The coaching choices around the NFL in Week 3 left plenty to criticize, but nobody gave us more fodder than Philadelphia Eagles head man Doug Pederson.
One day, you’re calling a trick play at the goal line on fourth down against the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl and earning a bronze statue outside your team’s stadium. The next, you’re punting on fourth down late in overtime to preserve a tie against an 0-2 team with a rookie starting quarterback.
Life comes at you fast, Doug Pederson.
Late in the overtime period of their eventual 23-23 tie with the Cincinnati Bengals, the Eagles offense drove all the way from their own 45-yard line to the Bengals 41, then stalled due the exhaustion of journeying 14 yards. The Eagles lined up for a 58-yard field goal to win the game, but lineman Matt Pryor jumped offside.
“The false start backed us up, so we just said ‘Let’s just punt the football here.’ We didn’t want to give them the ball near midfield: even a chance to go for it on fourth-and-long, an incomplete pass, something like that, they get the ball on a short field, can kick a field goal and win the game. Just made that decision: hopefully something positive might’ve come out of the punt.”
Translation: the perpetrator of The Philly Special put did not put his faith in his offense nor his defense, but on the slim chance of a muffed punt.
If there were Eagles fans in seats at Lincoln Financial Field at that moment, there might not even have been a Lincoln Financial Field anymore by Monday morning.
Much of the blame for the Eagles’ 0-2-1 start has fallen on quarterback Carson Wentz, whose progression of reads when he drops to pass in 2020 goes like this:
- Look at an open receiver but decide not to throw;
- Ignore an even more open receiver because the pocket has collapsed; and
- Throw an off-target pass under duress to a blanketed receiver for an interception.
Wentz is a mess right now, but Pederson had him attempt 47 passes on Sunday behind a rickety line to a receiver corps which is as depleted as ever. (First-round pick Jalen Reagor was out, Dallas Goedert got hurt during the game, Alshon Jeffery is essentially an urban legend at this point in his career).
When Pederson tries to mix things up, the results are often silly, like the end-around the Eagles ran to Greg Ward for a loss of six (Zach Ertz didn’t seem to know that he was supposed to block.)
Pederson defended Wentz on Monday, warning “don’t go there” to reporters stirring up a quarterback controversy. But Pederson is in the process of losing a locker room full of veterans with Super Bowl rings, and the decision to punt and settle for a tie won’t win him many admires. It was a beginning-of-the-end type of decision, one that marks an organization’s turning point from striving to win another Super Bowl to just trying to survive until they find some answers.
At least Pederson can take heart in knowing they don’t tear down bronze statues of sports heroes. Not even in Philly.
How to Turn a Two-Possession Game into a Two-Possession Game
Facing 4th-and-5 from the Patriots 7-yard line while trailing 23-10 early in the fourth quarter, Jon Gruden’s Las Vegas Raiders kicked a field goal to cut their deficit to 23-13: still two scores away from taking the lead.
Per EdjSports, that decision cost the Raiders 3.8 percentage points of win probability at a point in the game when they only had a 6.1% win probability to work with. Gruden doesn’t believe in math, of course, but he should believe in past precedent: settling for field goals against the Patriots has been a recipe for failure for 20 years. Sure enough, the Patriots pulled away for a 36-20 victory.
The Raiders were plagued by mistakes in Week 3, including a pair of brutal special teams penalties: they jumped offsides on a punt to extend a Patriots possession, then got penalized on a short kickoff return, which led to a Derek Carr strip-sack in the end zone that turned the game into a rout. But the Patriots were also uncharacteristically sloppy for much of the afternoon.
Gruden could have manufactured a win to lift the Raiders to 3-0. Instead he stuck to the old-school script, and paid for it.
This Week in Bill O’Brien Nonsense
The Houston Texans took a 21-17 halftime lead over the Pittsburgh Steelers in their usual way — they strung together some DeShaun Watson highlights — then retired for the afternoon as they typically do. The second half was the usual Texans rhapsody of missed opportunities and fundamental errors, but one play really stands out.
After failing to pick up a first down in the entire third quarter, Watson scrambled and found Randall Cobb for a 34-yard gain to start the fourth. The Texans’ call on the next play was a shovel pass to Brandin Cooks on which no one was assigned to block T.J. Watt on the front side of the play. Watt leveled Cooks a moment after he caught the ball. Two plays later, Watson threw an interception while attempting another miraculous highlight, and the Texans soon surrendered.
Offensive coordinator Tim Kelly is the Texans play caller, but O’Brien is the guy who designs the over-engineered shovel passes aimed directly at the opponent’s best defender.
“I don’t think anybody is panicking,” O’Brien said after the game, per Aaron Wilson of the Houston Chronicle. “0-3 isn’t where we want to be. Urgency. There’s no panic. We’ve got to get over the hump here.”
You just lost three playoff-crucial games, coach. That “hump” is your burial mound.
Blame COVID
Pederson was the surprise winner of the race to blame the COVID-19 pandemic for his team’s shortcomings last week, but he crossed the finish line just moments after Matt Patricia, who told reports midweek that his Detroit Lions “need time as a group to work together.”
“We tried to do the best we could with the virtual world,” Patricia told reporters. “But then into a condensed training camp, it’s going to be this way in September.”
Hey, we can all relate. C’mon Coach is covering the NFL after getting almost no offseason access to players or practices, so we’re doing the best I can with the virtual world.
Mrs. C’mon Coach is trying to engage high school kids in classic literature while they are at home in their pajamas, so she is doing what she can with the virtual world. The folks who run the coffee shop down the street have barricaded their door and are selling blueberry muffins through the window while wearing Andy Reid face shields; they are doing what they can with the virtual world.
You, dear reader, are doing what you can with the virtual world.
We are all doing the best we can, but if your “best” is clearly worse than everyone else’s “best” when we are all facing the same damn obstacles, then that’s your problem. And saying “Gosh, I can’t get the Man-1 defense I have been installing for three years to stop anyone because, like, Zoom meetings, amiright?” is an insult to everyone who has been struggling to cobble things together and make them work for months.
At least Patricia’s Lions won their first game on Sunday, beating the Arizona Cardinals 26-23 on a last-second field goal. Congratulations on figuring out how to cope, Coach. The rest of us got here in mid-April.
Belichick Filibuster
Bill Belichick is famous for his monosyllabic press-conference responses, delivered with all the enthusiasm of a teenager telling mom what went down at the sleepover.
But when a reporter asked him about Jon Gruden’s West Coast Offense before victory over Raiders, Belichick elaborated for roughly 1,000 words on the WCO, Bill Walsh, Paul Brown, zone blocking schemes and other tactical and historical ephemera. Here’s Doug Farrar of USA Today Sports Media Group with a (long) transcript.
Now, Belichick has been dressing more like a Medieval beggar than usual lately, which may be a sign that he has been staying at the Rough Divorce Motor Lodge since Tom Brady left and is really desperate for someone to talk to. But maybe not.
There are two types of reporters who ask strategic questions at press conferences, and Belichick has zero patience for either of them:
- Old-school beat writers who throw around terms like “West Coast Offense” and “Tampa-2 Defense” but really don’t know what they are talking about;
- Next-generation blogosphere types who Tweet endless jargon about “pin-pull blocking,” “shade 2i defensive alignments” and “Invert-Cover-2 coverage assignments” but really, really don’t know what they are talking about.
C’mon Coach’s theory is Belichick was throwing low-key shade on the press pool by burying us in a heap of self-evident facts. He was basically saying “You are using terms from 40 years ago that no longer have any meaning, you silly people.” But we get so excited whenever Belichick acknowledges our questions at all that we sift through them for every crumb of wisdom.
I once asked Belichick how the Patriots schemed to stop J.J. Watt after a playoff win over the Texans. “You don’t block someone like J.J. Watt on a whiteboard,” he said, then muttered something about how his linemen stepped up. It sounded like an accurate, informative response, but not a very quotable one (I just found a use for it, four years later).
Maybe I should have demonstrated by intimate knowledge of the Invert-Cover-2 to him. He might have gone on for 15 solid minutes.