Monday Afternoon Week 7 Recap - ATL/MIA, CIN/BAL, CHI/TB, IND/SF - And a comparison of Burrow and Tagovailoa within their offenses

 

Atlanta Falcons (2-4) @ Miami Dolphins (1-6)

There's a maxim in game-calling circles that you always take the better quarterback. Even when the lesser is backed by the better defense. If you want to be right when you pick games more often than you're wrong, you go with the better quarterback.

I know that – and knew it last week when I wrote the Week 7 Game Power Rankings. I went with Miami anyway, and I don't feel foolish for it, but I do wonder what I was thinking. I wrote that Kyle Pitts was going to go off. I anticipated Cordarrelle Patterson would have an impact. But I went in to the game having watched next to no Matt Ryan over the years (outside my media market, NFC, and still salty about not drafting him, I guess), so I treated the QBs as a wash, even knowing that Ryan has appeared in a Super Bowl.

You can convince yourself that the better defense should win, here. And when the game was still only 20 – 7, I thought it was still possible. The Dolphins offense was just waiting to really click into gear by that point – irrespective of the blocked field goal and endzone interception. That's what I was telling myself.

Let's just look at some numbers real quick

I know that Tua completed 32 of 40 passes – but for 291 yards. That's 7.275 yards per attempt. Matt Ryan was 25/40 for 336 for 8.4 yards per attempt. You can know two things, reading those two sentences: Matt Ryan was having a much more difficult time moving the ball against the defense opposite him; and that Tua was throwing everything underneath all day long. Tua's 9.09 yards per completion against Matt Ryan's 13.44 tells the same story. Miami had 29 rushing attempts for 132 yards, for 4.55 yards a tote; the Falcons made 22 rushing attempts for 72 yards.

Before your eyes glaze over:

As a straight numbers comparison, Miami ran 7 more plays than the Falcons and moved the ball better. Which is what you would assume going into the game – the Dolphins have the superior defense. In fact, the Falcons defense is so bad it got its defensive-minded coach fired last year, remember?

So when I move forward with the game and try to explain why the subsequent Dolphins scoring drive (and the rest of the offensive performance, frankly) doesn't (and didn't) impress me, let's keep those numbers in our minds, remembering that Miami has been pushing the ball up and down the field against the Falcons inferior defense.

That drive didn't look good. Miami moved the chains exactly like they should have on their first drive out of halftime – because halftime adjustments get quick results from good coaches with prepared players. The protection from the offensive line is nearly perfect. The playcalling is fine. Tua looks late to throw and like the ball floats on him – like a late career Chad Pennington, when the shoulder was totally shot. So he moves the chains, he gets completions, but his receivers have no space to make a play after the catch. They're waiting for the ball when it isn't high and late. Outside of Waddle making the first defender miss, there is no YAC element to this offense – which, let's just be real, is how it's designed.

That's an artifact of quarterback play. But it's also affected by the route running of the receivers – which had been poor all day up to that point. More than a few times, I heard Jimmy Cephalo and Joe Rose complain that the receivers weren't running routes, they were just kind of running into the defense.

Which, as I type it, and as I think to the plays I've seen where it's evident that no one is expecting to get the ball, I have to wonder whether this isn't the downside of the RPO game.

Tom Brady's game was built around his relationship with his receivers. We've heard for 20 years how much he loved Julian Edelman and Wes Welker, despite their flaws as players and playmakers, because Tom knew exactly where they were going to be every play and that he could trust them to read and react to the defense the way he wanted them to. When you run the RPO offense, your players all have to read the defense the same way. They all have to identify whether the defense is going to play the run or the pass – and everyone has to react the same way.

If you have receivers running routes and your linemen downfield blocking, you can't run the ball or throw it – running is going to result in a loss as the linebackers and secondary are able to crash the line of scrimmage; and a pass is sure to get an Illegal Man Downfield flag.

I have to remind myself at this point that Tua has only played three games this season and that his receivers are all always hurt. Which begs the question of why every pass isn't filtered through Jaylen Waddle and Mike Gesicki.

Let's look at this problem from a different angle

If the Dolphins offense goes to sleep for long stretches of games because only the scripted sections work, I can't take that out on the coaches. If the scripted plays are working, then the coaches are doing their jobs.

Brian Flores said sometime last week that the things he and his coaching staff are emphasizing and working on in practice are the things that show up on film. Now, a fan will tell you that's the coach's fault for not teaching better – and it's what Flores said: they need to change up the way they're teaching because it's not working if the same problems keep showing up on film every week, even though those problems are what they're working on in practice.

I am a different kind of person. I am a person who values personal responsibility.

I was not a straight-D student after fourth grade because I was stupid or because I couldn't understand the material, and most certainly not because my teachers didn't teach it to me. I absorbed the information; I just refused to do homework or independent study for tests. What I learned during lectures or what I already knew was what the teacher was going to get on the test. My grades reflected my high test scores and zeroes for participation.

And that's what I see when I watch Miami play. I see extremely intelligent, hyper-prepared coaches and a team that spent their time-off doing literally anything but studying the playbook. I see a team that thinks that classroom and practice time are all the time they need to spend on football to be great at the game. This is endemic to the whole NCAA football situation: so many great college players get to the pros on talent and reputation alone, then flame out because they don't know how to prepare or protect their bodies.

The offense looks unprepared and the playcalling tentative, and I think I finally understand why

This is a universal take from the professional Dolphins fans community: the offense isn't working.

You'll see fingers pointed in every direction. And the effects are right there for everyone to see, and everyone is seeing them. The disagreement is over the causes – and what they mean. I'm here to tell you I think I've figured it out.

You have to learn how to win again every year.

I think the Dolphins know they have one of the greats at head coach. I think the rumors swirling around about Deshaun Watson are undermining that relationship – and that's what I talked about before the London game when I said if I were Flores I would walk into Stephen Ross's office with my letter of resignation if the rumors didn't stop. ...Coming from his office, at least. But more than that, I think the Dolphins know they have a great coach.

The defense looks like a well-coached unit with new and injury-limited pieces.

The Dolphins had a chance, down 20-14. The defense gets a stop, then Tua shows me what I'm starting to notice is his pattern: he has a very limited “move” set. He broke a defender's ankles on a run up the middle earlier in the game, then, with his own endzone behind him, he takes off up the middle of the defense doing that same move and really breaking his own ankles and looking silly as he gets crushed from behind.

Tua plays at the pro level like he went to university at Alabama and playing football on Saturdays there was easy.

That drive ends. Xavien Howard makes perhaps the heads-up defensive play of the weekend, and— You guessed it, Tua does his best Patrick Mahomes impression and throws a shovel pass directly to a linebacker on the next play.

I turned off the radio broadcast at that point. I couldn't listen to Jimmy and Joe and Jason Taylor be disgusted by the offense anymore. I had the Bengals in a tight and highly entertaining deathmatch with the Ravens I'd much rather watch – and which I cannot tell you how happy I am that I got to. I thought my 1 o'clock was going to be television football-less.

Now, if the Falcons have a Falcon that they're gonna, it's blowing huge leads. But a pass interference penalty and a short Cordarrelle Patterson run later, and I felt more than confident the game was over. I was certain of it.

Sure, the Dolphins had another 14 points in them, which appears pretty impressive – Tua had four touchdowns! But three of them were in Garbage Time. And yeah, I'm calling the entire second half Garbage Time.

Tua lost the game with the INT in the endzone, and he threw away the comeback on a shovel pass.

Fucking sigh.

I should be writing that I love the effort to come back and make the score respectable

I should probably be writing that Flores deserves more of the blame for losing this game. I tweeted it that the goal is to keep an NFL offense to under 24 points, and Miami failed at that by allowing 30. But what I failed to write – and what I have failed to write as an addendum to that maxim – is that when you're playing one of the great quarterbacks, (and I don't know that there's an argument against Matty Ice as one of the greats, maybe not of all-time, but come on – he got to a Super Bowl and won an MVP) 31 points is your ceiling. And if I'm giving them lollipops or moral victories, the Miami defense did that.

It's the Atlanta defense that gets to walk away from that contest saying they were the better unit. When they aren't – not on paper, not in personnel, not in coaching. But they played better when it counted, and that's what matters.

Miami should have treated this defense the way they did in the second half during the first half. This was billed as a get-right game for the Dolphins offense. It was going to be a shootout because Matt Ryan and Kyle Pitts are too good. But Miami is built for shootouts on offense.

And the players know it.

So they practice and prepare like it's going to be easy – because the level of talent says it should be that easy.

But it's never that easy in the NFL.

Moving on

Cincinnati Bengals (5-2) @ Baltimore Ravens (5-2)

I'd been watching the Bengals game pretty closely the entire first half.

I loved how Zac Taylor coached this game. I loved how his players played it, and I especially loved the way the first half went.

The Ravens defense got the better of Cincinnati's scripted portion of the game. Bengals drive, take the opening field goal. Then their offense looks poised to come out and do what we all knew they would: take big shots down the field to Mark Andrews. It's something a defense is going to have to be ready for. Cincy does – gets pressure on Jackson and forces an errant throw. Field goal, and we've got a tied ball game.

You only needed to watch these first two drives, though, to know that you were in for a good one. I'll tell you right now: this isn't moving much in this week's Game Rewatch Rankings. Cincinnati and Joe Burrow respond like a well-coached operation. The deep shot to CJ Uzomah looked and felt like a coach and quarterback who had seen something in the defense during their first drive and exploited it for points. That's exactly what you're looking for, when I'm talking about the Eye Test for quarterbacks – can they exploit matchups they've seen on previous drives?

Not to be outdone early, Jackson leads his team almost single-handedly down the field to keep the game tied. Which, again, is what I'm talking about when I'm talking Hero Ball.

At this point in the game, I'm hopping on the balls of my feet like I think I'm a boxer or something. How do the Bengals respond? They have to keep scoring, because no matter how good their defense is, and no matter how well it's playing, they can't afford to get behind against these Ravens in Baltimore. Not if they want to reject their Little Brother status.

The Dolphins offense I've watched the last two weeks goes into the tank, here. Two drives in, their quarterback doesn't have answers for what the defense is doing, so the coordinators start calling jabs – questing around the defense's defenses for an opening, rather than having already identified it by drive three and turning now to exploit it.

Scoring points should be like getting a cut or swelling in a fight – when you find something that works (Jaylen Waddle, for example) – you want to target whatever it is through misdirection and change-up punches. In other words, you just keep hitting a man in his swollen eye until it's so swollen he can't see from it, and then you really start to do damage to his face when he can't defend himself anymore. (I know that's when they call the fight. That's why they call the fight. They don't call fights in the NFL, last I checked.)

CJ Uzomah is something else – and JaMarr Chase is already one of the best receivers I've ever watched play. I haven't gotten to watch many of the greats – the majority of my football attention has gone to the Dolphins, the past two decades. And Burrow is a killer. I already see it, on top of the arm talent and the decision-making, in addition to his obvious mastery of the offense, and complete with his knowledge of what the opposing defense wants to do with him.

And that's kind of forgetting that Joe Mixon and Tyler Boyd and Tee Higgins are all good football players in their own rights. Higgins had some big drops in the first half, one that stalled the field goal drive, if I remember correctly. But he got right by the second half. Spoiler alert, I guess.

Baltimore is no slouch team, though. And corner Anthony Averett was not going to be picked on this weekend. He's been picked on and lost plenty enough, thank you! ...That's how I imagine his first half went. The Ravens keep Cincy to a field goal attempt again, then Jackson comes out with a huge TD strike of his own: to Hollywood Brown in the back corner of the endzone from midfield.

I didn't think this was a catch, but the toe-tap is undeniable: you can see his whole foot move.

It's at this point in the game that I want that opening in the Ravens gameplan to become a factor in the game. Bengals're down four. The game is by no means out of reach, and they have plenty of time. I don't care how they do it, I just want to see a score here – and not another field goal. Another field goal feels insufficient. And that's what Burrow does. With the one-two punch of chunk plays to Chase and Uzomah, he marches right down the field and into the endzone. This is when I notice the difference in what Miami is trying to do and what they're actually doing.

Cincinnati is probing the Ravens offense when they have the lead, and punching them in their swollen eye when they're trailing. In fact, it's a brilliant gameplan. If you switch to your tendencies when you're leading, you give the defense a false sense of security that they don't have to cover their swelling. If the defensive playcaller can have it in his head that the thing you did to score was a fluke, he can focus on taking away what he thinks you actually want to do to him.

If that's a feint....

Well, you know the final score by now, no doubt.

Let's compare the Dolphins' playcalling with the Bengals'.

The Dolphins are conceptually doing just what I've described. I sort of talked in a previous piece about how Miami's playcalling is obviously trying to avoid their obvious tendencies – but they had only had two weeks with their starting quarterback to that point, they should have no tendencies to break. And if you don't establish the thing everyone expects you to do well early and often, there's nothing to feint to or with.

Miami understands the value of getting up early. They've done it in every game this season, isn't that right? That's what Jimmy Cephalo said. And, just like Jimmy C said, they've stalled on offense and fallen behind and had to climb out with a miracle play at the end by their defense. The problem is that the defense has only done that once – Week 1.

It reminds me of how Chris Wesseling would always be incredibly skeptical of any team that jumped way out from their (or the) average in any particular area. But especially turnovers and special teams points. He would always say that even the greatest defenses and special teams have spent most of their runs near or at the average for turnovers and points-generated.

And I think he's right. I think he's more right than even he realized.

Because Miami's defense has regressed to the mean. I think they're still an above average, even an elite unit when everything is working right. But the offense has to stay on the field for that to be true.

The reason this defense looked as good as it did for as long as it did under Flores is A) it had to for the team to be competitive, the offense was so abysmal the first half of the first season, and B) Ryan Fitzpatrick made the offense competent.

The Dolphins offensive coaches are clearly able to identify weaknesses in the opposing defense, because they score points to keep these games close. Their quarterbacks have just thrown them all away early. The problem for me is that Miami treats a 3-point lead like a 30-point lead. Their defense isn't that good, and their offense really isn't so good that they can spend 85% of the game experimenting with their approach.

What that says to me is that the Bengals are a versatile, adaptive team. And if you've been reading my other blog, you know just what I think about adaptability as a trait.

The Ravens offensive approach is entirely different.

Everything in Baltimore goes through Lamar Jackson. If the defense doesn't play Lamar near-perfectly, he is going to beat them. He's good enough. I don't know if Burrow is there, yet; and I know Tua doesn't have that ceiling. (Even during Griese and Aikman's pitiful rookie seasons, no one was arguing that they were just average, there was nothing special about them; when Peyton Manning was throwing 28 interceptions and losing games, no one was calling him a bust.)

Brees's situation remains the most similar to what Tua is going through – and that has to be for another time.

The Bengals defense got another huge stop after their offense took the lead in the third quarter. Up 20-17, I'm wondering how the Bengals coach this. They could continue probing the Ravens – or they can start to really fuck up that eye. If they can get it bleeding, they'll win this fight for sure.

It's third and two and Zac Taylor looks like he's going to call this drive about as conservatively as you can – and then Burrow and Chase do the rest. A perfectly placed pass on an in-breaking route in the heart of the Ravens' zone defense, and Chase is able to break a tackle from every defender on the field – and a few of them from the bench – before it's a footrace and only fans in the endzone are stopping him.

It feels like that eye is cut.

The myth is both that Lamar Jackson cannot play from behind and that he has proven this season that he can excel from behind.

I don't think anything changed yesterday. I think the Bengals have a goddamned good coordinator in Lou Anarumo, and that the players played like the best defense in their Division. Which, whether that is true or not, the Bengals perch atop their big brothers this week.

Bengals get the ball back, up ten at 27-17, and now it's Tee Higgins' turn to redeem himself. The Ravens are going to overcompensate for Chase and Mixon, and Burrow carves them up with his other pretty dang good receivers.

If you're a Baltimore fan, when Burrow drifts back and floats it up to the right corner of the endzone, you think your team is going to be in this one. The interception is an arm punt, which— I don't like it in that spot. You can't complete that pass in the NFL. But if he was trying to get it out of bounds to avoid the sack— Well, you have to love the effort, even if you hate the outcome. His team was up ten points – if you're going to experiment, that's the time to do it.

The defense gets the job done in getting the ball back, and Joe Mixon and Samaje Perine do the rest. 41-17, and at 5-2, the Bengals look as good as or better than anyone else in the AFC. I predicted them to start running away with the division two weeks ago, and I feel confident that now that they have it they won't be letting it go.

Burrow is the only killer of the quarterbacks in that group.

The Bears Versus the Buccaneers was the 4 o'clock game

And I don't really want to talk about it. I knew it wasn't going to be fun, and it wasn't. I can't believe the Philly/Las Vegas game was so lopsided.

What does it say about the two of them that Tua replaced Hurts because Tua threatened to transfer, then Hurts did transfer, and both men are on teams with enough talent for them to shine but somehow they don't?

Three weeks ago, I was all primed up to talk about how the Eagles were scheming their offense the way I want to see Miami scheme for Tua. Since then, it's been nothing but— Well, I can't say that. I didn't watch any of the Philly game. I watched the Bears game until I got sick to my stomach, then I took a nap somewhere around the end of the fourth quarter.

Is there anything to learn from this game?

Justin Fields takes way too many sacks. I read today that he's taking sacks at a 14% clip. No other quarterback takes sacks on 10% of his dropbacks. That's unprecedented.

And why Nagy didn't want him on the field.

You can't go back to Dalton, now, though. If head coaches from the future are learning anything from Flores' tenure, it's that you can't bench the kid no matter how badly he's playing. Mitchell Trubisky last year is a different situation. He was no longer “the kid”. It was pretty evident his time in Chicago was over by the time Nagy pulled the plug on him.

Speaking of Nagy, what a bummer he's got COVID. If his team wins without him – assuming he misses the game because of the illness – does he keep his job? It would be hard for me to justify retaining him. Luckily I don't have to justify these things – I just choose to.

The Buccaneers are too good. Their defense is too good. You take the better quarterback when you pick the game, but in this case you got the better defense, too.

The Bears were down 21-0 after two punts. The game was over by their third offensive drive. There's nothing Fields or anyone else could do about that than make the loss respectable. Something which was not forthcoming.

Indianapolis Colts @ San Francisco 49ers

I'm going to be honest with you and you're just going to have to forgive me (or not, it's your choice): there was nothing about this game that captured my attention. Not going into it, not after two margaritas and a bowl of nachos. When I wasn't dozing, I was mostly finding other things to do.

Jimmy G played like shit. He played like the inside of his helmet was a shit emoji. He played like he'd never handled a wet football before. I've seen better performances in the rain during Pop Warner games.

Wentz wasn't exactly better, and I agree with him one hundred percent when after the game he said something to the effect of “Because of the guys I've got to throw it to,” when (I thought it was Tracy Wolfson) asked him why he was so willing to be so aggressive through the air. Though, now that I'm looking for the quote, I feel like I must have hallucinated it. It was in every headline when I woke up, so I'm thinking no big deal, I'll find the exact quote later, and now it's in none of the headlines, and all the quotes from his post game with Tracy start after that question. And NFL.com no longer has the article talking about it. It's the most bizarre thing I've experienced since I discovered and then lost Bourgeoisie Guilt.

It's a conspiracy, man.

I don't think this game taught us anything. It didn't teach me anything.

The quarterback who is willing to put the ball up for grabs and get dirty running with it is probably going to be the one who wins the rain game. That's just football, man.

I do wonder.

Mike Florio of PFT pointed out yesterday something I've been privately wondering for a while: if the 49ers drafted Trey Lance to replace Jimmy G, and Trey Lance is 2-3 years away, how does Shanahan expect to stay employed? Cus Jimmy is playing some seriously bad football right now, and he's just never healthy.

Billy B really dodged a bullet, trading this guy to San Francisco. Could you imagine if he'd sent Brady instead? He'd be a laughing stock.

I don't think Kyle Shanahan can survive another terrible season. But it also doesn't make sense to bring someone else in to develop his quarterback, if that makes any sense. Jed York has to be beside himself with the situation he's gotten himself into with his coach and general manager.

The Colts look like they're going to be frisky. We'll see who they really are when they get pulverized by the Titans. If Carson Wentz can continue to trend upward, no matter how their season goes, I think Frank Reich can call this season a success. They have to be able to compete next year, but they aren't ready. Not quite, not this year.

Thanks for sticking around for so long! It's pretty cool of you to get this far. I let this one grow on me a little. I've been reading a lot of two and three paragraph football articles the last few days, and they make me crazy. I like something I can really sink my teeth into. And hopefully that's what I'm providing for you.

We've still got Monday Night ahead of us, so I plan to switch gears until then. I'll be back tomorrow with the postgame and a What I Learned from this weekend – because I think that even though the games weren't especially interesting, and I maintain that to be true, we're in the stretch of the season where teams are teaching us things again.

So, until then, it's been awesome talking at you.