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We talked about the impact on Sam Darnold yesterday,
and today, Quinnen Williams is the focus, and the impact of having no off-season program might have on him.
This is a player who really, really needed an NFL off-season conditioning program this year.
While he has freakish athleticism and foot quickness for a 303-pound defensive tackle, one thing we saw last year was that, at times, he could get manhandled by NFL offensive linemen if he didn’t beat them into gaps quickly.
While he’s listed at 303 pounds, he doesn’t have “a lot of mass in the ass” as scouts like to say.
He’s a somewhat lean 6-3, 303, and I wonder about that 303 part. He might not weigh that much.
Williams, who just turned 22, needs to get bigger and stronger. Now you don’t want him to get too big because it might take away from his freakish movement skills, but he needs to stack and shed offensive linemen more effectively, and an entire off-season workout program led by Jets strength coach Justus Galac, would have been very helpful to him.
Remember, he’s not participated in an entire off-season program before. After getting drafted by the Jets in late April of 2019, he only participated in part of one last year.
So the NFL not allowing players to work out at their team’s complexes this off-season, is certainly going to hurt Williams, and his need to get bigger and stronger.
Is he working out on his own? Who knows, but generally players don’t work at as hard on their own sans a fire-breathing strength coach, like Galac, pushing them.
Hey, some do, most don’t.
Williams also needed a lot of work on his technique this off-season with Jets defensive line coach Andre Carter. As we all know, NFL offensive lines are much better than college lines, so technique is of the utmost importance for NFL defensive linemen. In college, they could just overmatch a lot of the guys they faced with their athleticism. That isn’t going to cut it in the NFL.
Hey, it’s understandable why the NFL isn’t allowing teams to have player at the training complex and in the weight rooms, due to the pandemic.
I’m not making light of it, just dealing with the reality of what impact that’s going to have on certain players, especially the young ones.
Williams needs the Jets right now. He needs the strength coach, he needs the defensive line coach, he needs defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.
Young players need more structure than perhaps older ones. We already saw Williams get in to some trouble earlier this off-season trying to carry a gun on a commercial aircraft.
This is a very young person still learning a lot about life and playing in the NFL.
This was a huge off-season for Williams in so many ways, including the fact that he needs to impress the new brass that didn’t draft him. Joe Douglas didn’t take over until last June, a couple months after the draft, and Adam Gase and Mike Maccagnan weren’t on the same page, so we don’t even know if Gase wanted Williams.
So in many ways, Williams not having an in-person off-season program isn’t ideal for the former Alabama standout.
May 20, 2020
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