Quotes: WR Darius Slayton, OT Jermaine Eluemunor

Wide Receiver Darius Slayton

Q: Have you talked with or seen (wide receiver) Malik (Nabers)? What’s your feeling on his spirits as he goes through a concussion? I know you went through one a couple weeks ago yourself.

DARIUS SLAYTON: He’s doing well. I saw him today for the first time since Friday, but he was in good spirits. He’s doing what he needs to do to. Concussion, all you can really do is keep your eyes closed. He’s handling that and he’s in good spirits.

Q: How hard is that to go through, having you just gone through one versus when you have a hand injury or a toe injury or whatever?

DARIUS SLAYTON: It varies for everybody. It can affect your mood, your sensitivity to things, your vision, different things. For everybody it’s different, but he’s handling it well and I think he’ll be all right.

Q: And then the other guy I’d ask about is (wide receiver) Jalin Hyatt. From your experience a couple years ago when you weren’t playing much, how frustrating that can be, and you obviously worked yourself back. I think you led the team in receiving yards that year. How did you handle it? What would your advice be to a young kid about how not playing as much as he thought he would be?

DARIUS SLAYTON: That’s the NFL. It’s a very competitive league. Specifically, our team, we have a lot of good players on our team. Your maybe lack of playing or involvement at times is not always an indictment on you. Sometimes it’s just the situation you’re in, the people you’re around. Obviously Jalin knows he’s a talented player. He knows he can help his team win. And we know he’s a talented player. We know he can help this team win. But it’s a long year. We’ve only played four games. The kind of dark reality of the NFL, sooner or later, somebody’s going to get hurt. Stuff happens. In one way, shape, or form, this opportunity will come. For us as players, your job is just to be ready for whenever that opportunity presents itself.

Q: You’re now four games into the season. I know it’s still early, as you said, but it is basically the quarter point. What do you view your offensive identity at this point through four games?

DARIUS SLAYTON: I think we’ve done a pretty consistent job of moving the ball over the past three weeks, specifically. I think outside of game one, I think last three games, like I said, we’ve moved the ball really well. We’ve gotten into scoring position fairly consistently. We just haven’t been able to finish in the red zone like we wanted to, obviously, this last game, specifically. But I think on offense, we’ve done a good job establishing the run game at times. In the Washington game, we ran it really well. We ran it pretty well against Cleveland. Not as great against Dallas, but most of that was self-inflicted wounds. I think we’ve also done a pretty good job on offense of being efficient. I think we’ve wanted to maybe hit some of the more explosive, bigger plays. We’ve hit a couple of them, obviously could have hit more, but we’ve done a good job of being efficient, moving the chains and sustaining drives.

Q: You guys talked a lot about getting those deep shots this offseason. It hasn’t exactly happened. I’m wondering if you view yourself as like a quick passing team, a running team that can pound it or play action team that’s trying to hit deep balls. What do you see when I ask you that?

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, I think we’ve tried to get the shots up. We’ve gotten them up a couple of times, we just haven’t converted on them at as high of a clip as we would want to. And the reality of deep shots is you only hit – everybody hits a small percentage of them anyways. They’re not easy plays to complete, but obviously we’d like to have completed more than we have to this point. But all you can do is get the shots up and try to make them when you get them.

Q: With the weekend off, people who are in other professions don’t usually watch their profession. They get away from it. Did you watch a lot of NFL football since Thursday night?

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, I watched a decent amount.

Q: I’m always curious as a player when you just sit back and watch and you see what other teams are doing offensively, either good or bad. And then you look at your team. Do you either get ideas or just look and say, ‘they’re making it look easier. We’re having too hard time…’

DARIUS SLAYTON: I think when you watch the NFL specifically, you start to realize that sometimes you think that it’s all going great for some team or another. Depending on what time you play on a Sunday, you don’t necessarily watch their game. For example, the Bills before last night, they were rolling. I think they put up almost 40 or they put at least 30 plus every game. Were firing people up. And then last night they’re playing Ravens, and they look like they’re in Hell. The NFL is like that. The Saints, pretty sure they came out, put up 40 in two or three games in row, too and then they played the Falcons yesterday and they lost the game to a game winning field goal. So, you realize that sometimes you have a perception because of media and highlights and things like, oh, ‘There’s bombs over Baghdad there.’ Then you sit down, you watch a game, and they’ve got 10 points in four quarters, and they have to rely on a 58-yard field goal to win the game. It just kind of shows you that this league’s really competitive. You’re not just going to go out there and beat the brakes off everybody. You’re going to have to show up every weekend. You have to win each game however that game has to be won, whether that’s 40-45 or 10-3.

Q: But given that inconsistency, what you see this weekend, ‘we know this team’s great. Now they can play well’. Vice versa. Your offense just has not scored enough points, that seems to be a consistent thing. It’s not like you guys scored 40 one game and then 10 the next. If you could just give me one or two things besides the buzzwords about execution or consistency that you have confidence that this team will score more points, in these last 13 games…

DARIUS SLAYTON: I would say the fact that we have, for instance, the Dallas game, I don’t know if you remember way back early, like the mid-2000s, Alabama and LSU played the national championship game and it was like the worst offensive game ever because neither team got past the 50. That’s not us. If that was the case, then that would be, ‘we’re in Hell. We can’t get anything going. We can’t move the ball.’ We got into scoring position multiple times against Dallas. We scored I think on every drive in the first half, and then in the second half, we got into scoring position other times. If it wasn’t for a penalty here or there, or better execution by us here or there, we would have been in scoring position some more. That tells you that we’re getting into the scoring position and now you just have to finish from there. The encouraging part of that is that we are getting down there. If you’re not getting down there then you don’t have a chance in the first place. I would say that going forward is what we will try to hang our hat on is, ‘All right, we have done a good job of getting there and now we have to finish when we get there.’

Q: You’ve been on offenses that haven’t got there. You know what I mean?

DARIUS SLAYTON: Exactly. Yeah, I definitely have. So, I know the difference.

Q: You said you watched some TV yesterday and what seems to be the common theme is that there are some teams show up some days, and then hey don’t show up the next day. When you’re sitting at 1-3, do you sit there and go, ‘We’re really not that far out of it?’

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, it’s a long year. I mean four games is, like you said earlier, a quarter of the year. Got a lot more football to play and ultimately, if we play better going forward, we’ll get different results, and you’ll look up and we’ll be where we want to be.

Q: Do you sit back and look at the Washington game and scratch your head and go, ‘How are they 3-1 and we should have beat them?’

DARIUS SLAYTON: If you look at that game specifically, they didn’t score any touchdowns. They won with all field goals. And they found a way to beat us that day. That’s why I said, it’s the NFL. It’s not always going to be you get in the end zone three or four times. You would love for it to be that way, but you have to find a way to, like I said, win each game the way that game needs to be won.

Q: What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of having the time off from a Thursday game to a Sunday game, because just as an example, the Jets came out yesterday and were completely out of sync after looking really good the previous week. What’s the advantages of the extra rest versus staying sharp?

DARIUS SLAYTON: I think the advantage is that it gives your body time to recover. Obviously playing that Sunday-Thursday back-to-back is a very short window to play football in, so it’s nice to have the time for your body to recover. I think it’s important to stay, if not fully physically locked in, mentally locked in, whether that be…I wouldn’t say that it’s the time to go to Miami and kick your feet up on the sand. It helps to get treatment or watch extra film or stretch, do Pilates, whatever it is you like to do to keep your body right in this time to try to keep yourself mentally into it, keep your body into it, but not fully relax.

Q: You guys have been to Seattle in recent years, and it hasn’t been a good trip for you guys. What is it that’s difficult about playing there and what are your memories?

DARIUS SLAYTON: We’re 1-1 there, aren’t we? Since I’ve been here…we beat them that 6-10 year, then we lost the last time we went there.

Q: Yeah, I guess it was last time I’m looking at. Is it a difficult place to play?

DARIUS SLAYTON: For sure. I mean the 12s are well-known. They’re well-documented. It’s a loud place to play. They have a good football team. They’ve been a good football team for it feels like, the last two decades, so they’re always competitive. We know it’s going to be a tough challenge, but we’re going to work to go out there and get a win.

Q: No crowd that first time when you guys went out there. There was no crowd in the stands.

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, you’re right. That was the COVID year.

Q: In terms of Seattle, you talked about watching games over the weekend. They’re obviously playing tonight, but when you’re watching a game like that, and because this has become such a week-to-week league, can you fall into a trap of watching that one game tonight and forming opinions off of a team, or have you gotten to the point where, you know how to assess a team over a larger period of time rather than looking at them, ‘Well, this is what they did the last game, so we’re going to anticipate, this versus maybe a bigger picture?’

DARIUS SLAYTON: For sure, because there’s also matchups involved in this where certain teams maybe match up better with a team or match up differently with the team than you do. Obviously tonight it kind of helps, you get a little precursor I guess, to be able to watch a full game of them. And for me as a receiver, I get to watch their DBs up against Detroit’s, (they’ve) got (Lions wide receiver) Amon-Ra (St. Brown), one of the better receivers in the league, (Lions wide receiver) Kalif Raymond, they got some other good wideouts. I’ll get a chance to see them go up against those guys and more so get a feel for how they play and the way they look. Whether they win or lose, ultimately, is irrelevant, but for me, I try to take more away from like, how do they play, their style of play, those types of things.