The fans behind the rope had wide eyes and high-pitched voices. “The future is here, baby!” a man with a gray beard shouted. “You’re going to save us!” a middle-aged woman screamed. “I love you SO MUCH!” a young girl hyperventilated, and when the Washington Commanders quarterback signed her shirt, she turned away in tears. A crowd of teenage boys brawled over one of his sweaty towels, and after a handshake, a disabled, nonverbal man with shining eyes touched his chin. Thank you.
Is Jayden Daniels the one?
From ‘the Dino’ to the bayou, the rookie quarterback always ends up on top. Winning in Washington is a whole different animal.
16 min
By Sam Fortier
Down the length of the field, outstretched arms held jerseys, posters, trading cards, water bottles, bucket hats, burgundy-and-gold Nikes and, in one case, a freaked-out newborn baby. Once, he started to walk away and someone hurled a football at his chest. He caught it instinctively, signed it and tossed it back. He started to walk away again and out flew two more footballs.
The fans begged for selfies. They jockeyed with one another, yelling things like, “For my son!” or “Service member!” The white plastic fences began to buckle.
“You’re squeezing the kids up front!” a security guard yelled. “Careful with the kids, PLEASE!”
The kids were the boldest:
“Caleb Williams has nothing on you!”
“You’re the best quarterback the league has ever seen!”
“You’re better than RG3, bro! I know it!”
The voices, all of them, were actually asking a question — an existential question, the question that will for the foreseeable future hang over the owner’s suite, the nosebleed seats, the barstools and the group chats.
Is Jayden Daniels the one?
No pressure, kid
The stakes are immense. If Daniels lives up to the hype, he could jump-start the revival of Washington’s historic NFL franchise, validate its new leaders and pack a gleaming new stadium, giving it heart, making it a place for community and pride.
If not, he’ll be the latest unanswered prayer in a long, dark age, and the collateral damage could be considerable: sullied reputations, lost jobs and a new stadium that may be shiny but soulless. He’d be another name on a listless list. In 92 seasons, the only Washington quarterback who has thrown 30 or more touchdown passes in a single year was Sonny Jurgensen in 1967.
The Commanders’ new regime has, for its part, avoided presenting Daniels as the savior.
It didn’t anoint him the starter right away, as the Chicago Bears did with No. 1 selection Caleb Williams, and it didn’t send him to the draft rally to meet fans shortly after being picked. The fans who attended training camp in Ashburn, Va., saw his face on marketing material no more than the right guard and box safety. The big welcome banner featured running back Austin Ekeler.
The plan to minimize the pressure on Daniels seems to be working. He feels it was harder to follow Joe Burrow at Louisiana State than it has been to enter the NFL. “[LSU] fans were very spoiled [with] what Joe did,” he explained.
If you’ve studied Daniels, if you’ve traveled to San Bernardino, Calif., and Baton Rouge, to understand his past, you’d see significant challenges everywhere. But many of the more than 60 people interviewed for this story — including family, friends, coaches and rivals — said they have rarely, if ever, seen him rattled. The last time, he said, was when he lost a flag football game as a little kid.
“My dad was my head coach, and he was screaming at me,” Daniels remembered.
He laughs. He figures he was 6 or 7 years old.
“I seen my mom, and she asked if I was okay, and I started crying. And after that, all the kids started crying.”
You really haven’t been rattled since?
“I was taught at a young age: Just be even-keeled no matter what,” he said.
Every quarterback says stuff like that. It’s part of the job. Yet at the heart of the question — Is Jayden Daniels the one? — there are two sides: The quarterback and the franchise that keeps breaking them.
Restoring pride
Daniels knows what it takes to champion a place past its prime. His grandfathers, military men from Indiana and North Carolina, arrived in San Bernardino when it was a thriving hub along Route 66, the anchor of a desert region just east of Los Angeles and the birthplace of the nation’s new favorite restaurant: McDonald’s. The men were part of the city’s strong working class, when, in 1977, it won the All-America City Award.
But Daniels’s parents, Javon Daniels and Regina Jackson, grew up as the steel mill, rail shops and Air Force base closed. Downtown emptied out and the wealthy fled. Poverty, crime, violence and gang affiliation rose, especially during the crack epidemic.
“The Dino,” as it’s known, was still sliding on Dec. 18, 2000, when Daniels was born in nearby Fontana. He was in first grade when the city got hit by the Great Recession, sixth when it filed for bankruptcy and ninth when the Los Angeles Times called it “broken … a symbol of the nation’s worst urban woes.”
His parents were determined to help their son succeed. They taught him hard work by pulling long hours at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and the importance of family by leaning on aunts, uncles and grandparents. Even though they broke up when Daniels was young, those around them described them as committed co-parents with complementary strengths.
Javon, who played cornerback at Washington and Iowa State, coached Jayden in football. Jackson, a former high school cheerleader with two master’s degrees, was the do-it-all team mom. She became president of the Pop Warner chapter and excelled at organizing and fundraising.
Daniels’s parents encouraged him to think for himself, but when, around age 7, he said he wanted to play quarterback, his dad hesitated.
“Do you know what comes with it?” Javon asked, meaning the preparation, responsibility and scrutiny, especially as a Black quarterback. He pointed out Jayden would probably grow up to be lanky and fast, like him, which meant he could excel at defensive back — a position with more college scholarships available.
Daniels wanted the ball in his hands. He wanted to make plays — and soon, the Precinct Reporter, the local Black newspaper, was chronicling his Pop Warner team’s back-to-back perfect seasons. No. 5 was a miniature version of the man he’d become, throwing deep passes, outrunning defenders and using certain tactics, such as the zone-read keeper, he still uses today.
In seventh grade, Daniels saw Cajon High, his parents’ alma mater, get blown out by a powerhouse from a nearby city. Some friends urged him to go to a different school.
“But he said, ‘Don’t worry, things are going to change,’” Javon remembered, and over the next decade, Jayden chose San Bernardino again and again — by picking Cajon, by resisting recruitment, by always proudly calling it home even as the pursuit of greatness took him farther and farther away.
If Daniels could restore a little pride to a faded, all-American city, maybe he could someday do the same for a faded, all-American team.
Parents’ commitment
Before his freshman year, Daniels, 14, went to see a pediatrician who was friends with his grandmother because the California Interscholastic Federation forbids varsity football “until the student has reached his 15th birthday.”
“She was supposed to clear me,” Daniels remembered.
The pediatrician declined to sign the waiver because she believed Daniels — about 5-foot-11 and just 125 pounds — was too small and could get hurt, Jackson said.
While another doctor cleared Daniels, Jackson still worried. “If you don’t want to play, this waiver will never surface,” she told Jayden. He insisted he wanted to play. “Me and my dad had to sit with her and convince her that I’m going to be all right,” Daniels remembered.
That is one of the most important stories from Daniels’s upbringing because it is not only about his slender frame — which remains one of the greatest concerns about him as a player — but it is also an illustration of his parents’ commitment to him.
Over the next four years, Javon, Jackson, a personal QB trainer and Cajon’s staff nurtured Daniels’s talent. Javon was up in the booth as the co-play-caller and Jackson was the booster club president.
Daniels, who had a knack for seeing space, leverage and numbers, gained command of the offense. He and star wide receiver Darren Jones developed a set of hand signals to change routes at the line of scrimmage. If Daniels tapped his helmet, Jones should run a fade; if he put his right arm across his left shoulder, it was a post. As juniors, the duo led Cajon to its first CIF championship in 30 years.
By senior year, Daniels was shaking off some plays and calling many of his own.
“I remember on the headphones, coaches were like, ‘What are we running here?’” Coach Nick Rogers recalled. “I said, ‘I have no clue. Whatever No. 5 is doing, we’ll roll with it.’”
Before senior year, Jones, the 6-8 wideout, needed help. Jackson had always treated him like one of her own, taking him on family vacations and helping him navigate school, but now he had a big ask: Could his girlfriend and their newborn live with her? “They had nowhere to go,” Jones said. “She took them in … so I could get my stuff straight.”
After the season, Daniels committed to Arizona State — and furious fans of Utah, which had long been considered the favorite to sign Daniels, blamed Jackson’s influence.
In the years since, Jackson has remained intimately involved in Daniels’s life. She visited Arizona State often, and in 2021, she was implicated in alleged recruiting violations there. (She denied any involvement.) She moved to Baton Rouge for his first season at LSU, and last year, when Daniels suffered a head injury against Alabama, she went into the blue medical tent on the sideline to check on him. She tried to become a certified NFL agent, but Daniels signed with Ron Butler, who upset bigger firms despite never having represented a quarterback.
Now, Jackson lives in Northern Virginia, attends every game and works closely with Butler.
Jackson knows people criticize her for being, as she puts it, a “hoverer.” She thinks it’s partly systemic —the male-dominated football industry feels “threatened” by strong moms. But everything she does is to help Jayden, she said. She pointed out that, as a veteran of corporate America, she understands its boundaries.
“It ain’t bring-your-mama-to-work day,” she said. “I’m not going to make his decisions. If I don’t like it, and it doesn’t work, I’m going to call his agent. I’m not going to call the GM. I’m not going to call the owner. I have both their numbers, but that’s not my place. … I’m a mom.”
Gaining control
Over his 23 years, Daniels has seemed to largely control his fate. He graduated high school in 3½ years to enroll early at Arizona State. He graduated from there in three years and had the freedom to transfer to LSU without having to sit out a season. Neither college guaranteed he’d start before he arrived; he beat out multiple quarterbacks at both places.
Rob Likens, his first offensive coordinator at Arizona State, trusted Daniels so much that he let him audible at the line of scrimmage — even though Daniels was the first true freshman to start Week 1 in program history.
“I didn’t know he was going to do it on the first play of his career,” Likens said, laughing.
The pandemic changed things. Daniels played four games in 2020, and 2021 began with what he called “the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.” Both his paternal grandparents died due to complications from the coronavirus.
That fall, Daniels didn’t look like himself. In December, he announced he’d return to Arizona State, but in February, following the resignation of several coaches, he transferred to LSU. He hoped to be one-and-done there, but even after a solid season, scouts gave him a late-round grade. So he stayed and professionalized his training.
The team helping Daniels bend the world to his will had grown since high school.
A QB guru refined his mechanics. A nutritionist devised a plan for him to add weight, and a chef cooked the meals. A mad scientist (official title: “director of performance innovation”) brought in a German software company so its virtual reality headset could give him extra practice reps.
To maximize it all, Daniels instituted a rigorous routine that started at 5:30 a.m. Sherman Wilson, a friend and confidant (official title: LSU’s “director of player retention”), motivated him and held him accountable.
Quickly, LSU staffers noticed his maturity. For years, some coaches had seen Daniels’s strength (calm, cool collectedness) as a weakness too (not enough urgency). But last season, Daniels met each moment, growing more self-aware and occasionally correcting his urgency midgame, his quarterbacks coach said.
At 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 5, 2023, LSU landed back in Baton Rouge, and Daniels thought his dream might be dead. He’d just been knocked out of a loss to Alabama with what he called “my first concussion.” LSU fell to 6-3 while Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. and Oregon’s Bo Nix — his greatest rivals for the Heisman trophy — shined in wins.
Wilson could sense Daniels’s doubt, so at 4:05 a.m., he sent a text: “You still have a chance at the heisman bro.”
“s--- bro we going to see,” Daniels replied at 7:35 a.m. “U know they gonna give it to penix.”
Wilson encouraged him to see things differently. “Why give in now?”
“You said you wanted to be recognized as the best?”
“There is your reason.”
Daniels replied: “I ain’t giving in.”
He resumed his routine — though, because of the concussion, LSU removed the blue light from his VR headset. “I technically wasn’t really supposed to be doing that,” Daniels admitted recently.
That Saturday, in his final game under the lights in Death Valley, Daniels made the rival Gators look like the helpless kids who had once chased him all over the youth fields in San Bernardino. He became the first player in FBS history with 350 yards passing and 200 yards rushing in a single game.
“Thank you for everything you done for me, pushing me no matter what,” Daniels said to Wilson in his Heisman speech.
Daniels has maintained his routine as a pro, which he said allows him to focus and prepare for each day. But playing in the NFL will test how much he can truly control.
Ambitions of greatness
During the preseason, Daniels had a greater appetite for risk than his team. He audibled from a screen to a deep pass on his third play, and despite the urging of his coaches, he didn’t slide at the end of a run. The subtle tests of himself and his control in meaningless games have led to lighthearted tension; Quinn has said Daniels is on “double-secret probation.”
Daniels’s life story, at the dawn of his NFL career, is a tidy hero’s journey: A determined young man overcame challenges to achieve greatness.
But just four years ago the same was true of Chase Young. He won defensive rookie of the year, earned glowing praise from respected veterans and seemed destined to lead Washington’s franchise for a generation. Now, on his third NFL team, he’s a reminder nothing is guaranteed.
In early July, Daniels won an ESPY as Young, who signed for one year with the New Orleans Saints in the offseason, hosted a youth camp at the fields next to RFK Stadium. The city, while it still embraced him, was not as warm as it had once been. One of the most-liked comments on his Instagram post about the camp said, “Such a disappointing player for the fans of DC.”
Daniels has big dreams. He wants to be a billionaire like Jay-Z and legend like Tom Brady, whom he lunched with in the spring. But Daniels, like Young in 2020, has also said that football comes first. He says he’s focused on working hard, earning respect and winning games.
What his life stories mean will be decided in the coming years. They can harden into legend or be discarded as the trivial tales of just another guy who wasn’t the guy.
For now, Daniels seems to have only thought ahead in concrete terms to the end of his rookie year.
At some point — he won’t say when — he wrote down C.J. Stroud’s stats from last year, when the Houston Texans’ No. 2 overall pick had one of the greatest rookie seasons ever for a QB. Stroud grew up in a city just east of San Bernardino, and his friendly rivalry with Daniels goes back to high school.
“It’s just a competitive thing,” Daniels said, so the numbers — 4,108 passing yards, 23 touchdowns and five interceptions — live in his phone as a personal challenge amid his quest to become the one.
