The NFL season is moving towards the halfway mark after Week 6, and for some teams that also means time to think about the future. While in the playoff race of course (almost) anything is possible, in the respective division cellars some teams can already look towards 2019 – highly unofficial, of course. But what should such a rebuild actually look like? Are the Oakland Raiders facing a complete upheaval? Also, how did the cowboys defeat the Jaguars Defense and get the Seahawks into the playoffs?
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On Sunday, the rumour mill around the Arizona Cardinals suddenly started to seethe, whose season can already be considered as a year of transition: The Cardinals are supposed to listen to Cornerback Patrick Peterson’s offers, while elsewhere they said the New York Jets Pass-Rusher had Chandler Jones in mind as a trade target – or in other words, Arizona’s two best defenders, both of whom have played very good seasons so far, and the two best players on the team are now.
It’s clear how rumours like this come up: A team that has nothing to do with the playoffs in the short term should give up players who could bring in high draft picks and prepare for the future.
To put it mildly, that’s enormous nonsense.
Anyone who has followed the NFL over the past three years, even in its initial stages, knows how quickly a change can take place in the NFL. The Philadelphia Eagles and the Los Angeles Rams are the prime examples, the Bears on their way there. And what unites these teams? It is the franchise quarterback on the rookie contract and combines a high aggressiveness in trades and in the Free Agency, with an emphasis on immediate success and less on draft picks as well as the long-term future.
The four or five years a quarterback plays under his rookie contract are the best possible title window for an NFL franchise; there is simply no greater Cap advantage than the quarterback before his first contract extension.
So if you think ahead, for teams like Arizona, Cleveland or the Jets, this is the time to be aggressive. These teams will be among the franchises with the most Cap Space in the upcoming Free Agency, and that’s exactly what they should be exploiting now. As absurd as it may sound now, these teams should have a four-year title window for the coming season, of which they should have serious Contender ambitions at least in the last two years.
This is how you approach a rebuild in the NFL, and it can also be done quickly. Not by resetting your squad to the beginning after having the rookie quarterback. And also not by pushing your cap hits around like the cowboys for years so that they cause you problems when you have Dak Prescott on the extremely cheap four-round rookie deal.
To a certain extent the opposite of the Jets, the Browns, the Cardinals and possibly also the Bills are the Oakland Raiders. No team in the NFL seems to be currently facing a long upheaval, which makes the decision-making process that led to Khalil Mack being traded away at least more comprehensible. It was still a mistake for me, but you can see why Gruden looked at this team and then decided that you’d rather be three to five years away.
It is fitting that Amari Cooper should now also be a trade option. And Karl Joseph. And Gareon Conley, who lost his starting place and didn’t do a defense snap against the Seahawks. Young, quite talented players who have been drafted by the past regime – and who may not fit into Gruden’s long-term plan.
All this points to one thing: a total rebuild, a team that Gruden wants to rebuild from the ground up according to his ideas. Which, of course, raises the question at some point: how does Gruden really rate Derek Carr?
Carr is a short pass quarterback that works when the circumstances around him are good. Against the Seahawks in London, he was the first starter quarterback this season to achieve the feat that more than 70 percent of his passes arrived and he still recorded less than five yards per pass. Graphically it looks like this, and as soon as Pressure comes into play – which can happen against the current Raiders tackles – Carr is not only prone to mistakes, but also to sometimes absurd interceptions.
My opinion about Carr is now, after some years in which I could not really grasp him, more and more concrete: For me, he is a game manager, extremely dependent on the situation around him, with sometimes bad dropouts on his passes and too little big play potential.
The result: you can be successful with Carr if everything fits. But if the Raiders go through the upheaval that I see coming more and more, then they won’t win many games with Carr in the medium term under difficult circumstances and with some bad teams.
That’s why you don’t just fire him after this season, even if that would mean cap savings of over 15 million dollars. The Raiders should also play Carr in the 2019 season – unless there is a spectacular trade offer – which should also be a big transition/makeover season.
Not only is the quarterback class much more promising for 2020, Carr and Gruden can still try out their chemistry – and after the 2019 season Oakland could release him with a dead cap of just five million dollars.
I expect this kind of massive upheaval in Oakland in the meantime, and Gruden will consider carefully whether he can raise his offense with Carr. Schematically, Carr’s strengths fit at least in Gruden’s West Coast Scheme, but I increasingly don’t see him as a long-term franchise answer if you want to reassemble your team more or less completely.
Maybe you just have to look at it more relaxed. Just like Bruce Irvin after the game in London, who gave the best: “We lost, but I have a beautiful wife to come home to. I’ll try to make some babies!”
If someone had said before the game that the cowboys were beating Jacksonville, then I would have had only one realistic scenario in mind: The cowboys’ Front Seven dominates the game against Bortles and the fragile Jags-Line completely, forces several critical turnovers and Dallas succeeds in the end in a close success.
The reality: Dallas flashed six times and never came to Bortles, who was only 13 times under pressure in 31 dropbacks. The Jaguars’ passing game was extremely inefficient, Bortles didn’t even get six yards per pass – but this time it wasn’t the primary reason for the Jaguars’ (surprisingly clear) defeat.
Dallas rather ran the yags for 5.9 yards per run and 206 rushing-yards in total in the ground, and here one sees a continuing trend: The cowboys, equipped with the worst receiving corps of the league, increasingly find other ways to create yards. About screens and play action on the one hand, but also about the run game on the other.
This means that the cowboys are using Prescott better and better as a threat in the run game. The Zone Read was a central element for the victory against the Jaguars, but it doesn’t matter how often Prescott himself runs with the ball (against Jacksonville: 4 Designed Runs for 21 yards, plus 7 Scrambles for 61 yards) – the fact that the Defense has to consider it in its approach is rather the means to success.
And the Cowboys were persistent in their Rushing approach, at the same time they had obviously identified the left side of the Jaguars front as a weak point. Dallas ran 21 of his 35 runs (not including QB-Scrambles) on the right side, and especially Interior had enormous success on the right side.
For example, this long run of Elliott. The cowboys – actually a classic zone run team – mix in a pull blocker and get an over-number situation on the side where the run develops. The defense on the other hand reacts to the formation and because the play looks like an inside run at first, the linebackers are briefly pulled into the center.
At the same time, the in-line positioned receiver takes the defensive back positioned opposite it to the outside, creating a huge gap for Elliott.
This procedure could be observed several times, for example with this 20-yard run by Elliott, which really got the second cowboy TD drive rolling.
Again it’s a pull concept to the right, where the cowboys trust their two tackles and the center to hold the center momentarily, while both guards are used as pull blockers, with the support of very good tight-end blocks from the outside.
And this run also shows how a defense has to react if the offense is only versatile enough: already at this comparatively early play you can see how the Jaguars safeties and linebackers hesitate for a short time and respect the play action rollout respectively the quarterback keeper and hesitate for a short time before they attack.
Of course, not everything was perfect. Once again, the cowboys didn’t break the 200-passing-yard barrier, and the play calling at First Down was again quite questionable: although the passing game worked comparatively well here, Elliott often had to run into a wall.
But the good news: It wasn’t just the run game that worked. The cowboys mixed play action efficiently with screens and short dumpoffs, Prescott didn’t have many, but enough big plays in the passing game and also attacked the Jags remarkably often deep – and that although he was under pressure in almost half of his dropbacks: 13 of his 27 passes flew ten yards or further. With Zone Read and Play action, the cowboys also brought Prescott into motion and out of the pocket, making the game easier for him.
But especially Cole Beasley didn’t get the Jaguars under control. Jacksonville doesn’t play a complex defense, but rather relies on explosiveness and individual class at every level – the more serious it is when coverage breakdowns occur anyway.
That’s exactly what happened with Beasley’s first touchdown. The Jaguars seem to be playing a kind of Zone Man mix, with two Underneath defenders in Zone. The centrally positioned linebacker is responsible for the deep route of the tight end and follows it accordingly, while the two outside corners are also vertically occupied and the left linebacker has to cover the flat route of the running back.
That should leave two defenders in the center, and before the snap it looks like Beasley was in the slot in Man Coverage. After the snap, however, the two players let themselves fall into a similar zone, which couldn’t have been planned – maybe one of them didn’t react correctly to the deep route of the tight end and the resulting coverage tasks. In any case, the center is completely open for Beasley to touchdown. Beasley caused big problems especially for the cornerbacks in this game again and again, his route was often the one that was used as a zone concept beater.
In the end it’s two teams that both get big problems if they fall behind with two scores. Dallas came into this game with 16.6 points per game, the third weakest value in the league and had not scored 40 points since Week 7 2017 against the 49ers.
Jacksonville, on the other hand, has had some vulnerabilities to the run several times this season and is not at the hoped-for level yet. And it raises a general question: to what extent can you build up your team via an elite defense in today’s NFL, where offenses are not only more constant over several years, but also have to have a greater weight for the outcome of games?
That’s a subject for a different, deeper analysis, but for the Jaguars it’s clear: in games where you get behind early, the chances of winning at the end are very slim. And that’s a problem.
Page 1: Rebuilds, the total upheaval in Oakland – and Dallas defeats the Jags Defense
Page 2: Bell comeback, Dolphins vs. Bears – Seahawks in the playoffs? Your questions!