian Caps the players are wearing in practice?

Coach McDaniels: “It’s hard for me to say whether we would have or wouldn’t have had any kind of a head issue at this point in time. All the science says that it’s a good thing for us to have and for us to wear, limiting the residual effects to the brain and those types of things. Our players have been great in terms of doing it the way the league wants us to do it and there’s nothing more important than the health of the team and the safety of the players. I’m all for anything that would protect them short-term and then long-term and based on what we’ve been told from the doctors and the scientists, those people that have studied that and this an effective way to try to minimize that, so we are going to do everything we can do to follow the letter of the law on that and like I said, it’s a little different playing with it because you don’t necessarily have a lot of snaps playing with it before now. So, our guys needed to get acclimated to it, but generally speaking I think they’ve had a great attitude about it, and we haven’t had any issues.”

Q: The Jaguars being a team that you play this regular season, does that change how you prepare going into this game?

Coach McDaniels: “Not really. There’s such a time gap between when we play them and this game coming up. There’s a lot that’s going to happen between now and then. I don’t think you’re going to see any triple reverses or all those kind of things in this game on Thursday night. Not that were going to run that either in December, November, whenever we’re going to play them. There’s an element of fundamentals, there’s an element of evaluating your players ability to use their techniques and play within the scheme and communicate with each other that I think is most important. I’ve had many discussions like that over many years about what we should or shouldn’t do, or what’s too much or not enough to show. I think it’s important for us to go out there and let the players play and be aggressive. So hopefully they’re going to know every call were going to make in every phase and go out there and do their job and we’ll see who can block and who can tackle and who can cover and who can get open. It’ll be effective for us even if the scheme is minimized.”

Q: Trayvon Mullen, Bilal Nichols and Johnathan Hankins, is there a level of positivity that they’re able to get on the field here in training camp?

Coach McDaniels: “Yeah, I’m positive about everybody. Like I said, they’re all working really hard. It’ll be exciting obviously when some of these guys come back. As soon as that’s the case, they’ll be out there and hopefully reintegrate to our group. I know this, they’re studying hard, and they’re involved in everything we’re doing. When they’re ready to practice, they’ll rejoin us.”

Q: What’s your early takeaways of your quarterbacks you brought in Averett, Ya-Sin and Phillips?

Coach McDaniels: “Very competitive, mature, smart. They certainly have added an element of toughness and competition to our group, which is great and it’s what we want to do in every room. Right now, they’re doing anything and everything they can to earn opportunities and more opportunities. I think that group has been very competitive in practice. We’ve had some back and forth with the receivers. Some days the receivers may get the better of them, some days they don’t. So, the competition across the ball and at that position has been good and I think we’ve enhanced it with those guys.”

Q: Is Rock Ya-Sin a guy you’ve seen improve over the years?

Coach McDaniels: “Yeah, played against most of these guys. I’ve coached against most of them and Rock certainly coming in as a young guy and growing. He’s competitive. He’ll tackle, he can cover. There’s an element of toughness to all those guys. They’ve improved the competition and eager to see those guys continue to compete and see how it unfolds. But I think they’re all making one another better right now, which is a good thing for our team.”

Q: What have you thought of the competition on the offensive line? Has anybody stood out to you yet?

Coach McDaniels: “Like normal, there’s been some good and some bad. I think anytime you have an opportunity to get into pads, what happens is there’s going to be things in the very first day that are sloppy. Which we saw that the other day, then the second day was better. Now we’ve had a day off and then a shells day, and now we’re going to come back into them today. I know those guys really are eager to take the opportunities that we have in full pads to try and work on those things because you just can’t simulate that. So, a third padded day, we’re going to learn more about ourselves today then we had in the first couple of days. There are definitely somethings we can improve. But as a whole, I think both sides of the ball are trying to do the right things. We’re just not there yet in terms of being able to do it over and over again consistently, which is not unique to this year. That’s generally the case. They haven’t been in pads in months and now we’ve had two days. We didn’t expect it to look perfect at this point and we’re just going to try and use these days that we have, today, tomorrow to try and build on this, so hopefully we can improve those things and make them consistent.”

Q: Are you comfortable with how that defensive tackle group looks?

Coach McDaniels: “Like I said, they’re competing. We don’t have everybody out there yet, so the guys that have been out there have had great opportunities now. They’re competing hard with one another. We’re asking them to play a few different roles inside and they’re just grinding away. They go over there, and they are far away from you guys in their little corner over there in their jungle gym. They’re working on all their pad level and their technique and those types of things. But it’s a grind for those guys too. Playing the run, playing double teams, pass rushing, and they’re trying to again get back into form relative to using their techniques, playing with their hands, getting off blockers and those kinds of things. It’s a process on both sides of the line. A third day in pads helps us try to take a step forward.”

Q: Zamir White returned to practice today. What have you seen so far that you’ve liked, and do you think he’ll be ready for the preseason game Thursday?

Coach McDaniels: “Love his attitude. Works really hard when he’s on the field. Very coachable. He’s a great kid. Just eager to see us try to string together some days and hopefully we can do that. He was out there yesterday and doing somethings both in the kicking game and offensively. Hopefully, like I said, everybody is getting ready to play Thursday night and all the guys that are able will do that. Hopefully Zamir will be in that category.”

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