DawgTalkers.net Forums The Archives 2019 NFL Season Looking Back: Browns 19 Broncos 24 Postgame Thoughts

This entire coaching staff is garbage, minus Mike Priefer. If it was me, I would hand the reigns over to him.

Baker is just a piece of the pie. JMO, but I've seen enough of Freddie. Gotta love the guy, but he's not a HC.

We'd have been better off keeping the coaching staff from last year completely intact. Williams, for any faults, was a superior HC to Freddie.

The talent is there. Someone needs to step up and lead them

j/c...

The Browns did something right...

He's free to go NOT tackle guys on another team. He SHOULD get a sit down with the league...

See ya Whitehead

Special Teams has been the only unit doing its job and doing it well.

j/c...

Which was our only "hole" going into this season if you asked the pundits.

His eyes were def on OBJ as the first read, why he went away from it is beyond me. But no one will ask him that

J/C

I watched over and over again as Den used Play Action to help Allen with our Def biting almost every time.

Yet, Freddie it seems doesn't believe in Play Action.

nope, we believe in shotguns and empty sets. putting Baker on an island and not using Chubb in the clutch

Inside the opponents 10 yard line!

It is absolutely maddening. Baker under center with Chubb behind him with playaction as an option and Chubb able to get rolling and see what's ahead...keeps the defense guessing.

Vs.

Empty shotgun sets and the defensive rolls over our O line.

Smartest guy on the field. The stubbornness and overall game management has not gotten any better.,,maybe worse. Clean up the penalties and turnovers and what have you got? The same pitiful coaching, planning and awareness.

J/C

one of the best backs in football, and we threw the ball 27 times by halftime.

only to watch said best back come to the sideline on key downs.

Yep. And yesterday we flipped the script and did it on the other side of the ball.

QB that has never thrown a ball in the NFL seeing LBs 7 yards behind the DL and not even moving. "Don't worry, we never blitz anyway... And here's proof!"

Uncanny.

My guess is that he's under pressure to make quick reads/passes. He ends up having time to keep watching OBJ - but let's face it, if he continues to wait for OBJ without looking for a different more immediately open receiver, Baker would be slammed as locking on to his primary. . . . the comment about the mechanics and patting the ball are just as much concerns as not throwing to OBJ who eventually gets half a yard on his man.

Jc

Ive read comments on twitter that thinks his primary is Hilliard (you can’t really tell based on that screen grab who he’s looking directly at) because Hilliard had chipped ALL day and that may have been our wrinkle to get him open quickly

1. OBJ actually gets 2 yards separation according to nextgen stats.

2. if OBJ has 1on1 coverage, you throw it everytime. There is no need to look elsewhere. That's why the frustrations. If he has 1-1 coverage, as the best player on the field, hes open. Throw it. Give him a chance.

3. If he throws it to OBJ, hes not patting the ball.

Our offense play count was literally 2:1. I think we outdid them in time of possession by close to a full quarter of football. Ridiculous. That and the plays coming in late... I don’t even think FK knows his own play book.

Plays coming in late is so aggravating. Baker gets to the line too often with less than 7 seconds to go ... no time to shift, motion, examine, etc ... it’s like we make it as tough as possible on him

Well to be fair, our TOP was going to be a lot higher because they were scoring on 75 yard plays left and right. lol

cant lose TOP if you let them score really really fast.

But whose playbook is it...Freddie's or Monken's? Is there some issue between FK and TM?

No, not at all. Certainly not EVERY player on that list was a bust, but I gave every player that met the statistical criteria for completeness. Some of them were HOF, but played in a different era.

What it does show is that:
a) single-season TD passes is a terrible metric to grade a QB
b) there are TONS of guys who put up big TD's once or twice and never again
c) a case could be made that a large majority of those guys were nothing more than average to below-average QBs for their career (as justified by career QBR)who just had one "magical" season
d) stating no QB who has ever thrown 27 TD's in a season has been a bust is completely factually wrong - unless you think Derek Anderson and Jake Plummer and Don Majkowski etc etc...

Right! And then we complain about Baker not being able to make his reads lol. It was the same crap we went through under Shurmur. McCoy and Weeden who have opposite skill sets had the exact same problems

See my last post. That's not what I said at all.

Guess I should have cherry picked my data to make a point instead of actually giving the entire historical context. My bad.

This is 100% spot on and why I keep saying Baker doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know how to play professional QB cerebrally.

THIS is my biggest pet peeve. It's exasperating, I talked about it in the "keys to the game".

Remember our first pre-season game? We came out in the "hurry-up" and drove straight down for a TD. I remember thinking "this is what you want to do with all this talent and a high-power offense... This is going to be fun to watch!"

We don't even run hurry-up when the clock is under two minutes! I would say we snap the ball at 2,1 or 0, 75% of the time.

he also doesn't understand what constitutes as open in the NFL..in college his receivers had miles of separation. Add in the fact he's probably afraid to throw anything even closely contested because he's a turnover machine, this is the result..one read qb with bad mechanics and zero touch ability. Whens the last time we've seen him drop a ball in over coverage?

At the beginning of the season when we lost I didn’t want to listen to anyone talk about the Browns in a negative light because I didn’t want what they said to be true.

After a couple losses I didn’t want to listen to what people said because I didn’t want it to be true.

Now I actively seek out negative information because it leaves me someone to blame.

I hate this team.

That's what I see as well. He has all but abandoned any effort to throw it deep. He's looking for all of the underneath stuff and when he throws it, he throws it 100 mph like he's afraid it's going to get picked. I don't know if it's pressure from early in the year, his pick numbers being up, I don't know what it is but something is in his head

I don't think that's the issue. He did that plenty last year.

Last year he wasn't asked to think. This year, as part of the evolution of a QB, he is. And he's failing at it.

He just doesn't know how to think the game first then execute after. He's completely confused and the lack of success has hurt his confidence. He's just winging it at this point.

I'm not sure what to make of it all. I don't know what this means for his long-term prospects.

This is especially true on critical downs or where there was confusion or something to fight about. I totally put this on Freddie because he's arguing and yelling like a HC should but he's not getting the next play in...

We lost a chance to get the ball back yesterday because we blew out last 2 timeouts on 3rd and 4th downs because we couldn't get the play in... so we just had to sit and watch them run out the clock.

Whitehead cut:

https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2019/11...MZ2M_s6ijAZ5CGk

I chalk that sort of thing up to Learning Curve.



When I take a step back and think about the things that are going wrong (most of which are getting listed in several threads at once on here), I see things that are inherently fixable, and things that are inherent to inexperience.

It mostly boils down to Freddie and Baker.
Freddie is making some head-scratcher decisions at times, but those will go away with experience.
Baker is NOT playing like we've seen him play, and it mostly seems to be because of his lack of experience and the learning cliff associated with being a Year 2 QB.

Taking those things into consideration, I could very easily see where this roster (it still isn't a team) could start to play really well if they just start making little bits of progress with the things they are not doing well.


Of particular note is the very dramatic decrease in penalties and other self-inflicted wounds that we've seen all season long. There was still the very weak roughing call on Richardson, but that's really the only killer I can think of.

Unfortunately, what still happened were those couple of big plays where lapses in judgement allowed them to just kill us. e.g. Lindsay's big run.... just before the snap, our DE shifted one gap inside, then Lindsay ended up running right through the gap our guy vacated, but NOBODY behind him came in to fill that gap. SOMEBODY freelanced and it cost us 7 points. This will sounds very Butch Davis, but other than those two or three big plays, we played them pretty well.

It's still a very painful & dejecting loss, and the season is absolutely over at this point, but there IS visible progress from these guys. They ARE working at it, but they just haven't got it all together, yet.

Has Kitchens ever developed a QB into a legit top 12 QB in his
Celebrated coaching career ?

Last year, I remember a specific endzone play. He had something like 2 slant routes coming from the left side, but Baker read the coverage and new he had to occupy the safety get one of the slant routes open. So he motioned the running back over to the other side of him to draw off the safety, snapped the ball, looked off towards the first route and then threw to the receiver on the second slant. Guys that broke down that play were drooling over what they saw, because Baker was doing Peyton Manning-level things in his rookie year. I also remember people saying during his draft interview that he was one of the most cerebral QBs in the Whiteboard sessions.

I don't think he's suddenly lost this ability. Something else is going on. I think getting the play-calls in with 7 seconds left on the play-clock could be a big part of it. When Freddy is trying to do HC things while also trying to get a play-call in, he probably has too much stuff on his plate.

Well, technically ... last year during the last 8 games, Baker was a top 12 QB for the most part.

the problem is we don’t know if thats because of Kitchens, Williams approach, Zampese’s creativity, etc

Great lead in to what I’m going to post. I’ve never played the position but I think i could argue that the success of a play has more to do with what happens before the snap than what occurs after. When the play comes in late and we’re not lined up until 4 seconds left, Baker has no time to read what he is seeing, compare that with what he should be looking for, and making adjustments accordingly. Instead, what he has to do is snap the ball then figure out what he’s seeing and how to adjust. No kidding he’s not confident in any of his throws, even the obvious open targets.

And for those criticizing him for not being able to make his 2nd and 3rd reads... so what? Eventually he has to get there, but why this need to make things more complicated than they have any need being? If you want your QB to get rid of the ball in 2.5 seconds, you don’t burden him with making 3 reads as the play progresses unless you’ve designed the routes to lead his eyes from one WR to the next. Much like artwork where good composition leads your eye from one element to the next.

Give Baker the tools and opportunity to diagnose the defense before the snap and I predict a marked improvement.

Made a poll just to see where everyone stands on where the "issues" lay:

Blame Poll