The Washington Redskins are coming off a tough loss and are preparing for their next game, with news and rumors coming out.
Check out the latest buzz below.
Cousins Working on Not Telegraphing Passes
The New York Giants picked off Kirk Cousins four times, in part because they learned that he telegraphs some of his passes.
Giants players said after the win that defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul had noticed by studying tape that Cousins tended to telegraph with his eyes where the ball was going, reported the Washington Post.
“So throughout the Sept. 25 game at FedEx Field, Pierre-Paul shouted out Cousins’s target, making it easy-picking for the defensive backs.”
Redskins coach Jay Gruden says that Cousins is working on using his eyes to mask his throws.
“Staring down receivers is part of it that you have to learn from,” Gruden said of Cousins, 26, who has thrown six touchdown passes and five interceptions since taking over for the injured Robert Griffin III early in the Week 2 victory over Jacksonville.
“If you stare down receivers against these guys, you’re going to throw more than four picks — you’re going to throw about 11. So we’ve got to make sure he does a great job with his eyes because that’s one thing Seattle does unbelievable. All eyes are on the quarterback.”
Former Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski says that disguising throws is a process.
“I’d say most guys early in their career don’t have a clue of the complex, sophisticated defenses you see week in and week out. The young guys, they struggle like Kirk is struggling. He’s not a wily old veteran,” Jaworski said. “That’s why I’m normally pretty adamant about young quarterbacks being thrust onto the field. It takes time.”
Cousins Deals With Rising, Falling Stock
Cousins has played in 11 games in 2¼ seasons for the Washington Redskins. He’s been praised as better than Robert Griffin III after some and derided as nothing better than a career backup after others.
That’s an awful lot of zigzag to handle, even for an even-keeled guy.
“It’s been tough,” Cousins said Thursday. “Even my rookie year, when you only get a couple of spots and everybody’s going to try to write the book on who you are as a quarterback.”
Cousins’ stock plummeted with a second-half meltdown that included four interceptions in last week’s blowout loss to the New York Giants. He looked nearly as bad as, well, Tom Brady, who finished the game on the bench in the New England Patriots’ 27-point loss Monday night.
Brady, of course, has earned the right to get more chances. Cousins will also have the opportunity to rebound, if only because Griffin is sidelined at least a few more weeks with a dislocated ankle. Besides, Cousins appeared on the verge of forcing a Cousins-Griffin quarterback controversy after back-to-back solid games before the Giants debacle.
Where will it all end? Cousins would sure like to know.
“How do you deal with that? You know, I don’t know that I have the perfect answer,” Cousins said. “I’m the kind of guy who would like to know my future and like to know how things are going to play out. I don’t. So I try not to ride the roller coaster. I try to be as consistent as I can possibly be and I think that approach is going to help me have success in this league.
“But, as a quarterback, you’re going to have things that go your way, you’re going to have times where it’s going to be tough. I think the guys that last are the guys who can ride it out and stay consistent no matter what.”
“He’s still progressing,” Gruden said. “He’s very young with limited starts. That’s going to come with experience. Staring down receivers is part of it that you have to learn from. If you stare down receivers against these guys, you’re going to throw more than four picks — you’re going to throw about 11.”
Griffin Gets Support From Wilson
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, who entered the NFL the same year as Griffin, says that he’s rooting for the injured player.
Griffin is currently undergoing rehab and hopes to return to action later this season.
“We’ve talked a couple times. I root for him, man,” Wilson said in a conference call, reported the Washington Post. “I want nothing but the best for anybody, but for him, especially the quarterback. There’s only so many guys who can play in the National Football League and play the quarterback position, and so you always root for those guys.”
Wilson added, “And so, for me, I’m just praying he gets back healthy, and I know he will. I know he’s a dedicated guy and a guy who loves to play the game, and so hopefully he’ll continue to come back stronger.”
The Redskins play the Seahawks on Monday night.
Neither Griffin nor Cousins the Answer?
Griffin is hurt and Cousins is struggling. And the question has emerged that maybe neither are the answer for the Redskins quarterback position.
“The fact that the Redskins are even in this spot is surprising. Including the pick used on Cousins and the four high-round picks traded for the one to select Griffin, the Redskins committed five picks to get their top two quarterbacks. After all of that, the Redskins don’t know where they stand at the position,” wrote Jason Reid of the Washington Post.
“Over the final 13 weeks of the season, the Redskins hope to finally determine what they have at quarterback. It would be disappointing if they fail to get the answers they’re seeking — and far worse if they get the ones they don’t want.”
There have been trade rumors swirling around both quarterbacks, with several teams likely willing to make a deal.
But none of the reported deals have appeared close. That might change after this season.
Fine-dining chef has Redskins eating healthier
Washington Redskins tight end Niles Paul stopped by his locker before a recent practice to drop off a carry-out plate of baked chicken, black-eyed peas and rice. The mini-feast would become dinner later that evening for a player who doesn’t cook, one of the many advantages of playing for a NFL team with a full-time, fine-dining chef.
It’s quite the change from Paul’s previous options.
“Probably Wendy’s, and get a Baconator,” he said.
Over the last 13 months, the Redskins have changed the diets of many players by converting the basketball and racquetball courts in the Redskins Park basement into a made-to-order, healthy-options eating establishment. There’s a chef with a French cuisine background, a sous-chef, five cooks and a full-time nutritionist creating some 350 fresh-from-scratch meals per day — mostly breakfast and lunch — for the players, coaches, support staff and other employees.
“If I was going to take a leap from the fine-dining branch, why not go polar-opposite and try to do clean-eating for a football team and see where it goes,” said the head chef, 49-year-old Jon Mathieson, a top name in the D.C. dining community who was hired away by Redskins owner Dan Snyder.
Teams invest more than a hundred million dollars annually in player salaries, yet they often fuel those high-performance bodies with standard fare catered from a local restaurant during the week. That’s what theRedskins did until the start of last season, setting out lunches of Mexican, Italian, barbecue or other fare — whatever the catering company had to offer — much of it containing heavy sauces and empty calories.
Of course, the team did win three three Super Bowls while eating McDonald’s hamburgers for lunch in 1980s and early 1990s.
“But they were also smoking cigarettes and drinking malt liquor,” tight end Logan Paulsen said. “The culture’s changed. It’s another resource that 20 years ago wasn’t really looked into, and now it is. They didn’t take care of their bodies the way we do now. There wasn’t the necessity for it because no one was doing it.”
The kitchen was part of a $30 million building renovation and opened just over a year ago. The Redskins say they are one of a handful of teams that employ a full-time nutritionist, and on-site chefs are even rarer in the league.
“If your diet starts to suffer a little bit, then your play is going to suffer,” Redskins coach Jay Gruden said. “You’ll get more tired and you’re going to sleep worse at night. It all goes hand-in-hand. It’s hard to be a physical specimen and have a terrible diet.”
Snyder spared no expense in giving Mathieson and nutritionist Rob Skinner every toy a food connoisseur could imagine: two wok stations, cheese melters, a pasta station, an omelet station, a brick pizza oven with the word “Redskins” visible next to the flame, a smoothie bar, industrial-sized pots that can cook a week’s worth of meat sauce at a time. Mathieson arrives before 5 a.m. every day, a delivery truck shows up within an hour, and soon the kitchen is running like a well-oiled machine preparing 75 pounds of fish, 75 pounds of some other meat protein and as many as 30 pizzas per day.
Breakfast might include scrambled egg whites, turkey bacon and sausage, apple chicken sausage and an omelet station that runs the vegetable gamut. For lunch, Mathieson comes up with inventive, healthy ways to cook fish, chicken or turkey and occasionally beef. A recovery smoothie is waiting at every player’s locker after practice. “Berry” and “tropical” are popular flavors, although Paulsen goes for the more exotic “kale.”
Some players buy in more than others. Running back Alfred Morris provided a comical highlight last season by declining comment on coach Mike Shanahan’s firing. Why? Because Morris said he had to get to Chick-fil-A before it stopped serving breakfast.
“Dietitians are salesmen,” Skinner said. “We’re trying to sell good health. We’re trying to sell better performance. Do guys still eat fried chicken? Of course, they do. … I don’t whip, but I gently nudge in the right direction. I get all the time, I’ll stand here and they’ll say, ‘Well, which one’s better?’ And I’ll say, ‘This one.’ They’ll say, ‘But I don’t want that one.’ I’ll say, ‘You didn’t ask me what you wanted, you asked me what was better, and this is better.'”
Quarterback Kirk Cousins has been known to text Skinner from a grocery store to ask which product is a healthier choice. Veteran Santana Moss brought in a recipe for garlic crab legs from his native Florida, and Mathieson cooked it as a special meal for the receivers.
The chef’s craftiest masterpiece might be his pizza. Knowing it was a treat dish that players couldn’t resist, he changed the dough, adding yogurt and milk and whole wheat flour.
“We started with 50-50 to see what they would do, and if they kicked back on it,” Mathieson said. “No one said anything. We went 75-25. No one kicked back on it.”
It’s 100 percent now, and a quick poll of the locker room shows that the pizza is probably second to salmon among the players’ favorites from the kitchen.
Skinner consults with the team’s doctor about individual players. He advises them how to eat when they’re not at the facility, but he obviously can’t control whether they follow his advice. An average player eats about twice the protein of a normal person, although a lineman’s diet is obviously more caloric than a kicker’s.
And then there are the coaches, who live perhaps the unhealthiest lives of all, meeting deep into the night and getting by on little sleep.
“I’ve talked to them about putting me on a meal plan,” Gruden said. “But I go down there and I always look for the most fattening food and eat that. I’m terrible.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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