“Peyton Manning would walk in, and you just knew,” says Troy Aikman, the three-time Super Bowl champ and Hall of Famer. “Tom Brady was the same way. Aaron Rodgers, too. Some guys just carry themselves differently.”
A broadcaster for 24 seasons now, Aikman’s had the chance to sit in pre-production meetings with every great quarterback to pass through the league since the early 2000s. Manning, Brady and Rodgers became the standard against which he measures every budding star. “It’s 20 minutes, so it’s not everything,” Aikman clarifies. “But sometimes, it tells you a lot.”
He gets the question all the time: What separates the special ones from the rest? For Aikman, it starts with that feeling. Presence can’t be faked.
“It’s not arm strength, it’s not about if a guy is mobile or not, all that bullsh– people talk about at the combine,” Aikman says. “To me, it’s the unquantifiable that’s so dangerous.”
It hit Aikman again last season, before Week 3 of “Monday Night Football.” He was sitting with a 23-year-old rookie he’d never met. He’d heard the hype. He’d watched the film. Still, he remained skeptical, like he always does.
Twenty minutes later, Jayden Daniels exited the room. Aikman immediately turned to his broadcast partner, Joe Buck.
“I’m telling you right now, Joe, that kid is going places,” Aikman told him. “He’s the real deal. He’s wired different.”
A night later, Daniels finished with two incompletions in the Commanders’ 38-33 win over Joe Burrow and the Bengals. Aikman’s gut was right, and he knew it. By January, Daniels had authored the most successful season by a rookie quarterback in league history.
That season ended one win shy of a berth in Super Bowl LIX, and after the team plane landed back in Washington, Daniels walled off the world. He huddled at home for a few days, “completely away from everybody,” he says, and silenced his phone. He needed the quiet.
Come Super Bowl Sunday, he didn’t even make it to halftime. He turned off the TV.
“Couldn’t watch,” he says.
Had the Commanders made it, the storylines would’ve been irresistible. A rookie quarterback with a chance to win it all for the first time ever? A return to glory for a franchise stained by self-inflicted chaos for decades?
The spotlight would’ve swelled. Daniels knows it would’ve grown uncomfortable. “Look, I love football and I love playing quarterback,” he says. “I’m just not a big fan of the …”
His voice trails off, but the implication is obvious: … the circus.
“Right,” he says. “I just want it to be about ball.”
Daniels led Washington to its first playoff victory in nearly 20 years with a wild-card win over Tampa Bay, then followed that up with a divisional-round win in Detroit. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
Go figure: One of the league’s budding stars, in one of the league’s biggest markets, playing the league’s marquee position, happens to be an “introvert” — Daniels’ word — who wants nothing more than to blend in with his teammates. The 24-year-old doesn’t chase the attention that attends his day job; he merely tolerates it.
“Just watch,” Daniels says after a sweltering training camp practice wraps in early August. Fans arrived early — hundreds, if not thousands, clad in white and burgundy No. 5s— and formed a line that stretched for half a mile outside the team’s Ashburn, Va., facility. Then they stayed late, begging, shouting, clamoring for Daniels’ attention. “Soon as I walk away from you, it’s about to get rowdy.”
The Commanders are coming, coming fast, and general manager Adam Peters knows it. It’s why this spring he swung trades for a Pro Bowl left tackle (Laremy Tunsil) and a Pro Bowl receiver (Deebo Samuel), then signed future Hall of Fame pass rusher Von Miller in July. The impetus was clear: Time to go for it.
It’s not a stretch to say this is the most anticipated season for the franchise in a quarter-century.
“You can feel it,” Daniels says.
The catalyst behind it all, the bedrock of so much belief about where this team is and where it’s headed, is the unassuming kid from San Bernardino who oozes California cool and finished one spot behind Patrick Mahomes in MVP voting as a rookie. Daniels led five game-winning drives last season, including in his first playoff game. He threw 12 touchdowns in the fourth quarter or overtime, a rookie record. He lifted a broken franchise to its first NFC Championship Game in 33 years.
There will be no sneaking up on anyone in 2025. Daniels knows this. He also knows what got him here is what’s going to keep him here.
“How do you deal with all that?” Daniels’ position coach, Tavita Pritchard, asked him recently.
The circus, he meant. Everything that comes with being a star quarterback.
Daniels shrugged. He keeps his circle small. He keeps his social media quiet. He doesn’t show up on a different podcast every week, and didn’t spend his offseason flying from city to city filming commercials to bolster his brand.
He spent most of it back in California, repping drills with the coach who’s known him since he was 11 years old.
“Same kid he was five years ago,” Ryan Porter says. “Hasn’t changed one bit.”
Everything around Daniels has changed in those five years. He transferred from Arizona State, landed at LSU and climbed from fourth on the depth chart to Heisman Trophy winner. Then came the draft, the season, the near-perfect game on “Monday Night Football,” the Hail Mary to beat the Bears, the playoff run, the blowout loss in the NFC Championship Game and, soon after, Offensive Rookie of the Year honors.
“Crazy when you think about how fast all this happened,” Daniels says. “But it’s not like we didn’t put in the work to get here.”
In some ways, that’s become his refuge — the sweat and the solitude, the incremental gains that come from hours of repetition. Daniels’ father, Jay, says his son always loved the process of quarterbacking more than the stage that came with it. “I never once had to tell Jayden, ‘Hey, go get your cleats, we gotta get some work in,’” Jay says. “He never missed a practice. He loved practice.”
That’s how the rookie won over his teammates last season: Daniels said little, ceding the spotlight to the veterans and letting his habits speak for him. Most mornings he’d slip into the film room and shut the door behind him. Sometimes he’d rep the day’s walkthrough alone on the practice field.
“I don’t like to voice what I do,” Daniels says. “If you see me, you see me. But I’m not gonna broadcast it.”
Word of Daniels’ 5 a.m. routine started to trickle through the building. In time, the cadre of veterans Peters had signed the previous spring — Super Bowl champs like tight end Zach Ertz and linebacker Bobby Wagner — bought in. So did the holdovers, like wideout Terry McLaurin, who’d grown tired of the Commanders’ musical chairs at quarterback. So did the coaching staff.
“This is somebody that is absolutely a savage from a work standpoint,” coach Dan Quinn said this summer. “You gain street cred by your performance, by the things you do. Then people trust him.”
A new standard was being set. Belief was being built. A team that hadn’t finished above .500 in seven years went 12-5, then won two playoff games on the road.
“The humility has been the surprising thing,” Ertz says. “You don’t get drafted No. 2 without the physical traits, right? He’s fast. He can make all the throws, all that. But it’s his ability to be one of the guys that sets him apart.
“I don’t throw this name around lightly, but he’s a lot like Andrew Luck in that way,” Ertz says of his former college quarterback. “At Stanford, it was never about Andrew. Here, it’s never about Jayden. They’re the best player on the team, but they just wanna be one of the guys. That’s rare. I’m telling you, that’s rare.”
Pritchard happened to be Stanford’s incumbent starter in 2009 until Luck, then a redshirt freshman, took his job. The guy he wanted to hate instead became one of his closest friends.
“That’s where he and Jayden are similar,” Pritchard says. “They care about people in a genuine way, and teammates gravitate towards that. At this point in their careers, the Zach Ertzes, the Bobby Wagners, they can sift through bullsh– really fast. With Jayden, there’s none of that.”
They know what’s coming.
“Counterpunches,” Pritchard calls them.
Defensive coordinators now have 20 games on Daniels as a pro, hints and tells and tendencies they’ll look to weaponize against him during his sophomore season. The C.J. Stroud arc in Houston offers a warning: after a stellar rookie year, the Texans’ quarterback regressed in 2024 thanks in part to a tougher schedule and a leaky line.
“They’re going to scheme Jayden different,” Ertz says. “We know that.”
Daniels’ focus this offseason was twofold: pack on some weight without losing his quickness (Porter says the QB added five pounds of muscle) and refine his footwork so fundamentals won’t slip when a play breaks down.
The effortlessness with which Daniels dances in the pocket — the smooth shuffling of his feet after the snap, the subtle hitch, the slingshot of a throwing motion — is the byproduct of thousands of reps with Porter on those empty practice fields across from the San Bernardino YMCA. This spring, the pair worked as they’ve always worked.
“My goal was to improve my strengths,” Daniels says, “and close the gap with all of my weaknesses.”
Peters, afforded the flexibility of a star quarterback on his rookie deal (Daniels will count just $8.5 million against the cap this season), tried to close the gap with the roster. Across 72 hours in March, the GM landed Tunsil, Daniels’ new blindside protector, and Samuel — “another toy,” per Peters, for offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury. The hope is Miller, he of 129.5 career sacks, has enough left to add some punch to a defense that gave up 55 points to the Eagles in the NFC Championship Game.
That said, a step back in 2025 isn’t out of the question. Washington won’t have the luxury of a last-place schedule this fall, and what felt storybook at times last season was also partly fortuitous: of the Commanders’ 12 regular-season victories, 11 came against teams that failed to make the playoffs. Nine were one-score games.
Washington is now a marquee team. Expectations come with that. So does a tougher slate.
“The thing people don’t realize about the NFL is that you don’t just pick up where you left off last season,” Ertz says.
Daniels will have to be better — and come up with some counterpunches of his own. Pritchard is confident he can. To illustrate this, the coach revisits a scene that’s stayed with him from last season. It was Week 1, at Tampa Bay, the first start of Daniels’ career. On a third down, he failed to identify a blitz and took a sack that killed a drive. The Bucs won by 17.
Four months later. Same stadium. Wild-card round of the playoffs. The Bucs showed the same blitz on an early third down, and this time, Daniels sniffed it out, all those 5 a.m. film sessions paying off. He changed the play, then hit McLaurin for a 35-yard gain. Pritchard grinned on the sideline. “Man,” the coach whispered to himself, “he’s grown.” The Commanders won by three.
Ask Samuel what’s stood out about his new quarterback, and he begins with one word: “poise.” The longtime 49er watched what Daniels did last season from afar, never doubting his talent, but it’s the presence — the very intangible Aikman was referring to — that sold him once he arrived.
“Man, it’s just different when you’re in the huddle with him,” Samuel says.
Daniels has the job he’s always wanted, even if he could do without all the noise that comes with it. Pritchard appreciates the innocence of his approach, how one of the league’s blossoming stars has refused to let the spotlight shift his process. The coach never has to remind Daniels what’s important. Never has to ask him to show up early.
“Jayden just plays with a lot of joy, man,” Pritchard says. “The reasons he loves football are pure. They’re real. He loves talking about it. He loves finding ways to get better. He doesn’t think he’s arrived or anything.”
Another season like the last one could change that. Daniels enters 2025 as the face of a franchise with Super Bowl aspirations and with the fifth-best odds to win league MVP.
Again, he’s only 24.
“You know me,” the QB says, shaking his head. “I never pay attention to that stuff.”
It’s like his dad used to tell him, before the buzz started to build and Jayden Daniels became the beaming light of a once-broken franchise: “Don’t chase the accolades, because the accolades will find you.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)