Jay Gruden Redskins Presser: Trent Williams seeing specialist for thumb injury

Jay Gruden answered questions about the Redskins after today's practice. Jamison Crowder will miss another game with an ankle injury. Chris Thompson suffered a rib injury on the other side last week, and it looks like he'll miss another game. The good news is that starting CB Quinton Dunbar is expected back on Sunday vs the Falcons. Trent Williams is visiting a specialist in Pittsburgh to determine if he needs surgery for his thumb injury.

Injury updates:

Jamison Crowder:

“He’s coming along. This is just a tough injury with the ligament and all that stuff. We don’t want to push it until he feels like he’s with the trainers and the strength staff and he’s cutting at full speed. We don’t want to put him out there when he’s 75 percent. There’s no point.”

Chris Thompson:

Byron Marshall:

“We’re not bringing up Byron this week. He can’t come up this week. He’s practicing this week but possibly next week we could bring him up. Yeah, I mean, anytime you have a rib [injury] like that it’s a painful deal especially for the things that he (Chris Thompson) has to do – running the football, protecting and catching the ball. We’re going to give him a little bit of time, make sure he’s ready to roll and he can have all his movement and flexibility and can run out there without pain because it is a tough injury for a running back or for anybody for that matter.”

Quinton Dunbar:

”Dunbar? He did good today. I mean he’s full today so I have every indication in my mind that he’s going to play barring a setback. Again, we’ll keep close tabs with the trainer and talk to Quinton and see how he’s doing. Like I said, barring a setback, I’d imagine he’ll play. As far as how we matchup with the receivers, we’ll see how it goes. I think they have so many good weapons with [Calvin] Ridley on one side and Julio [Jones] on the other side. I don’t think it really matters. Both of them are pretty dang good. Ridley’s a first-rounder. Obviously, Julio is Julio. If we choose to match, we match. If we don’t, both of them are going to have to strap it up and cover one heck of a player.”

Moving Norman and Dunbar around:

”Well, it depends on the game, the person, the scheme, what coverages we’re playing. If you’re playing a lot of two shell, you don’t really move them around a lot. If you’re playing a lot of single safety stuff, you might want to move them around. Let Josh compete against the best – the guy who they might throw it to or target the most. If that’s the case this week, they could be the same. But with ‘Dunny’, the way he’s playing or was playing before he got hurt, we may not have to do that. We can leave him right and left and let him be comfortable and cover equally two pretty good receivers. A lot goes into the decision, coverages, who you’re playing against and who’s on the field with you.”

Red zone offense this year:

”I think it has to improve. We’ve missed some great opportunities, man, some really good ones. It’s not easy down there. Defenses, they have great options. They can Cover 0 you. They can show Cover 0, drop eight. They can play two deep, three deep and it gets all packed in down there and windows are very tight. You have to be very accurate and anticipate throws. You have to win your one-on-one matchups when you do get man. We do have some improvement to do in the red zone area. We have the guys that can win in the man-to-man. Then, it’s our job to find the holes in zone – might have to buy some time if they drop eight guys and work some scramble drills.”

Alex Smith getting more comfortable in the red zone:

”Yeah, probably and it’s play dependent and play related. What play is good versus what coverages. We try to help him out and try to match it up, but sometimes we don’t get the coverages we anticipate and we have to ad lib a little bit. He’s been very good as far as protecting the football, which is good. You want to come out of there with seven obviously, but Hop [Dustin Hopkins] is kicking the ball very well. We’re playing good defense. Most important thing is to at least get points and we’ve done that pretty much every time.”

Trent Williams:

Ha Ha Clinton-Dix:

Greg Manusky Presser

Ha Ha Clinton-Dix and getting him up to speed:

”Well that’s the biggest thing, I think he’s a professional of course, it’s great to have him on our team. It’s an individual that came from somewhat of a similar background, so I think the calls and stuff will relate over a little bit. But that’s the biggest thing, is trying to get him get up to speed with the defenses that we have. That might be a little different than what he did but overall he’s doing a good job.”

New players adjusting to the defense:

”Well, I think it takes a couple of weeks. I think overall, an individual that doesn’t know all the calls; I know he (Ha Ha Clinton-Dix) knows a fire zone concept. He knows Cover-3. He knows Cover-2 but every team is different. So overall, his knowledge of the game is very good, so I think he’s going to have a chance to probably play a little bit this week and we’ll see from there.”

Montae Nicholson:

“Right now we’re just judging and weighing what we have right now. Based upon that, he’s (Clinton-Dix) been here for two days right now so just trying to figure out what he knows and how he knows it and then try to plug him in and hopefully he’ll be in a situation where he plays a little bit.”

Falcons offense:

“I think overall you can see a lot of speed showing up across the board with the receivers that they have and with [Devonta] Freeman down, what happens is those other guys get an opportunity to really fly down the field. They can run. They have some speed, so we’ve got to make sure we match them up.”

Run defense:

“You know, we’re playing physical up front. I think the guys that we picked up in the draft in Jonathan [Allen] and Matt [Ioannidis] and all the guys up front, Preston [Smith] setting an edge and [Ryan] Kerrigan and overall, they’ve been doing a good job. I don’t know where we’re ranked or anything, but we’ve just got to make sure we stop the run, make them one-dimensional and put them in a passing situation.”