HoofHearted

Glad someone enjoyed it. Buried on page 13 I wasn’t sure if anyone was even going to see it. 🤣

Offensively: Condensed sets are going to be good to us. Attack the edges of the defense through these - force their corners to make tackles in the run game and tire them out. See if they can hold up in the pass game after being heavily involved in run fits. Duo/pin and pull should be good calls. Need to come out in bunch/stack sets and test their communication switching routes off. Choice routes. Must make an effort to target backs in the pass game - their backers cannot cover our backs. Primarily a MOFC coverage team. They want to play Cover 3 on run downs or quarters on run downs vs condensed sets - this is when you want to run your RPOs and PAPs. Defensively: Have to pick and choose when you want to pressure. Heavy sets they max protect quite a bit - play coverage. 11 personnel or lighter is when you want to bring pressure - heavy pass out of this personnel though mostly quick game. They run a ton of condensed sets - stay out of man as much as you can. Run game is mostly zone scheme, but like the Bengals (who had also been mostly zone scheme) I wouldn’t be surprised to see more gap scheme runs against us. Duo, toss, and iso are staples, but inside zone and Midzone show up a lot. Match heavy with heavy on run downs, play base on pass downs. 47 follows Diggs. They like stressing your curl/flat defender in base pass game - overhangs have to play well. Play action is largely flood concepts or wave - must play top down and force the check-down.

Have you seen our missed tackle numbers improve throughout the season? They have. Zero missed tackles vs the run the past two weeks.

I’m with @GunnerBill here. McDermott has always been this guy. It’s why I really liked the hire when they first brought him in. He’s tough nosed, gritty, and won’t shy away from the dirty work in order to improve a team. I think you are hearing it more from him this year than in years past because we are so young. When you don’t have the veteran leadership that we’ve had you have to be that voice. Obviously player led teams are ultimately what you want, but if you know you don’t have that the onus is on you as the head coach to make sure that message is being spread. As a side note, because I feel like it gets glossed over quite a bit around here, McDermott is a true coach. He is teaching fundamentals daily. You’d think that be obvious coaching the highest level of football, but you’d be shocked at how many coaches in the nfl gloss over fundamentals of football for scheme, and just expect every player that comes into their program to be able to do things at a refined level already. Flaws obviously get brought up way more than strengths, but McDermott offers a lot of strengths to this football team.

Only blitzed on the final play. Other than that it was Cover 2, Cover 3, Combo, and then the touchdown on Tre actually wasn’t 2 man. It played like quarters with wall players inside. Cam should have been further inside. He should have either back out weak or first crosser if back goes strong.

Yeah, man is taxing. Add in condensed sets that make it difficult to sort out man responsibilities post-snap with all the switching that occurs. Add in the choice routes that just run away from your leverage. Add in a Quarterback who, as you stated, is smart and can diagnose all of this based on your pre-snap presentation. It still sound as good? There has to be a healthy mix in order for a defense to be successful. At the end of the day if you sit in one thing all game you're going to get picked apart. That first drive alone we ran 10 different coverages (Cover 3, Cover 4, 2 Man, Cover 6, Tampa, 4 Buzz, 2 Invert, 2 Sky, and what I call Combo (Split Safety Coverage), and Cover 1). If you're going to feel out a first drive and see how an opponent is going to attack you while still disguising and showing a whole heck of a lot of post-snap presentation I'd say we did a pretty good job of making Burrow think - all while showing tight coverage pre-snap to not allow him to get anything out quick to at least give our pass rush a chance (as bad as they are). At the end of the day, if we don't miss a tackle on a check-down to Perine it's a completely different start to the game. It's 2 man - he blew the coverage. You can see McDermott yelling at him from the sideline. Go peep TJ Sanders dropping into coverage on one of our Sims where we bring Poyer from the opposite side. Hancock blew the coverage. It was 2 man there as well. Left Tre hanging. Young players making young player mistakes.

So is zone the issue or that we aren't getting hands on receivers that you take issue with? EDIT: I assume when you say press you're referring to a true jam at the line.

That whole first drive we were within 3 yards of the receiver from the LoS pre-snap. The only times we weren't was when we ran an Inverted 2 look and our corners were dropping out to play their Cover 2 drops, and one rep of 2 man where Tre bailed out early. Other than that our pre-snap presentation was very much a "press" look.

The first third down was 2 man and we sent the backer. What coverage is soft zone? That term gets thrown around here a lot and doesn't mean anything.

Both teams rushed 4 and dropped 7, if that's aggressive I guess we have differing definitions of what aggressive is.

Sure, we did as well. They just converted. It happens.

Did you watch last nights game? Rushed 4 dropped 7 the whole first drive. This happens more than you'd think.

I know a lot of us are in a bubble and mostly only watch Bills football, but this is like this in all of football. Come out in base, run calls you know your guys can execute in their sleep to ease them into the pace and tempo of the game while you see what your opponent is coming out in and what their plan will be to attack you. McDermott's been doing this a long time, he knew we wouldn't be able to sit back and rush 4 all day and be successful. He's also smart enough to have plans of action for different approaches based off what he's seeing from the offense. You need that first series to gather data then adjust from there all while hoping base d is enough to hold them on the first drive.

We’ll never get an answer from Josh, but I’d love to know if that pass was actually intended for Shavers 😏

Dagger concept there