Warren Moon on Quarterback Awareness & Avoiding Injuries

Warren, I want to go back to a scenario that we had Joe Theismann on the other day. And it was that Commanders and Giants ending to the game. And I asked Joe the question, I go, who's that on? And he goes, well, the earpiece goes out at 15 seconds. That means the quarterback has the game in his hands. He's got to know situation. He's got to know where he is. He's got to know time. You know, I mean, how do you look at that and how that thing was handled? is that on the quarterback is that on the head coach or is that on the collective i think it's on the collective because it's got to be communicated amongst everyone but the quarterback's got to be aware of that even if he's not told i i would know how many timeouts were left in a ball game whether my coaches told me how many were left or not i'm keeping tabs on that as far as how many we've used you can look at the scoreboard it tells you how many timeouts you have left you can ask the official he can tell you how many timeouts are left Especially if you're in a crucial game where you're coming down on the last drive in overtime, you want to know what you have left. And I think in overtime, it's different than in the regular time. You only have the one timeout. So maybe they used it already because I didn't see the game. But you've got to know that as a quarterback. But you also have to have that communicated to you from the sideline just in case you don't know. You know, Warren, we see a lot of guys that are being injured in the NFL at the quarterback position, especially when we're talking about a guy like Jayden Daniels here. In your opinion, do you think today's NFL quarterbacks, do you think they do a good enough job at protecting themselves and being able to play the following week? I mean, you guys took the beating back in the day. You know, there were more opportunities to hit the quarterback. It wasn't as legislated as it is today. do you think the guys today do a good enough job at protecting themselves um i really don't but guys run the ball a lot more today than they did back in my day there wasn't as many um dual threat quarterbacks playing the game it was more pocket passers and you're not going to get probably injured as much getting sacked as you will running the football and somebody coming at you full speed and taking a shot at you so i think that's the difference but these guys yeah they have to learn how to um either slide earlier than what they're sliding or they have to get out of bounds or take guys on yourselves i was a guy that never wanted to slide i always went uh head first into guys especially if it was somebody i knew i was just as big as or or or bigger than like a defensive back or something that way i was the one initiating the uh the contact as opposed to taking it from somebody else so uh i had a different style than other guys but some guys like to slide you look at Josh Allen he doesn't get hurt much because he he takes guys on he he initiates the contact and he is a bigger guy but I think they can do a better job of sliding but they have to slide earlier because when a defensive player is coming at you full speed he doesn't know if you're going to slide or not he's going to try and tackle you and he's going to try and put a hit on you then all of a sudden you slide at the last possible second there is no way that guy is going to be able to stop his forward momentum and not hit you very hard and a lot of times it's going to be in the head because you're sliding and he's going to come right over the top of you and hit you in your face. So they need to be smarter about sliding, but they also need to get out of bounds a little bit more when they possibly can.