DawgTalkers.net Forums The Archives 2020 NFL Season Looking Back: Browns 32 Colts 23 Other games

Unlucky pick for Allen. Great throw by Tannehill to Brown for the TD. Hard to believe Brown and Metacalf both played for Ole Miss.

We all knew it when he was coming out of college, but Josh Allen's arm is incredible. The amount of velocity he gets on the ball while being off of his platform is incredible.

Yeah, physically he's about as good at it gets. The question was mentally, which he seems to be proving himself as time goes on. Buffalo has done a good job of helping him develop.

These two teams seem to being slinging lots of big plays and not playing very good defense, which is what I thought their strengths were supposed to be.

Also, that was a really bad PI call on Josh Norman just now; that ball was uncatchable.

Horrible decision by Allen. Sheesh!

j/c

Watching the Buf/Ten game. After 2 weeks of closed facility, the Titans have had minimal training time.

Allen throws a sideline pass intercepted by Butler. Beasley almost tackles him about midfield, but in an amazingly athletic move Butler avoids the tackle. The Bills relax cause it looked like he was down, and he bursts past them all with 2 blockers toward the end zone.

And he ran out of gas. It slowed him down and he was caught from behind so no pick-6.

Man, Buffalo looks like the team that hasn't been playing. So many dumb mistakes.

The Browns and Titans are carbon copies of each other.

Bills got killed...

I was thinking very much the same thing. The offenses looked a lot alike at times.

j/c:

I think Allen played himself out of the MVP talk last night. He made so many terrible decisions. He struggled reading coverages and forced way too many throws. He is a tremendous physical specimen and he has improved a ton, but he still has holes in his game.

LOL

Anyone else notice long weird editing in tonight’s game?
Are the kickoffs not being aired live? They show the kickoff... then seconds later they show the first play of the next drive. No time in between for players coming on and off the field, etc.

What? Tonight's game was postponed. I think you are watching a replay.

There's a game tonight?

No. I think he is watching a replay of the KC/LV game on NFL Network. LOL

Well .... I flipped the game on earlier and thought, "Man, didn't these 2 teams just play each other?"

LOL

I play Daily Fantasy Football and went to enter a contest at lunchtime only to discover there is no game tonight.

The scheduled game was KC/Buffalo, but the Titans/Buffalo game was rescheduled for Tuesday, just two days ago. Thus, they had to move the KC/Buffalo game to a later date. I think it's Sunday, but I'm not sure.

Oh crap! Lol
I didn’t watch any other games this past Sunday.
Totally missed that this game wasn’t live until a bit ago.

I turned into NFL Network as well, looking for the Thursday Night game. Tuned in late, and the first thing I wondered was how could there be that much sunlight in KC at that time? Then I noticed how quick they lined up sometimes. Then it hit me that these teams just played each other.

The sun still shining as the game approached halftime is what really clued me in.
I’ll admit I was a little slow on the uptake yesterday. Lol

It's interesting you bring this up. I think a few of the younger quarterbacks are going through some challenges right now in overcoming designed schemes.

Mahomes: The Patriots created a designed scheme against him which has been called a Cover 5, which was very effective. They didn't send a ton of pressure at him either, which kept him "honest" so to speak in reading coverage. The Raiders followed suit, and Mahomes struggled again. I'm sure with Reid's tutelage and his own talent that he will overcome this, but it is a challenging transition for him.

Jackson: I actually think the Bengals drew up a great defensive scheme against the Ravens. Their offense against the Ravens, on the other hand, was quite possibly the worst called game I recall seeing so far this season. I'm being harsh, but I feel like the plays that were called were almost the worst plays you could call considering the Bengals offense and the type of defense the Ravens have. I digress.

The Bengals defense did a great job of scheming against the option. They had gap assignments that shifted based upon what the defensive end being read decides to do, and they executed it well.

On the back end, they did a good job of setting up their safeties to take away the big play down the middle of the field, where Jackson's arm is most dangerous. He ended up having a very pedestrian day, to say the least. I know he was not feeling great, too. He has shown his ability to bounce back and learn, as well, so I think he will also overcome this, but I hope that other teams implement a scheme in line with what the Bengals did.

Allen: I think the Titans were the first team to "respect" Allen. He had shown gradual improvement from his time as a rookie (stability...who would have guessed!), and was having a very good year going into this game. I think other teams had still treated him as a young, error-prone QB though, and they delivered a lot of pressure. In the Titans game, though, the defense only blitzed 3 times. They forced him to be patient and go through his reads, and we all saw what happened. I feel like he will struggle more than the other two to overcome this.

JMHO

I am not including Mahomes in this because I think he is football smart. I think his poor mechanics cost him at times. He has so much arm talent that he gets into bad habits. Drifting, throwing off balance, etc.

What I do want to get into is the draft class that included Baker, Darnold, Allen, and Jackson. I'm not including Rosen because he hasn't done squat is on the PS in Tampa Bay.

I was thinking about this recently, but it seems to me that all four of those qbs struggle w/the nuances of the game. The mental part of the game. The pre and post-snap reads.

Orlovsky had a video the other day about how Jackson is making poor pre-snap reads. It pointed out that the defense sometimes sends more guys than your OL can block. He highlighted the RT having to pick up a blitzer and that the Edge rusher was Lamar's responsibility and he should have recognized it pre-snap and thrown a hot route to that area. The TE was open, but Lamar never even looked that way.

I have been very vocal about how Baker struggles w/his post-snap reads and he isn't very good right now at pre-snap reads. I won't add anything else here.

We remember Darnold saying he was seeing ghosts. That means he wasn't reading post-snap coverages. He make some confounding decisions w/the football.

Allen forces a lot of throws into tight windows. He might get away w/them because of his arm, but he throws some dumb picks and even is careless w/the ball in his hands at times.

I think all of those guys are lacking in football intelligence and that's a lot to overcome.

That makes a lot of sense to me. It's interesting to see a lot of these young QBs see a shift in defensive schemes that are gradually depriving them of their crutches. The league is so saturated with QBs in the 1-4 years of starting experience that it will be interesting to see how this sink-or-swim transition plays out over the next couple seasons.

And look at the list from the last five drafts, besides those mentioned...

Trubisky
Watson
Goff
Wentz
Lynch
Winston
Mariota
Bortles
Manziel
Bridgewater

Some were straight busts, others have looked great at times and then shown great weaknesses. Although there are a lot of different reasons why, the bottom line is - playing QB is very challenging.

I feel like football has become a lot more of a chess match between offensive and defensive game schemes. There is a way to beat every QB, with the better ones it's just harder to find the formula. With the young ones, every learning curve is different. Look at the league and the amount of QBs playing into their late thirties, they can still be beat, but they've reached the point of "been there, seen that" on a week to week basis.

Baker trotted out as a "one trick pony" in 2018, by the first game of 2019, defensive coordinators said "I got your number". 2019 was a wasted year: it exposed Baker's weaknesses, it allowed him to solidify some bad habits, it set him back and ruined the learning curve. The best thing we can do is exactly what we have -- put together a strong ground attack and make him a "game manager".

It's funny to me that the knocks on people like Mahommes and Allen were "too raw, will take too much time", yet both of them have elite arms. To me, that is still the biggest key in drafting because it's never something you can teach. From there it's mostly a matter of putting them in a situation to succeed... And then waiting and adjusting, as the learning curve rears its ugly head.