Evans: 40 catches, 591 yards, 79 points
Brown: 40 catches, 478 yards, 84 points
Record Against the Browns
Evans: 1-0
Brown: 0-0-1
The Bucs “won a game” this past Sunday. It counts as a win because it raises our position in the NFC standings: 3-3, good for 7th place, just missing the playoffs in the unlikely yet oft-imagined scenario that the season ended today. It doesn’t feel like a win, though. It took overtime and a miracle field goal to beat Hue Jackson and a rookie QB. We used up all that juice a defense gets after rightfully firing its coordinator. Our hangover is especially brutal since we lost the playcaller and co-captain of our defense to a torn ACL. We are now down to three healthy starters from our preseason plans: David, Grimes, and Evans. We started the year with replacement-level players starting at strong-side LB and SS, so it’s no wonder the yards and points just pour in against us.
It’s clear that our defense is bad. It’s also clear that Baker Mayfield is much faster than Jameis Winston, but Baker showed on Sunday that he’s faster than anyone on our defense, too. That’s bad. If Madden ratings are to be believed, QBs with Mayfield’s athleticism should still be slower than all corners and about equal with safeties. It looked like Mayfield would have beaten all 11 defenders in fair race.
This is how the Bears and Falcons exploited us. There is just not enough speed to cover the field. Every team has an offensive player faster than our whole defense. It’s not like this is a death sentence. Tyreek Hill is faster than everyone’s defense, but he can be contained—not by a secondary, but by a pass rush getting to Mahomes before Hill has enough time to use his speed to pass the last line of defense. But I offer the question: what if you could guarantee that Tyrek Hill couldn’t use his speed to stretch the field vertically?
It occurred to me during Pats-Chiefs. Collinsworth said something about the Pats defense, how they weren’t among the best units Belichick had coached, but what they had in common was the way they hunkered down when the field shortened. It makes sense: the less field the offense has between them and the goal line, the fewer plays from their playbook they can realistically use.
Inside the 40, you can’t realistically call a flea-flicker or a play-action “shot” play because there’s enough room for the defense to recover. I’m not saying teams wouldn’t do these things. I’m just saying there’s a low chance of success against a balanced defensive look. Inside the 30, the QBs timing has to be very precise in order to get a deep ball in his receiver’s hands. Again, it can happen, but the metrics don’t suggest it. Meanwhile, the number of offensive plays becomes known. Assuming no penalties, an offense with 29 yards to go can run an absolute maximum of twelve plays (if the offense goes for it on three consecutive fourth downs). Realistically, you’re looking at nine plays max, which would be an average of 3 yards per play, in a league where the average team averages double that (5.7 yards per play).
Inside the 20, the defense can play facing the line of scrimmage, and the field becomes congested enough that most offenses run pick routes once they get down there. It’s difficult to prevent a catch aided by a pick route, but it’s possible to key in on where the ball is going and have a defender assigned to limit the yards after catch.
Inside the 10, it’s four to score, and there is just so little an offense can do in a straightforward manner. Power runs, dives, corner fades, slants, sticks, and bootlegs are pretty much the only concepts you’ll see outside of straight-up trick plays. Despite proximity to the goal, the increased congestion reduces the availability of true scoring opportunities.
The moment I knew I’d write about this was during Titans-Chargers. While the Chargers appeared likely to be (must…resist) in charge (sorry) of this game, the Titans dominated time of possession and prevented the Chargers from scoring a touchdown in the red zone. Granted, the let Rivers bomb two scores from the other side of the field, but listen, I’m talking about something else.
The Titans have as their head coach Mike Vrabel, player and coach with all of his professional experience tied to Bill Belichick’s tutelage. The Titans defense gets better the closer it gets to the goal line because there are fewer, simpler looks they’ll see down there, and they’ve actually had the opportunity to practice them.
(Tangent: my theory about why the Titans are so terrible despite having awesome players pretty much everywhere is that their coaching staff is too inexperienced. Vrabel is like 40 and OC Matt LaFleur—facial, LaFleur!—is maybe 36? Had to check: he’s 38. Anyway, my theory is they run inefficient practices due to having too little experience designing and running their own practices. I come at this from a teaching lense. A good teacher designs a lesson plan that runs a specific length in time. A short lesson leaves time for goofing around and drama, not to mention it probably means you missed opportunities to take it up the pyramid of Bloom’s taxonomy—more on this never. A long lesson means you don’t get to finish and probably left your students unprepared for assessment. Anyway, this is why the Titans are bad and the Rams are good. Though they employed the same strategy in their coaching hire, they didn’t consider who would lead practice and how. I’m almost positive it’s all Matt LaFleur’s fault. Because the main difference between the Rams and Titans is that McVay hired veterans to run the parts of practice he couldn’t, while Vrabel hired veterans to run the parts of practice he already could. Like, if Vrabel had somehow known to swipe Monken from Tampa, the Titans might be undefeated. For real.)
Okay, so to recap what we’ve learned so far:
Moving on, it appears as if their worst defense was played 70 yards away from the end zone, while their best defense was played inside their own 20. Using crap logic and ignoring maybe a million things that would negate my claims, I can determine that if the Titans played a larger percentage of defensive snaps closer to their end zone, they might have had a better chance to win.
Then, at the end of the game, the moment that decided who won and who lost came down to the goal line. The Titans ran some garbage from shotgun instead of running a QB sneak from the 1-yard line, and obviously that was no bueno. So the Chargers won the game in the way we actually see a lot of teams win. That last play of the game on the goal line goes in favor of the defense more often than you’d think. I wish I had statistics on it, but this just isn’t that kind of sports journalism.
So that was a lot of buildup to get to where I’m going with this: I know how to fix the Bucs season. Part of what makes the Bucs defense so bad is the statistics. It’s true. If they weren’t allowing so many yards and points, they wouldn’t be such a bad defense. Stay with me. We would get more respect if we allowed fewer yards and points. Stay. With me. How can we do that while losing key defensive pieces?
We change the nature of the game. Right now, when the offense craps out outside of the 40-yard line, the team punts the ball away. This is fairly commonplace, but why? It makes sense in a slow grind of a game where it is difficult to move the ball. When defense won championships, punting was strategic. Now, punting is a habit. It’s something you do when it’s 4th and 10. Should we stop punting altogether? No. Well, probably. I started to write a few instances in which it made more sense to punt, but really, unless you have a two-point lead and ten seconds left, you might as well go for it every time—assuming you’re losing. If you’re winning, hey, punt to your heart’s content. If you know the other team is going to be throwing to come back, then field position is your friend because they’ll never take the top off your defense. You can run clock keeping everything in front on defense.
So we stop punting, at least for the first half, and onside kick every time. We will give the other team more opportunities on our side of the field, but we will also dominate time of possession as a result. That’s the main thing. If we go three and out—sorry, four and out—from the 25, our defense isn’t going to gas out playing a max of eight snaps. And when we do get long drives going, we tire out opposing defenses. The more I think about it, the more I see it affecting small pockets of the game. An offense put in the position of “move the ball or give the other offense at least a FG” should work itself into gear, especially given the increased opportunities from (dumb math warning) 33% more plays per drive.
Practices will be more efficient because the defense will have less of the opposing playbook to scheme against, which will lead to fewer decisions needing to be made by these young, inexperienced, and sometimes untalented players we’re expecting to make stops.
Now that I think about it, this might already be Mike Smith’s defense. I mean, it’s definitely not, but I can see how some concepts overlap.
One problem the Bucs will face in any scheme is their lack of coverage from the safety position. Evans is more comfortable moving forward than backward, and Whitehead just isn’t ready to play professional football. Conte may have sucked at tackling, but he could cover the field. I’m very upset we haven’t done anything to fill that role.
I got tired writing this last night, and you either know or at least can infer my stance on editing the note before posting it. I lost some steam thinking about this “revolutionary” idea, but I still think that this could be a boon to any team with a top-5 offense and bottom-5 defense. But Doak, how many teams could that be? It’s three: Atlanta, Tampa, and KC. This is likely anomalous, but if we stretched it to top-10/bottom-10, I’m sure there would be a handful of teams each year suffering a similar conundrum. Shorten the field on defense, run the clock on offense. Tire the opposing defense, and watch the points rain down in the second half, especially the fourth quarter. What NFL offenses are doing right now is the equivalent of what the concept of the fast break did to basketball in the seventies. What do you do to contain the fast break? You control the ball in the half-court on offense with one man always on top, and you emphasize off-ball defense because dribbling is the slowest way to the hole. If you can’t piece the metaphor back to football, I can’t help you because I gotta move to these recaps.
Sleepy Gary 121 over Luck Dynasty 112
Imagine you’re Shelby: you have two choices to make in Week 7, one at QB and one at LB. Luck vs. Cousins and David vs. Williamson. Which pair do you choose? Now it seems obvious, but Andrew Luck was matched up against a team ranked third in pass defense, a team yet to allow 300 passing yards in a game. You might take Cousins against a defense that’s been mediocre since dominating the Lions Week 1. But, especially in this league, you take David every time! The 10-point swing between David and Williamson would have swung the game! Bad Bucs fan, bad! I think Shelby looked at Kennedy’s roster and thought it didn’t matter who she played, and that was a fair assessment. But Kennedy raised an important point. He started TY Hilton and Eric Ebron’s aka targets one and two for Andrew Luck. If either of them were going to be fantasy relevant, Luck was bound to be at least as relevant. This is the only situation in which we should care who our opponent is starting. Now, we shouldn’t always care. Again, the Bills defense is good enough that you could decide Kennedy’s only starting his Colts because they’re all he has (which is true). So no blame there, but I echo a sentiment from last week: YOUR TEAM NAME IS LUCK DYNASTY.
Kennedy, you got very lucky. You needed 44 points from Eli and Hunt, and you got 53. You survived the worst squeeze you’ll feel all year.
Looking forward: this makes a two-game losing streak for Shelby and a two-game winning streak from Kennedy, making them the only teams in their respective half of the standings moving toward the other half. Convoluted sentence, check.
Show me watt you got! 133 over Doofus Rick 93
This is the third week this year Oliver has fallen short of 100 points, and he too has the Bills-Colts game to thank. Get this: Derek Anderson had more passing yards than Luck in this game, and the Bills’ RBs averaged more yards per carry than the Colts’ RBs. The Bills even forced a safety. However, because they record zero sacks and turnovers combined, they got annihilated to the tune of -2 FP. Meanwhile, the Rams defense recorded four turnovers and seven sacks.
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