Brandon Jones – November 19, 2020
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Thursday, November 19, 2020
S Brandon Jones
(Good to see you getting regular playing time on defense. It’s been 20-30 snaps like last week. Where do you think you’ve improved as a safety from your time at Texas? What specifically have you gotten better in?) – “I would say overall, just being able to – I think it’s a lot different. I think the Dolphins always set the players to put them in the best position to be successful, so I just try to learn as much as I can and do whatever I can. Improvement-wise, I’m always hard on myself. I think there’s things that I need to improve on, on a daily basis for every aspect of my game. So that’s one thing that’s always kind of going to be unanswered because I’m never satisfied.”
(We’re all kind of obsessed with that fun third-down package where everyone sort of walks around and it sort of looks like a controlled chaos kind of thing. Did you do any of that in high school or college and what did you think when they explained the way it works to you at the Dolphins?) – “I’ve never done anything like that before, especially in high school and college. My thing was get the call, get lined, read your keys, do all that stuff. So that was something that was, it was fun just to – you never know, the quarterback never knows where pressure’s coming, if we’re coming, if we’re not coming. So it gives you a lot of freedom. It kind of just lets you be able to do what you want to do, put your own sauce on it, like our coach says, and at the end of the day, you just kind of create confusion for the offense and for the quarterback.”
(I wanted to kind of piggyback off that last question with a comment the coach made earlier today about defensive creativity. He said he encourages the Dolphins staff to be creative both offensively and defensively. So I’m curious if getting the week’s game plan for you, is it kind of like Christmas morning where you open it up and the game plan is different each week and you see how much dime or big nickel, how much am I going to be out there? Do you get pretty excited about that?) – “I do. It’s definitely exciting with this coaching staff and just the defensive scheme that we run. Like I said, just how versatile we can be and how many different packages that we have, it’s always fun just to see from my position to see where I’ll lined up this week, my certain job description this week versus what it was last week and just being able to adjust. That’s one big thing that I’m still kind of trying to learn each week, is just to be able to master my job description and be able to carry that on, on a consistent basis from week to week.”
(That project you did before the draft about notes on all 32 teams, I don’t recall, was that about each team’s defense or was it about offenses and stuff that you could study now to prepare for opponents’ offenses?) – “I was watching offenses and writing basically what I thought they were running on defense. It was kind of challenging, especially in college. I guess my football IQ – it’s a lot different – they run a lot of different stuff in college than they do in the NFL, so it was really just me just kind of guessing based off of what I knew in college, my knowledge, my IQ and kind of putting two and two together. I definitely look back now and think it was pretty cool because I felt like the majority of the time, I was right in a certain instance with just the basic coverage, like ‘oh, this is Cover 3 right here, this is Cover 4.’ Not really knowing – there’s a lot of different variety of things in the NFL, but I think from the baseline of it, I was pretty spot-on for the most part.”
(I think you guys catch a little bit of a break this week in Denver. It’s only supposed to be 40 degrees. It could be a lot worse. I’m curious being a Texas kid, what’s the coldest game you ever played in?) – “The coldest game I’ve ever played? I would say the coldest game would probably be in the 40s, 30s – not super cold – we always played Iowa State early or if we did play them late, we were at home. So I never got too cold when I played there. I would say the coldest places were probably either Kansas, Kansas State or probably West Virginia. It was pretty cold and rainy at the same time, so that was really fun.”
(Thanks for explaining that project to us again. I just wanted to follow up and ask you, has that work back in January and February helped you at all this season? Are there any notes you took that you ever look back to?) – “No, I really don’t look back with it now, just based off of my position. I got to know a lot of other different things and like I said, I wasn’t 100 percent sure when I was watching film preparing for the draft and stuff, if it was correct. So I kind of remember some stuff just mainly about the opponents, about the teams that we played against and people that I saw on film, but scheme-wise, not too much. I really don’t remember too much of that stuff and like I said, a majority of it was me just guessing depending what the corners and safeties were doing.”
(I wanted to ask you, most of the NFL – a lot of the NFL – is in the intensive protocol. You guys have been in it now for a couple of weeks, but the league mandated that everybody’s going to it on Saturday. How does the intensive protocol impact your preparation week? What changes? What’s different? And do you feel like it’s going to put the league at a disadvantage?) – “No, I don’t think – not at all. I don’t the league will be at a disadvantage at all. I think overall, our schedule is pretty much the same from a practice standpoint, for meetings – especially being able to have this during the offseason when all we were doing were meetings. So it’s basically – we have a familiarity with how that went and stuff like that. For me, I would say the only difference is just we used to have kind of walkthroughs before practice and that was super beneficial for me, just as a young player still trying to get the hang of things, being able to see it. I’m a guy that has to kind of walkthrough – I learn better with walking through and being able to see it in person versus kind of over Zoom. So that’s kind of the only thing that I battle with. I don’t know about everybody else; but yeah, mostly the schedule’s the same. Practice, the tempo of practice throughout the week is about the same. Another thing is just the grab-and-go stuff – that’s a little different from versus being able to eat in the facility.”
