Ron Rivera Presser: Darrick Forrest and Jeremy Reaves will be placed on injured reserve

Ron Rivera talks to the media

Update: Forrest’s injury is reportedly a shoulder fracture

Washington Commanders Head Coach Ron Rivera opened up his Monday presser with some injury updates. Darrick Forrest(shoulder) and Jeremy Reaves(knee) are both headed to injured reserve, and they’ll determine how long they will be out after further testing. Rivera said that safeties Percy Butler and Quan Martin would get looks to fill Forrest’s spot, and there are also players on the practice squad that would be “elevated”.

Injury updates:

It is part of the game, and I think the big thing for us is just next man up. You know, let’s get ready to roll and we don’t have time to worry about those things. It is very unfortunate. He’s a heck of a young man. He’s had a good start to his career. He has played a lot of football already and this is his third season, but it’s very unfortunate because you saw the growth and development. He’s playing hard. He brings an infectious energy and so, to lose him early, it’s tough on us. But, you know, we drafted Percy for a reason. We got Quan for a reason and this is why. So now it’s the next man up mentality and we just gotta go forward and get ready.

Learning from the Bears debacle:

I just think that first and foremost there was a good opportunity for us the last couple days to dive into several things, study some things, look at some things, evaluate what we do and how we do it, evaluate the way we’re doing it. And I think, going through it and in our conversations that we’ve come to some pretty good resolutions and some things that most certainly do need to be corrected, need to be fixed, and some things that we can do to help the players.

Friday was a long day. Longer than Saturday and Sunday, that’s for sure. But, you know, getting a chance to go back and look at specific things, looking at some of the analytics that we have that we get from our people that tell us about some of the things. I got a chance to look at them. And then you look at the tape and you see them and, and you say, ‘Okay, I get it.’ You look at it. Let’s correct it and let’s go on.

Turning the season around:

2-3:

This year’s draft class:

Well, I think the biggest thing more than anything else to look at and think about is starting the young quarterback. You know, that’s going to create some things that are going to happen. And I think as we play, it doesn’t matter who we play as he grows and develops and gets better and better, so will we. And I think that’s a little bit a part of it. Looking at evaluating the draft class, there’s a reason why we drafted some of those guys, each of those guys there’s a reason for it. An example is Quan, what happened last year to Kam, we really felt that we needed to have another topflight, young, depth type of safety and that’s what we did in the draft. Some of those guys we drafted for specific reasons, and we’ll continue to work with them.

This year’s free agent signings:

I think that those guys are growing, developing in what we do. And yeah, do we need to see more? We need to see more from everybody. You know, we really feel like we can play better. We can coach better. We can all do everything better. This is a collective thing. We’re all culpable for the things that have happened in the last five weeks. You know, we’ve had some opportunities and we’ve missed them. Well, we can’t miss them. This is a production based business. I get that part of it and we’re gonna look at them one game at a time. This game, we got Atlanta coming up and our objective is tomorrow when the players come in, it’d be an opportunity for us to get that bad feeling and bad taste out of our mouth and start getting ready for Atlanta.

Missed opportunities:

I think probably some of the things that surprised us was just the missed opportunities. You know, you go back and one of the things that we looked at obviously was the third down. You know, I was looking at third down and just the opportunities we had on both sides of the ball. Not just on the defense or on the offense, but on both sides of the ball. We could’ve done some things better and things that would’ve sustained drives for us on offense and things that would’ve gotten us off the field immediately on defense.

Is the best way to optimize the offense throwing the ball?:

Well, I think the thing that you have to look at is why did we have to throw the ball as much early on? And some of it was coming back and being very competitive in the Denver game, a good example. Doing the things that we did in Buffalo, unfortunately trying to come back and then last week. I mean, that puts you in a very tough, difficult situation. It’s interesting and I had a conversation with EB and that was one of the things that we talked about, we didn’t want to have to do, but we’ve had to do, unfortunately, that has put so much on Sam early. That’s expediting his development, that’s for sure but we don’t want that. We want to be balanced, we want to be able to run, use play action and drop back passing. We want to be able to use those phases of offense as opposed to getting stuck and saying, ‘Okay, we gotta try and do this and try and do this to give yourself a chance to win.’

Calling more passing plays compared to the rest of the league:

If you’re having success, you want to continue to do it. I mean, the quick throws are extended handoffs and there’s several ways to look at it that way.

Looked at the defensive play calling?:

I didn’t say that. I was going to say, look at the things that we do. I didn’t say anything about the choices of what Jack calls. I said, we’ll look at what we do.

Mistakes made by the secondary:

Well, I’ll say like a great example is the last touchdown for Chicago. Kendall Fuller was going in to try and make a play on the ball, and that ball was thrown high. If you look at it and try and time it out, Kendall’s there in time to at least knock the ball down. But the ball was thrown high. So it’s a guy trying to make a play, he wasn’t doing more than he shouldn’t have, he was doing exactly what he was, he had the beat on the play, went to break on it, and the ball was thrown high, whether it was thrown on purpose or thrown like that on accident, it was a high ball.

So sometimes those are the things that happen, sometimes it’s about putting yourself in the right position. You know, their first touchdown against us, we were in one of our cover twos, our shells, we were in cover two. Unfortunately, the safety was too narrow, needs to get to his landmark with vision and probably has a chance to either influence the quarterback not to throw that ball, or if he does, he’s got a chance to make a play on the ball. So those are the type of things that have happened and again, that was a young player in that situation. It’s got to be better.

Will Efe Obada and Phidarian Mathis’ 21-day practice “clocks” start this week?:

That’s something that we most certainly do discuss and talk about, and we’ll get further into that as that time comes.

Are lineup changes coming?:

I think those are things that we’re going to look at. We’ve got some things that we most certainly have talked about, and we’re going to practice them and see how things go.

Replacing S Jeremy Reaves:

That’s a big blow for us. Obviously we have some guys on practice squad that we’re going to look at and we will be elevating. A couple of those guys are guys that are special teams guys as well. They’re defensive backs that give us options. We’re mostly going to look at these guys and see where we are with that conversation that Nate and I are having, as far as that’s concerned.

Has Sam Howell met or exceeded expectations through five weeks?:

I think he’s a little bit ahead of where we anticipate only because he is having to throw a lot of balls. That’s unfortunate to a degree. But you do like what he’s done and that’s one of the things that you really appreciate. You see who he is, you see his grit, you see his toughness, you see his decision making. Those are all good. Those are things that hopefully we get this thing going in the right direction, that’ll benefit as we continue the season. It’s a long, long year. We got 12 more games left to play and we’re going to approach them one game at a time and focus in on playing the best we can each game.