It was cool to see guys like Ian \[Wheeler\] and Brittain \[Brown\] do their thing. We were all hyping them up on the sideline when they got in the end zone. It's just great to see all their hard work come to fruition. Seeing the game from that perspective definitely gave me a new look at things, but I wanted to be the one playing.
What I really focused on throughout the game was practicing identifying the defenses — seeing what the linebackers were doing, what their disguises were and what I could've done in certain situations.
Recognizing and reading defenses is something I've really honed in on during camp. Obviously football is football, there's only so many ways to skin a cat, so the defensive schemes themselves aren't much different from college. What's different is the disguises. A defense in the NFL can appear to be playing Cover 1 or single-high man and then they'll buzz out real quick and roll to a Cover 2. And that happens in split seconds.
What really opened my eyes to that was going against Dennis Allen's defense. I realized real quick in camp that I needed to get that stuff down, because if the defense throws something new at me, I've got to be prepared to take it on.
I think what's so special about DA's defense is his aggressiveness. He's not afraid to call what he calls. Even Sunday night, there were two plays in the game where he called a Cover 0 blitz on a big-play down. Most defensive coordinators don't have the cojones to do that. So there's little instances like that where DA's mindset is just different. He's gonna get after you, so going against that in camp has made us all better.