Coach McDaniels: “Excited just to see the guys here. Just finished our medical meeting, which is a mandatory part of camp every year and we’re get ready to do our last bit of that conditioning round with the guys who just reported. But excited to see everybody, obviously a very exciting time here getting ready to go for year two and a lot of work between now and the season, but I know everybody is eager and anxious to get out there.”
Head Coach Josh McDaniels
Q: Jimmy [Garoppolo] passed his physical, are there any restrictions on him at all going into training camp or is it just full go?
Coach McDaniels: “I mean no, there aren’t. We’ll do what we always do with players that are coming off of any type of rehabilitation, is just we’ll do it the right way. It might not be 100 percent of the repetitions first day and etc., but we would never do that with anybody. So, there’s a number of players obviously that had things in the spring and making sure that we’re just smart about how we re-integrate them to the totality of practice, and training camp is for everybody to get a lot of repetitions anyway. No player at any position would get that kind of a majority of the reps anyhow. So, this is where we have to put in the majority of our time so that we can build fundamentals across the board, build the depth of our football team. So, It shouldn’t affect us that much, but excited for him to be out there. I know he’s excited to be out there with his teammates too.”
Q: Obviously, Jimmy [Garoppolo] is going to be judged by wins and losses. When he went to San Francisco he won his locker room quick. And then he comes here and talking to the players this offseason, not at OTA’s, not at minicamp, but he won them already out spending time with them, being with them. What is it about Jimmy that allows him to relate so well to his locker room as a leader?
Coach McDaniels: “I think you have to care about the person, and I think Jimmy gives a lot of time and effort into conversations non-football related. I think that would be the same if it was you and I or any other two people trying to get to know one another. It’s how much you put into it, how much you care about where they came from, what their family situation is like, where they’re at in their life or their career. I think that’s important for anybody that’s trying to create relationships and especially at the position of quarterback in the NFL, where you want to be a leader on your football team, you have to be an elite communicator on the field. So, to be able to try to do that and establish those kinds of relationships is important. I’ll let the player speak for that in terms of how they feel and what he has or hasn’t done or anything like that, but I feel comfortable with who he is and in the way he goes about that.”
Q: Obviously, Jimmy [Garoppolo] played under you before with the Patriots, but he spent several years in another system. What went into that sort of re-acclimation process with him being in OTAs not relearning it but kind of getting back used to being in your offense?
Coach McDaniels:
“Yeah, it was a fun process because honestly any player that has played a significant amount of time somewhere else for a coach that I respect tremendously, it’s always interesting to hear some of the things that they did or how they called something or other things that maybe we don’t do that they did well and he likes. So, it was really a good back and forth in that regard. I think most of the terminology – I don’t want to say it’s like riding a bicycle – but if you spent four years doing something and then you change languages a little bit, you come back to it eventually. You kind of pick back up where you were. So, I don’t want to say seamless or not, we’ll see together here as we go. But generally speaking, I think the terminology is – I’ve said this before – it’s kind of overblown in general. We all run something similar to one another, we just maybe call it a little bit different names. I feel very comfortable with his ability to do that.”
