1) DD: Dalton, it's good to be with you. First things first:
DS: Rest in peace, Uncle Phil.
2) DD: Rest in peace, Uncle Phil?
DS: Yeah. "First things first: Rest in peace, Uncle Phil."
3) DD: Oh, man, You're just exposing my ignorance. What is this?
DS: It's a J. Cole Lyric. You're not a J. Cole fan?
4) DD: It's not that I'm not a fan. It's just I'm ignorant of it.
DS: Well, if you don't listen to him, you're not a fan. So I'm going to just take the gray out of this.
5) DD: You're black and white. I like that. Money aside, why did you choose to sign with the Texans?
DS: I think it's easy to get excited about a young team. It was a roster that didn't have a very good record last year. But the roster is solid. Having played against them last year, I just had a lot of respect for what they were able to accomplish. You bring in a good coaching staff and then I come in and I meet a great nutrition staff, and a great strength staff and a great front office. All the things are lined up. I'm like "Dude, how is this not a winning organization? I think all the pieces have been in place. Bringing in that SF scheme and that SF defense, I'm biased because like they kicked me out of the playoffs the last two years. It's a solid, solid scheme. I'm already bought into that aspect of it. Then you come here and you meet all the guys and you're around the locker room and you see the young leadership, the old leadership. It's just a recipe for success. So to me, it was kind of an easy decision.
6) DD: When you actually got the playbook and looked at it, how eye-opening was that for you?
DS: It's nice because they make a lot of stuff look exactly the same. That's a classic Shanahan offense. But just to see it in action, like on paper, it's like, oh my God, I can do so much with this. The second thing is, it's a lot. I was a little bit more of a West Coast offense guy in college. So I'm used to kind of a little bit of verbiage. But the amount of different formations and the amount of routes and the route tree, it's just it's a lot of volume. So I get why guys could maybe struggle early with learning a system like this. It's a lot of stuff. That is definitely a challenge and a challenge that as a young team, I think we look forward to. Because we got a lot of guys that haven't been in a ton of offenses. This is their first one that they can maybe really sink their teeth into. I think it's good, man. It allows you to really dial in on a week-to-week basis. You can always pull something out of the woodworks. I'm excited. I think 'Slow (Texans Offensive Coordinator Bobby Slowik) is doing a great job with installing and making things easier on us. Really categorizing things and putting things in specific buckets to make it easier to remember certain concepts and whatnot. I think the coaching staff, as a whole, has done a really good job with the transition from free agency to the draft to now where we can start putting these things in place at OTAs and I think it's really been smooth.
7) DD: It's cool to hear you say that, because last week when Slowik was meeting with the media, he talked about how at a very base level, they broke things down. How important is that as a player, seeing that and knowing how complex that playbook is?
DS: That's great. To be quite frank, the first few weeks we were all like, 'Gosh, are we doing enough?' They broke things down exactly. Like, "Okay, this is going to be this route, at this depth, at this many steps and we're going to do it exactly like this. It's just a lot of literally breaking down a route into a 5-minute presentation out there on the field. We'd get two or three of those, and that was our day. As a player, you're like, "Okay, can we put it all in? Can we go a little bit?" But having a staff that's willing to sit down and really go into the details and depths from the get-go, it shows, maybe for the young guys that haven't been in a bunch of offenses in the NFL and don't understand what the detail it takes to succeed as an offense on this level, it gives them a really good platform to kind of build their understanding of, "Okay, I have this route, why do I have this route? What do we want to throw this route for? What coverage is this route for? What release am I going to take on this route and why am I going to take this release again?" It's a lot when you're telling a guy for the first time "This is why we do it." The reasoning behind it is really nice and good and successful in my opinion. Starting from the ground up like that because it's easy to kind of just say, "Hey, just do this and then go back and figure out why I am doing this later? But if you start from that, I think it gives you a little broader understanding of the overall concept and opens up a path to kind of understand the offense at a deeper level from the get-go.
8) DD: So you just brought up all the stuff about running routes, catching passes and so on and so forth, but you're a tight end, so you're also an offensive lineman too.
DS: I need to touch on that because, arguably, that's the part of the offense that I'm most excited for.
9) DD: How come?
DS: Because to my core, I'm an offensive lineman. I grew up an offensive lineman. I played center forever. I dropped weight right before high school, played tight end my last year of Little League and then kind of went into my career as a tight end from there. But I love blocking people. It's fun. Especially when you're in an offense where everything is so finely defined. "Hey, this is where this ball is going. This is exactly how we're blocking. This is where the point's going to go. Hey, we're running this play. Here's exactly the track. Here's how these combos and double teams are going to work." It's black and white. Going back to our original conversation, there's no gray area for how things should be. For me in the run game, it's so easy to just tee off and just go. Whereas, in some other schemes that I've been in going even back to college, it's like "Well if they do this then, maybe we do this." No, it's, it's easy. It's this or this.
10) DD: Your birthday is July 11. 7-11. So what's your favorite Slurpee flavor?
DS: Free Slurpees on my birthday! Coke and pina colada mix. You gotta put them together.
11) DD: Earlier you were commenting on the microphone quality and the equipment here in the radio studio. You're the first player to ever say anything about it. Why?
DS: Yeah, I got a pretty beast computer set up. I've got a Shure microphone at home and I just have a lot of respect for good microphones and good audio. I stream sometimes in the offseason. I haven't streamed this season, but usually when I'm home, that's kind of what I like to do. I'm a big, big gamer. That's kind of my that's my pastime. I built a whole PC gaming setup.
12) DD: Last one. Rank the Daltons. You're in there, John Dalton, the English chemist who came up with Atomic Theory. Andy Dalton. B. Dalton Booksellers. And Dalton from "Road House".
DS: Dalton from "Road House" is number one. I think my dad would agree with that. I mean, that's who I was named for. I feel like the atomic theory Dalton sounds smart. I'm going to put him at two. Andy Dalton at three. The bookseller at four. Then I'll put me at, like, 7,000,023.
