Raiders QB Kirk Cousins The Unsung Hero of Our O-Line

Kirk, Spencer Burford doesn't get a lot of attention, but he's just come in as a free agent and been a rock-solid guy. Would you talk about him as a man and a player? What's impressed you about him as your left guard? Yeah, he's played a lot of meaningful football in this league. He's a pro, he's competitive in practice every day, and he stays steady. We're going to ask a lot of him this year. Guards in this league are doing a tough job. He's got a tough kick, but again tonight he's going to want to do a nice job running the football and also with pockets. How would you evaluate your progress from the beginning of training camp to now? I think it's every day, just trying to find continued improvement. You're never a finished product. You're always looking for ways to be better and to continue in your fundamentals and owning the game plan and how you operate in that plan. It's a progress, but I think it's been a productive training camp, productive pre-season. As Tom Brady spoke to us, one of the many good things he said to us was, Hey, everybody has training camp, everybody has pre-season games, so to think that you're somehow getting ahead of everybody else just because you went out to practice and practiced. There is no edge there in the sense that everybody else is doing that too. You've got to find your edge within those practices or post-practice or in the way you relate to one another. There's ways you've got to find edges, but it's not just showing up to practice and doing your job because everybody's doing that. You've talked about a few of them already. What have you seen that could make this O-line special? What about it could make it special over the course of the year? I think it starts with our scheme. I have great respect for Clint and Rick Denison and Mario and the gang just putting together the run plan each week and the way they teach the fundamentals. Great respect for Tyler, Spencer, Colton, all those guys, DJ, JPJ, Caleb. Just the way they go about their work every day and the way they grind through it mentally, physically. It's one day at a time, one week at a time, and we'll see where we're standing at the end.