Phillip Daniels blasts teammate Albert Haynesworth

It is not often that I get the chance to see an NFL interview as brutally pull no punches honest as the one 15 year veteran Phillip Daniels gave today and to be perfectly honest I loved every single minute of it….

What Daniels showed was a love for the game, the team and the fans and for that I respect him. For anyone that has seen or heard the interview what they saw was a man who feels the same tiredness and disgust with this team that so many fans have been feeling for awhile now.

Daniels started off with some hard hitting words that got directly to the point

“I’ve been through 15 seasons and I ain’t won anything. So what I’m saying is if I can come out there and do this, don’t tell me you can’t do it, I want every guy on this team to do well. I want you to realize that if you ain’t all in you don’t need to be here.”

From there he went on to further elaborate saying

“I’m tired of going through season after season where we lose games we should win, guys not doing the right thing, guys not putting effort in, whatever it may be. I’m tired of that.”

Some of these words express exactly how many Redskins fans feel while watching their favorite team lose game after game that they should have won. Fans are fed up and tired of missed blocks, blown assignments and poor execution and it seems so is Phillip Daniels.

When speaking directly on Haynesworth he definitely did not hold back having such quotable statements as

“He let himself down. But in the process of letting yourself down, you let your teammates down in a lot of ways.”

“He just needs to think about what he’s doing on the football part of things and know that people are counting on you. Not the coaches, Not the organization, but your teammates are counting on you. That’s what I play for every day, my teammates. That’s the part of the game that slipped by Haynesworth.”

In what was roughly a 10 minute interview he also said such things as the distractions caused by Haynesworth are not healthy and that they drag down the team. He also praised Shanahan for deactivating Haynesworth vs the Giants basically saying that not practicing has been a problem with players in the past and that a message was sent and needed to be sent that it is time for a change in the way things are ran.

I completely agree with everything that Daniels said in regards to the team and Haynesworth. Haynesworth is an extremely talented and gifted player who if he put his all in to working out, practicing, learning the offense and putting his best effort forward every single play on the field would be in the Pro Bowl just about every season. The problem with Haynesworth is he has not bought in to the concept of it is a team sport and he does not call the shots.

Haynesworth is a me first player who worries more about his individual stats than he does the final score which has always been the real reason for his pouting. It is not that he can’t play in a 3-4 defense he just does not want to see his sack and tackle totals go down. This is Haynesworth’s 9th season in the NFL and he still has yet to really buy in to the team concept and as Daniels put it “I don’t know how much he can change, I think your DNA follows you in a lot of ways”

Would I have liked to see Haynesworth on the field? Yes because talent wise he is one of if not the best player on the Redskins defense but if he has indeed became a cancer as it appears he has if you listen to Daniels “Guys don’t want to say it, but guys feel the same way” than maybe it is time to cut the cancer out. After all if we have learned anything about cancer it is that if left untreated too long chances are it will spread and only get worse.

So to Daniels I want to just say thanks, so thanks for taking things what many fans have been saying in quiet and putting it out there for all to hear.