The crazy exchange of blows between the Houston Texans and the Seattle Seahawks was the best game of the season so far and needs to be worked up – Deshaun Watson in particular is more than impressive. Meanwhile, Miami’s red-alarm level is running, and that’s up to the players. What’s going on with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? What about the Colts in the medium term? And who receives the Midseason Awards from SPOX editor Adrian Franke?
The (previously) big move before the trade deadline came out of nowhere – or not? 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan has been a Garoppolo admirer for years, I’ve looked at the five most important questions about the trade in more detail here.
It was an absolute highlight, what the Seahawks and the Texans there on Sunday gave us. What’s more, it was the best game of the season so far and it will be difficult to beat the level of the quarterback duel.
Russell Wilson has been playing at MVP level for most of the season. What Wilson brings to the lawn in view of the offensive line and the simply non-existent run game is absolutely spectacular and is not appreciated enough for my taste so far this year.
But my focus was on the Watson tape, because the fact that a rookie quarterback in Seattle against this defense, which recently reminded us of its great times, delivers such a performance is unbelievably impressive. So, straight to the point: how did Watson achieve this performance?
As in the past few weeks, Houston relied on a strongly play-action-based approach and concepts that move the pocket. A clear change to the complex offense that the Texans have wanted to play in recent years. However, it is noticeable that coach Bill O’ Brien is expanding his new approach with Watson and making defenses so difficult to live with.
Triple-options, many formations with two or even three players in the backfield – Houston chose this last line-up extremely often against Seattle and used it to create different moves – pre-snap emotions, misdirection and formations that are supposed to mislead the opponent are characteristic of the offense. And of course zone reads for Watson himself: The Texans’ playbook is becoming increasingly complex from the point of view of the defenses, while Watson himself rarely has to carry out difficult full-field reads. In this offense, the strengths of rookie are fully exploited, while its weaknesses are masked.
For example, 16 of his 30 passes were play-action passes, including remarkably all seven under-centre passes. In addition, there were three screens, all four touchdowns were thrown by Watson on Play Action or Screen. He still has some problems if the “simpler” read is not given. He sometimes runs off in a hurry or gets stuck with the first read. This led to the Pick Six when he more or less ignored the Seahawks’ cover-2-man defense and Earl Thomas had been reading the play all along.
So much for the schematic part. But it was also striking how courageously Watson played: In the first half, twelve of his 18 passes flew over ten yards downfield, seven of them over 20 yards, a spectacular quota. During the touchdown, he specifically attacked Earl Thomas after Seattle’s All-Pro-Safety had hesitated for a moment due to the play-action fake. Watson didn’t shy away from Richard Sherman either.
Houston then had nine placements with at least 20 yards of space, and that’s the best a Seattle team has ever made since Pete Carroll coached there. What’s more, Watson is over the last four games at 406 yards on long passes (at least 20 yards) – and has more than Brock Osweiler in the full pre-season for the Texans (379). You can’t stress enough how impressive that is. O’ Brien also deserves praise for his play designs that put Watson in a position to try these downfield shots over and over again.
And Wilson? He had 482 total yards. The Seahawks as a team had 479 total yards (due to sacks and a desolate run game). It’s hard to say much more than that, it was once again a great performance of Wilson, from the pocket and at rollouts as well as during his much feared improvisations. His deep ball is at least in the top 3 of the league, only the late interception was very strange, a throw directly into the arms of the defender waiting in the zone coverage.
Since there were also several questions about Seattle’s Run Game and the main culprits for the problems:”I still see the line as primarily responsible. Jadeveon Clowney was a walking mismatch on Sunday, a bag, a hit, seven hurries and two tackles for loss are even less obvious than the tape worked. Lacy and Rawls could still be solid in my eyes, but whoever sees backfield defenders all the time or gets their own blockers pushed back into their own walkways, whose tape will seldom look good.
The trade for Duane Brown is therefore an incredibly important move for Seattle and makes the Seahawks much more dangerous in one fell swoop. Even if the price wasn’t cheap, no one could expect the Seahawks to get a cheap starting tackle at that time.
Two shutouts, and if we are honest, the first game against the jets has to be counted as at least half a shutout. The performance at the Ravens on Thursday was the sad highlight, as Head Coach Adam Gase saw it. With regard to the implementation of the offense, he jostled:”It’s not about storing the information. We don’t work hard enough. That’s the point. If you can’t remember these things, you shouldn’t be in the NFL. In the end, everyone has to learn these things at home, it doesn’t just work in meetings.”
A clear announcement, and it went on. In response to the Miami Herald’s question as to how long the offense has had such problems, Gases proved:”This has been going on for two years now. I’ve been addressing that for a while. To be honest, I’m fed up with it:” You don’t hear such a public tirade against your own players in the NFL every day either, so I wanted to write a few more sentences about the Dolphins-Offense, because the problems are many-sided – and in the end it’s a horrendously bad offense at the moment.
The individual quality is lacking in several places, among others in the line and on the quarterback position. The run-blocking is bad and Jay Ajayi, who should be wearing this offense, is still waiting for his first rushing touchdown this season. In just two games, he got beyond 80 rushing yards.
Much more serious, however, is another aspect: Gases has already made the offense several times simpler, and this can be seen on the tape: Simple Route concepts, hardly any attempts to create downfield shots using the scheme. Gases confirmed that he wanted to minimize mental errors and therefore simplified the playbook. This can work in a certain way, Chip Kelly’s first season in the NFL is an example of this. Kelly focused heavily on small variations and a lot of training and extremely fast implementation on the course. But he also soon reached his limits, as we all know, because defenses in the NFL quickly learned.
So Miami’s players have to be held accountable. The fact that NFL players can’t mentally cope with an NFL offense is bad enough. If the extremely simplified version of it doesn’t work, it’s not acceptable. The Dolphins are currently much worse than their balance sheet suggests. And the reasons for this are simply unacceptable.
Page 1: Crazy Seahawks-Texans game and problem child Miami
Page 2: Bucs, Kaepernick, Awards, Patriots, Colts – your questions