Former Redskins tight end Chris Cooley graded Washington’s offensive performance against the Lions on his ESPN 980 radio program on Tuesday, and as you might expect, Jones did not receive high marks. It wasn’t only because the second-year pro out of Florida couldn’t hold onto the football, however. Cooley said Jones opened the game by making a good cut on Washington’s first play from scrimmage, but things started to go south when Jones tried to pick up a safety blitz later in the series.

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“You’ve got a play-action pass, safety blitz off the edge, that fourth play it looks like Kirk Cousins is going fake to his right and the running back’s not there,” Cooley said. “Did the running back go the wrong way? No, he saw the safety blitz off the edge and he actually aborted the play-action, went to pick up the safety blitz and then just gets bowled by the safety, right into Cousins. Cousins takes a bump as he throws the ball to [Pierre] Garcon.

“Those little bumps could be everything. They can change the way the ball comes out of the quarterback’s hand by three yards, and that is enough. And you’re a big-[backside] back. It’s a safety blitz. Go hit him in the mouth. Seriously, you’re a big, strong back. Hit a guy in the face. There’s a blitz pickup that he has later against a linebacker in the A-gap, and the linebacker mauls him — mauls Matt Jones — I mean, straight runs him over. Like, wow, you might want to start thinking about cut blocking him. You’re a big-[backside] back.”

The 6-foot-2, 232-pound Jones worked on improving his ball security during the offseason after fumbling five times as a rookie, even using a special ball that beeps to signal when it isn’t being gripped with enough pressure. His two fumbles against the Lions, including one while fighting for extra yards inside Detroit’s 10-yard line, brought his season total to three.

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“The fumbles,” Cooley said. “You just can’t afford the fumbles. You absolutely can’t afford them. They’re unacceptable. All of them are unacceptable. Whether or not you put all of them on him, I’ll tell you one you put on him; you put the fumble in the end zone on him. Fighting for extra yards, fine, but the first thing you do as a runner, as a ball-carrier when you’re fighting for extra yards is ensure that you have the ball, then fight for extra yards. Ensure the ball. The thing is, he runs so high. He’s got his chest up, he’s got his body up, he runs high, he turns to contact instead of continuing to take contact in the face where you can actually protect the ball. He turns to take it on the sides. It’s not that he has, like, a ‘case of the fumbles.’ He has a case of I-run-in-a-way-that-I’m-going-to-fumble because guys are going to hit the ball.”

Cooley graded Jones a ”D” and raved about Thompson, who led the Redskins with 12 carries for 73 yards and added seven catches for 40 yards. Given the 5-foot-8, 195-pound Thompson’s injury history, Gruden said that he doesn’t want to increase his workload going forward.

“I think that’s a great number for him,” Gruden said. “We don’t want to overdo it with him — he’s still not a very big guy.”

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Cooley gave Kelley, who only had four carries for 15 yards, a “B-minus or a B.” He also suggested that the ineffectiveness of the Redskins’ running game — and a lack of protection — affected Cousins’s ability to look to throw the ball deep against the Lions. Cousins’s longest completion was for 27 yards and DeSean Jackson was largely a non-factor.