Bad NFL coaching: Adam Gase reaches rock bottom, keeps digging

Adam Gase and the New York Jets can’t stop being a full-on train wreck, and we here at C’mon Coach appreciate their efforts.

The C’mon Coach team cannot stop watching Joe Flacco’s 28-yard sack!

It’s hypnotic. It’s mesmerizing. It’s hilarious, like a panda tumbling down a hillside. And it’s symbolic of everything wrong with Adam Gase’s New York Jets.

Let’s not dwell on Flacco. He’s a 35-year old journeyman playing out the string. Quarterbacks like Flacco make the blooper reel now and then. Flacco wouldn’t be out there if Gase hadn’t made Sam Darnold play through an injury, behind an offensive line playing through injuries, in a desperate attempt to beat the lowly Denver Broncos in Week 4.

Let’s focus instead on rookie running back La’Mical Perine, the guy Dolphins defender Eric Rowe plowed through to force Flacco into the neverending backpedal that led to Emmanuel Ogbah’s sack.

Perine is a fine prospect: a tough, compact all-purpose back out of Florida. The Jets ostensibly released Le’Veon Bell so they could give Perine more opportunities (in reality, they released Bell because Gase is the kind of person who tosses a match onto a pile of oily rags on his way out the door). Perine platooned with Frank Gore early in the game, then disappeared after dropping a pass in the second quarter.

“I was just kind of watching those guys, the body language,” Gase said after the game (per Greg Joyce of the New York Post.) “I know after Perine dropped that one ball, I was just trying to make sure he was good, confidence-wise. I didn’t want him to go in the wrong direction.”

Ah, so Perine was benched to help his confidence. Great interpersonal skills ya’ got there, Coach. If Adam Gase was a guidance counselor, he would tell a kid who just flunked a math test to just give up on school and prepare for a life of salting French fries.

Pappy Gore got most of the snaps with the Jets trailing by three touchdowns in the second half. Then Gase finally released Perine from detention, just in time for the rookie to be forced into a significant pass protection role. Because, you know, the best way to improve a rookie’s confidence is to make him do something which requires lots of experience to do well, the sort of task that keeps veterans like Gore in the league for an extra year or 10. The result was comedy gold.

Gase has somehow become a worse coach in the last month or so. He’s gone from garden-variety awful decision-making to doing the exact wrong thing almost on purpose, and the Jets offense somehow gets more predictable as the season wears on.

Gase probably isn’t stubborn enough to lose games on purpose simply to exert his authority and troll his critics. But we wouldn’t put it past him.

Cover-9

Packers defensive coordinator Mike Pettine went to the Rex Ryan school of game planning. Sometimes Pettine blitzes everyone but the towel boy. Sometimes he drops everyone into coverage. Occasionally, but not too often, he does something in between.

Pettine’s diverse defensive fronts and schemes keep opponents off-guard, but sometimes his Packers catch themselves off guard.

On a routine second down in the second quarter of Sunday’s 38-10 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Pettine dropped nine defenders into coverage, including defensive tackles Kenny Clark and Kingsley Keke. All of those defenders should have resulted in coverage zones as narrow as parking spaces, yet Tom Brady easily hooked up with Mike Evans on a quick out for a short first down.

In the C’mon Coach playbook, that coverage concept is called Man 2-Under 2-Over, and it’s perfect for getting gouged by a future Hall of Famer who relishes every opportunity to stand in the pocket and not worry at all about the pass rush.

Hurts, Hurts and More Hurts

The most frustrating thing about watching the 2020 Philadelphia Eagles — besides linebacker Nate Gerry stumbling around each week like he’s the owner’s nephew and cannot be benched — is seeing Doug Pederson make decisions as if the Eagles are still a Super Bowl team, not a rolling catastrophe with an offensive line full of third-stringers and a receiving corps cobbled together from two years of waiver-wire dumpster dives.

Pederson’s derpy Jalen Hurts Wildcat package was back with a vengeance in Sunday’s 30-28 loss to the Baltimore Ravens, and it still looks like the 1930s single wing reimagined for a 7-on-7 Pop Warner team.

Hurts and Carson Wentz stood side-by-side in the backfield with their hands out for a shotgun snap on one play. Hurts threw a long lateral to Wentz (lined up at right end) on another play; Wentz then threw back to Hurts across the length of the field, who eluded a pair of defenders to gain four over-engineered yards.

All of the trickery did appear to confuse the Ravens on one pivotal play: Hurts went in motion pre-snap before a routine handoff, and defenders were too busy watching for the triple-deluxe fakeout to notice Miles Sanders running straight up the gut for a 74-yard touchdown. So guess who lined up at quarterback for the two-point conversion? Yep, it was Hurts. Three Ravens defenders converged to stuff the zone-read handoff that everyone along the I-95 corridor could see coming.

Pederson’s cardinal sin on Sunday did not involve Hurts at all. Trailing 17-0 with halftime approaching, Pederson called a pair of timeouts so the Ravens couldn’t run out the clock.

The Eagles got the ball back at their own 25-yard line with 16 seconds left. Wentz took a vicious hit and nearly threw a pick-6 which wobbled off Patrick Queen’s fingertips on first down. A Sanders scamper then put the Eagles in Hail Mary range, where Wentz took another brutal shot while tossing an interception into the end zone which was nullified by a roughing-the-passer foul. The penalty set up a long field goal attempt, which Jake Elliott missed.

So Pederson exposed Wentz to two big hits and narrowly avoided two turnovers in a misguided effort to score three points in 16 seconds.

Daring tactics make sense for a Super Bowl team full of healthy veterans capable of driving 60 yards or so in the final seconds. The 2020 Eagles should be in survival/rebuilding mode: keep things close, keep Wentz alive, avoid further disasters. Pederson doesn’t appear to think there’s a difference. But there is.

Settling for Less

No team settles for field goals quite like the Carolina Panthers. Kicker Joey Slye is 8-for-8 on 20-29 yard attempts: great for Slye, awful for a team that could have beaten the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 1 and Chicago Bears on Sunday if they didn’t settle for three so often near the goal line.

Panthers coach Matt Rhule ordered a 21-yard field goal from the three-yard line in the first quarter of Sunday’s 23-16 loss to the Bears. He appeared to grow bolder in the second quarter, when the Panthers chose to go for it on fourth down from the 6-yard line. The Bears jumped offsides to set up 1st-and-goal, but when the Panthers couldn’t punch it in, Rhule called for a 20-yarder from Slye.

Per Jonathan Alexander of the Charlotte Observer, Rhule called for the field goals because he didn’t think his offense was playing well. Um, Coach, if your offense reached the goal line while not playing well, it means that you should try to score a touchdown, because if you stand a better chance of getting those final three yards than the 75 or so you will need on the next drive.

Rhule’s coaching quirks — he seemed to want to run out the clock while trailing in Week 1 against the Raiders — are getting a free pass right now because the Panthers are the fun little try-hard team that no one actually watches. They won three straight games! We love Teddy Bridgewater! Mike Davis is our fantasy waiver-wire savior!

And Rhule seems like a swell guy. That’s all just fine for a rebuilding team with zero expectations. Eventually, Rhule will be expected to do more than beat the Atlanta Falcons. By then, he had better have started turning those 21-yard field goals into touchdowns.

Self scouting

New York Giants head coach Joe Judge would not even refer to Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley by name during his first few press conferences in the offseason, citing some drippy Gil Thorp nonsense about not presuming that anyone on the roster has a starting job.

Fast forward a few months, and Judge is now letting his assistants open the door and let opponents right into the Giants positional meeting rooms.

When asked why rookie left tackle Andrew Thomas was struggling last week, offensive line coach Marc Colombo provided a scouting report that NFC East defenders like Chase Young and Tank Lawrence no-doubt appreciated.

“What he’s doing, he’s snapping out of his stance and he’s kind of overshooting his target,” Colombo began. Then he continued at length, with elaboration and detail about Thomas’ precise shortcomings that would earn him an A-plus in a Composition 101 class. His strong conclusion: “Until you shut it down and put it on tape shutting down the inside move, you’re gonna get it every time.”

Why not give us Thomas’ credit card number and expiration date too, Coach?

Offensive line experts on Twitter were stunned Colombo would go into so much detail that it’s practically a blueprint of how to sack Jones. Can you imagine what it would sound like if the quarterback coach made remarks like this? Our rookie can’t read zone coverage at all. So all you have to do is have a safety lurk underneath and he will throw, like, 50 interceptions.

The worst part of Colombo’s remarks is they will probably prompt Judge and other head coaches to shut down position-coach media availability, which is very rare in the first place. Beat reporters are scrounging in the time of COVID because access to the locker room is so strictly curtailed. Ten minutes on Zoom with the offensive line coach can flesh out stories for a few weeks.

But statements like Colombo’s make head coaches even more paranoid, which is scary, because most head coaches are already the types of men who install cameras to make sure no one is sifting through their trash cans for dietary secrets.

One final Giants note: Judge had the team practice outdoors in a miserable chilly rain on Friday so they could prepare to face Washington on a breezy, sunny, perfect autumn afternoon. The Giants won their first game of the season, of course, which will only encourage Judge to toughen the lads up by exposing them to the elements.

Great strategy, Coach: the one thing that’s guaranteed to make a team better in 2020 is weakening everyone’s immune system.