Punch

You'll often hear coaches talking about "staying on schedule" or "staying ahead of the chains." Against the Arizona Cardinals, we found ourselves behind schedule.

On 3rd and 11, the Cardinals saw the perfect opportunity to dial up a blitz, and they did just that. They sent a linebacker and their nickel corner on a blitz, while dropping a defensive end into coverage:

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Four Verticals is a passing concept that is almost exactly what you'd expect: four receivers running vertical routes. The fifth eligible (usually a back) will check their protection responsibility if they have one, and then release into some sort of underneath route:

Image via Chris Brown, who has previously highlighted four verticals here and here.

While all of those vertical routes might look simple, the nuances of the concept are really what make it tough to stop

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Our offense is bad. The good news is we were able to see some success between the 20s last week against a fairly poor Rams defense that only got worse with injuries during our game.

Our weak point last week was easily red zone offense, as evidenced by four Phil Dawson field goals and zero touchdowns. Contrary to frustrated fan opinion, we did try to pass the ball in to the endzone on multiple occasions, we just couldn't execute.

After the jump I've highlighted a few of the areas where I think our offense needs improvement, as well as some things we did well against the Rams. While there are more positive plays than negative ones below, I am not attempting to place this game in a positive light: it was a soul-crushing loss, and I don't think there are any excuses for not scoring a touchdown against the Rams defense that was on the field last week. We played a bad game but that doesn't mean it was all bad or that we have to linger on that as fans. Enjoy.

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The San Francisco 49ers offense we saw last week was a great example of one that had an identity yet remained unpredictable.  The 49ers are best at running the football with RB Frank Gore and an offensive line that features three first round picks in LT Joe Staley, RT Anthony Davis, and LG Mike Iupati.

But they also had plays designed to disrupt our defensive keys and punish us for attacking their bread and butter plays. Passes to NT Isaac Sopoaga and LT Joe Staley were off of play action using the same formations and personnel that they use to run, and off of the same initial action as their inside and outside zone runs, respectively. In other words, those passes looked exactly like their runs.

One play that illustrates how the 49ers overwhelm their opponent with size and (tactical) leverage is their version of the sweep play.  This play is a modern adoptation to classic football, namely the Power Sweep used famously by Vince Lombardi.

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An introduction to protection can be found here.

Regardless of what pass protection scheme an offense is using, they can be faced with more rushers than they can block. When that happens, the offense will need to get rid of the ball quickly (before the untouched rusher gets to the QB), and they will want to throw to the void created by the blitz. Cue the "hot route."

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Announcers and casual fans can see defenders coming clean at the quarterback and immediately place the blame on an individual player.  Sometimes, they are correct in doing so.  But too often, observers of the game are unable to correctly recognize blocking responsibilities.

In this post, I'll discuss the three basic forms of pass protection, "BoB" protection, "slide" protection, and "combo" protection.

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I updated the spreadsheet.

Sorry it's later than usual this week, I've been bogged down by "work" and "responsibilities." An ugly win is still a win, and late is better than never. With that, here are some of my observations from last week's game against the Miami Dolphins.

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I've updated the spreadsheet and per a suggestion by scrumm I have begun separating things into further columns.

Shurmur's trend of running the same or countering plays back to back continued--including three different inside zone plays on our last three offensive plays of the game.

Another place where we saw the back-to-back tendency was in an area of our offense that we put in specifically for teams like the Colts:

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When work hasn't gotten in the way this week, I've been re-watching the Cleveland Browns' game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Normally when I look to chart plays I am scratching plays into scraps of paper and notebooks, but I decided to take a different approach this week and I am hoping I can keep doing it throughout the season. I have created a spreadsheet to keep track of down and distance, our personnel groupings, formations, a quick read of the defense, success of our offense (or lack thereof), and general notes on the plays.

I've uploaded the spreadsheet here if any of you want to look at what I've recorded, and I have just a bit of analysis after the jump.

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I believe this is what they call a "dagger."

Down three points late in the fourth quarter, the Cleveland Browns had to stop the Cincinnati Bengals from converting a 3rd and 3 and running out the clock. Cincinnati stacked the box, leaving only one WR on the field in favor of "22" (2 backs, 2 tight ends) personnel. Cleveland countered by bringing an 8th man (Joe Haden) into the box, but 8 weren't enough.

DE Jayme Mitchell, who was lined up at LDE crashed down the line as RB Cedric Benson ran around him outside for a touchdown. When I watched this play live, I was furious at the undisciplined play and youthful mistakes of Mitchell and our line. Ready for five (four?) words you won't hear very often from me?

I was flat-out wrong.

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Check out part one and part two of this series.

The season is upon us and I am sick of looking at Sam Bradford in this offense instead of Colt McCoy in Orange and Brown. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to continuing this series for the Browns in the near future.

These concepts aren't constraint plays and are not as cohesively grouped as the running game and 1-step quicks are, or the shallow series and screens with inside motion by a WR: I just needed another post to split the passing game up a little.

Smash

Smash is a hi-low off of the CB/sideline defender. Typically, a WR runs a short curl that converts to an in against man. He is going to run up the field to around 6 yards and turn in, and then "just get open".

The inside receiver will run a corner route. Against man, he'll lean on his man and then break hard to the corner at 12 yards, against someone in a deep zone, the route will look a little more like a "post-corner" with him faking inside then breaking out. With no one over the top, he'll roll his route as to not lose any speed.

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For part one of the series, click here.

There are no two ways about it: the Rams threw the ball quite a bit last year despite playing a rookie QB and having less than ideal receivers on the outside. Their passing game involved several different passing concepts and I am willing to bet that Pat Shurmur didn't install everything in year 1 with Sam Bradford.

Most of the Rams' pass plays utilized short to intermediate routes along with 3- and 5-step drops. You'll notice a lot of motion, "bunch" formations and formations with receivers tight to the formation. One reason that St. Louis utilized these formations often was because of their reliance on the shallow crossing route.

Shallow Cross

Despite displaying variety, one mainstay of the Ram's attack was a series of plays revolving around the shallow crossing route.  

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Throughout the offseason I have been studying the St. Louis Rams' offense from the 2010 season. There are many similarities between what we think we will have headed into next season and the squad that the Rams put together last year. They started an inexperienced, accurate, mobile QB, a physical Pro Bowl caliber running back, and not a whole lot to speak of at wide receiver. Combine those similarities with the fact that Pat Shurmur will have been in charge of both playbooks, and I think we'll see a lot of similarities between the offenses.

The running game

Simply put, the Rams were a zone blocking team. They didn't systemically draft lighter, quicker OL like the Indianapolis Colts or Mike Shanahan's Broncos, but an extremely high percentage of their runs were either the inside zone play, the outside zone ("stretch") play, or much less often the pin and pull outside zone play.

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Much in the way that Bill Walsh wanted to make a QB's reads an algorithmic, automatic process, Walsh wanted to make as many coaching decisions as he could before the weekend. Human beings simply do not perform their best under pressure:

"Your ability to think concisely, your ability to make good judgments is much easier on Thursday night than during the heat of the game. So we prefer to make our decisions related to the game almost clinically, before the game is ever played."

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The old adage about passing is that "three things can happen when you pass the ball, and two of them are bad." While it is true that many bad things can happen when you pass--sacks, interceptions, incompletions, injuries, and penalties to name a few--many good things can happen as well.

Many teams passed their way to championships before Walsh using many of the same plays Walsh later incorporated into his offense, but Walsh was really the first to minimize and manage these risks of passing the ball. That's what made his offense so formidable.

Walsh did not throw the ball solely in an effort to generate big plays--typically it was quite the contrary. The Ball Control passing game Walsh employed aimed to gain solid yardage on first and second downs, and convert on third downs. Much of the time, this was accomplished through 3- and 5-step drops by the QB, WR and TE routes breaking at around 12 yards, and backs running routes out of the backfield.

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One common misunderstanding about West Coast offenses is that they only throw short or that they utilize the 3-step drop most often in the passing game. In fact, Bill Walsh's bread and butter was 5-step drop, timing-based passes.

The genius of Bill Walsh was that everything he did in the 49ers organization was coordinated and extremely detailed, and it all worked to put the team in the best possible position to win. That theme remains true in the passing game, especially in the 5-step passing game.

Timed patterns coordinate the drops of the Quarterback with his reads, the receivers' routes and the pass protection within the context of the individual play. If done well, these 5-step timing patterns could also be coordinated within the more macro context of playcalling as well.

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There is no "the" West Coast Offense.

Offenses at all levels--but especially the professional level--are not stagnant, unchanging entities.  If a coach sees a play or a formation that he thinks he can give his team the edge, he'll incorporate it in his offense. No one will lose games in order to stay true to a specific style (and if they make that choice, they won't be coaching for very long).

No one today runs the exact same offense as Bill Walsh did in San Francisco.  Defenses adapted to Walsh, and Walsh and his disciples adapted to the defenses, and so on. Don't believe me? Take it from Brian Billick. Still, there remains something that unites all "West Coast" offenses.

Andy Reid runs a west-coast offense. Mike Shannahan runs a west-coast offense. Mike McCarthy runs a west-coast offense. It could even be said that Mike Leach ran a simplified, bare-bones version of the West-Coast offense.

Next year the Cleveland Browns will run a West-Coast offense. In future posts, I will discuss what that offense is likely to look like based on Pat Shurmur's offense with the St. Louis Rams.

For now, I will compile a few posts about Bill Walsh's offense, about THE original West-Coast offense, and it's impact on today's game. First up: a general introduction and brief overview of Walsh's offense.

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The Cleveland Browns have run a 3-4 in the recent past, but with new head coach Pat Shurmur and new defensive coordinator Dick Jauron coming to Cleveland, the smart money is that we'll run a 4-3.

The defense won't just look different, it will probably function a lot differently than those we've run recently. So how will we stop the running games of the Baltimore Ravens, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Cincinnati Bengals? It's all after the jump.

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There is one thing that really jumps out at you when you are looking at Phil Taylor, and that's obviously his size. Taylor wasn't rated highly on draft boards (26th on ESPN's) because of his outstanding quickness, he was rated that highly because of that size.

Taylor is huge, a good athlete for his size, and he's a nightmare for the OL in the running game. So where does he fit in our defense? And what does this pick mean for our defense? Take a look below the jump for my hypotheses.

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Every year as the draft approaches many media outlets either generate or regurgitate content that uses a lot of scouting terminology.

In a short series of posts, I'll explain what some of this terminology means. In this post, I'll cover the "Rush End," the "Power End", and defensive line versatility

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The votes are in, and after 37 votes our DBN Big Board slots 41-45 are as follows:

41. Greg Little--49 total points
42. Colin Kaepernick--45 total points
43. Danny Watkins--39 total points
44. Bruce Carter--39 total points
45. Allen Bailey--35 total points

The Draft is today, so this is where we'll stop our rankings. For fun I've set up my Browns-specific board below ours. Feel free to ridicule me later when you have the benefit of hindsight (but I will ridicule you back).

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The votes are in, and after 52 votes our DBN Big Board slots 31-36 are as follows:

36. Derick Sherrod--71 total points
37. Torrey Smith--68 total points
38. Leonard Hankerson--63 total points
39. Aaron Williams--60 total points
40. Jake Locker--51 total points

On to the 41-45 slots!

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The votes are in, and after 58 votes our DBN Big Board slots 31-36 are as follows:

31. Jonathan Baldwin--118 total points
32. Titus Young--68 total points
33. Randall Cobb--65 total points
34. Brandon Harris--59 total points
35. Rahim Moore--57 total points

On to the 36-40 slots!

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