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# Jayden Daniels' Sophomore Slump Wasn't His Arm — It Was the Two Plays That Made Him a Star
- URL: https://www.statsdigest.com/jayden-daniels-sophomore-slump-scrambles-intermediate-2025/
- Published: 2026-08-08T11:23:04.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-08T11:23:03.000Z
- Description: Daniels' deep ball got sharper in 2025 — his intermediate throws and explosive scrambles are what collapsed.
- Author: Bill Seifert
- Tags: Jayden Daniels, Washington Commanders, NFL analytics, EPA, 2025 NFL Season, quarterback play

The narrative on Washington's 2025 season wrote itself: injuries derailed the Commanders, and Jayden Daniels regressed. But "regressed" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because when you crack open Daniels' 2025 tape play-by-play and put it next to his Offensive Rookie of the Year campaign, the story isn't a quarterback whose arm fell off. The story is that the two very specific things that made him electric in 2024 — explosive scrambles and rhythm intermediate throws — both cratered at the same time.

His deep ball, of all things, got *better*.

## Table of Contents

- [The headline collapse](#the-headline-collapse)
- [The deep ball got better, not worse](#the-deep-ball-got-better-not-worse)
- [The intermediate throw disappeared](#the-intermediate-throw-disappeared)
- [The scrambles stopped exploding](#the-scrambles-stopped-exploding)
- [What it adds up to](#what-it-adds-up-to)

## The headline collapse

Daniels' overall passing profile in 2024 was efficient, accurate, and mistake-free. In 2025 (through seven starts before the season ended for him), it was none of those things.

|                 | 2024 (17 starts) | 2025 (7 starts) |
| --------------- | ---------------- | --------------- |
| Pass attempts   | 528              | 204             |
| Completions     | 331              | 114             |
| Passing yards   | 3,568            | 1,262           |
| Pass TDs / INTs | 25 / 9           | 8 / 3           |
| EPA per pass    | **+0.103**       | **−0.029**      |
| CPOE            | **+3.55**        | **−2.73**       |

Team-level, Washington's offense fell from **+0.132 EPA/play** (2024) to **+0.005 EPA/play** (2025), while the defense collapsed from +0.039 EPA/play allowed to +0.142\. That's a fuller-story point — this wasn't only a Daniels problem — but on the QB side specifically, the interesting question is *which* passes and *which* runs actually broke.

## The deep ball got better, not worse

Here's the finding that upends the sophomore-slump framing. On throws of 20+ air yards, Daniels was dramatically **more** productive per attempt in 2025:

| Deep throws (20+ air yards) | 2024       | 2025       |
| --------------------------- | ---------- | ---------- |
| Attempts                    | 49         | 18         |
| Completion %                | **30.6%**  | **55.6%**  |
| EPA / attempt               | **+0.530** | **+0.815** |

Completion percentage on deep balls nearly doubled. EPA per deep attempt jumped over 50%. This is the opposite of a quarterback losing arm talent or downfield feel. On a per-throw basis, Daniels' downfield passing was one of the few things in Washington's 2025 offense that actually improved.

The sample is small (18 attempts), so I'd hedge on how far to push it — but the point is directional and clear: whatever went wrong with Jayden Daniels in 2025, it wasn't the shot play.

## The intermediate throw disappeared

If the deep ball got sharper, the *middle* of the field is where the damage lived. Intermediate throws — 10 to 19 air yards, the rhythm layer where Kliff Kingsbury's offense hummed in 2024 — collapsed:

| Intermediate throws (10–19 air yards) | 2024       | 2025       |
| ------------------------------------- | ---------- | ---------- |
| Attempts                              | 103        | 44         |
| Completion %                          | **62.1%**  | **43.2%**  |
| EPA / attempt                         | **+0.516** | **+0.044** |

An **18.9-point drop in completion percentage** and a wipeout from +0.516 to +0.044 EPA per attempt. In 2024, every intermediate throw was worth roughly half a point of expected value. In 2025, that number rounded to zero.

This is the "rhythm" layer of a modern passing offense — the 12-yard dig, the seam shot off play-action, the sit route between the hashes on third-and-eight. It's the throw that keeps drives on schedule. When it stops working, offenses have to lean on either short completions (fine, but slow) or shot plays (fine, but low-hit-rate). Washington's short passes (0–9 air yards) held up reasonably: +0.282 EPA/att in 2024 to +0.201 in 2025, on a 77.0% → 64.4% completion rate. But losing the intermediate strip took away the connective tissue between those two extremes.

## The scrambles stopped exploding

The other 2024 superpower was Daniels-the-runner. That part of his game didn't vanish in volume — the athleticism and willingness were still there — but the explosive plays that made it valuable did.

Combined rushing (scrambles + designed runs, excluding kneels):

| Rushing              | 2024       | 2025       |
| -------------------- | ---------- | ---------- |
| Games started        | 17         | 7          |
| Rush attempts        | 138        | 54         |
| Rush attempts / game | **8.12**   | **7.71**   |
| Rushing yards        | 904        | 283        |
| Runs of 15+ yards    | 15         | 2          |
| Explosive rate (15+) | **10.87%** | **3.70%**  |
| EPA / rush           | **+0.503** | **+0.075** |

Per-game rush volume barely moved. What changed is what those runs *produced*. Explosive-run rate got sliced by roughly two-thirds — from more than one in ten Daniels carries breaking 15+ yards, to one in twenty-seven. And with the explosives gone, EPA per rush fell from an elite +0.503 to a barely-above-zero +0.075.

Splitting scrambles from designed runs makes it starker:

|                 | 2024 scrambles | 2025 scrambles | 2024 designed | 2025 designed |
| --------------- | -------------- | -------------- | ------------- | ------------- |
| Attempts        | 72             | 38             | 66            | 16            |
| YPC             | 8.01           | 6.47           | 4.95          | 2.31          |
| EPA / att       | **+0.722**     | **+0.278**     | **+0.265**    | **−0.406**    |
| Explosive (15+) | 11 (15.3%)     | 2 (5.3%)       | 4 (6.1%)      | 0 (0.0%)      |

Daniels was still scrambling *often* — 38 scrambles in 7 games is a similar rate to 72 in 17 — but each scramble was worth less than 40% of what it produced in 2024\. And designed QB runs, which were a modestly positive tool in 2024, became actively negative in 2025 (−0.406 EPA/att, zero explosive gains on 16 tries).

## What it adds up to

The two mechanisms nobody has isolated are staring right at you when you split the game by throw depth and run type:

1. **The intermediate layer of the passing game broke.** From +0.516 EPA/att and 62% completion to +0.044 and 43%. Not the deep ball — the deep ball actually improved. The middle.
2. **The explosive scramble stopped happening.** From 15.3% of scrambles breaking 15+ yards at +0.722 EPA/att, to 5.3% at +0.278\. Volume held; violence didn't.

Both of these are the *specific* traits that powered the ROY campaign. In 2024, Daniels won on rhythm intermediate throws and by breaking contain into chunk-play scrambles. In 2025, both of those individual toolsets stopped functioning while his downfield shot-play accuracy — the trait most people would have bet regressed — went the *other* direction.

What the data *does* settle is what to look for when Daniels comes back healthy: not "is the deep ball there" — it is — but whether he can win between the numbers again, and whether he can turn 8 carries a game into the kind of highlight-reel scrambles that made him a star instead of the 6-yard gains that made him a slightly better-than-league-average runner. Those are the switches that flipped off in 2025\. When they flip back on is when Daniels is Daniels again.