pass rush

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FOUR THINGS REVIEWED: WK 15: BEARS

Posted by The BEAST on 2022/12/19
Posted in: breakdown, Coaching, Defense, Four Things, NFC East, NFL, Offense, Players, playoffs, Reviews, Roster, Special Teams, stats. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

RUNNING a lot hurts Jalen.

EAGLES 25 – Bears 20

EAGLES STATS:

Categories include an EXCLUSIVE weekly Offensive Line Report (Rushing TD’s (6 points) + 3rd downs converted by handoffs (1 point) + sacks allowed (-2 points) = score); as well as Drive Killer (Int – FR – 4th down Tackles – FF – TD).

New Category Ace is for Kick return TD’s, Returners run-down, kicks blocked, etc.

Passing :(S) QB Jalen Hurts (22/37 – 59.4% – 315 – 0 – 2)

Rushing :(S) QB Jalen Hurts (17 – 61 – 3.5 – 3 – 0)

Receiving : (S) WR A.J. Brown (16 – 9 – 181 – 20.1 – 0)

Offensive Line Report/Enforcer : (3 (18) + 1 (1) – 1 (2) = 17 ) LT Jordan Mailata

Drive Killer :(S) OLB Haason Reddick (0 – 1 – 0 – 1 – 0)

Sack Leader :(S) OLB Haason Reddick (4 – 2.0 – 0 – 1)

Ace : RB Boston Scott: 58 yard KR (3 – 92 – 30.6 – 0)

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I hear you asking, “What about all the stuff that stats don’t reveal?” Well, that’s the reason for these Four Things articles. It’s to point out what we need to address BEFORE the game. Then AFTER the game, there’s a no-bullshit assessment of whether or not the Eagles did any of what they needed to do, to ensure the win.

So how much of what I mentioned in Four Things: Bears did the Eagles actually get around to doing? Well let’s see:

DT Javon Hargrave and DE Josh Sweat each had 2 sacks in this game.

1) Lock The Box: Don’t mush-rush. Play the LB’s in shallow zones, and get aggressively after their QB with our front four. That was the call and that’s EXACTLY what we did. Three different Eagles had 2 sacks each, as DT Javon Hargrave (3 – 2.0 – 0 – 0), DE Josh Sweat (6 – 2.0 – 1 – 0) and OLB Haason Reddick (4 – 2.0 – 0 – 1) all laid hands upon Chicago’s QB.

Aside from 95 rushing yards to a run-first QB, we gave up just 62 yards on 15 carries (4.1) to the rest of their team. Some of the yards were in small chunks, but most were in small pieces and slivers. So it was never something they could rely on, or use to complement the rest of their offense. (DONE)

2) Man Coverage on the Corners: Chicago’s top three WR’s COMBINED for 4 catches, 72 yards (18.0 yards per catch), with a 35 yard score on a blown coverage. Our CB’s played up in the receivers faces and reduced them essentially to spectators. (DONE)

3) Use Play-action: You can’t use play-action if you don’t hand the ball off. In the first half of this game RB Miles Sanders (11 – 42 – 3.8 – 0 – 1) carried the ball all of 4 times. That’s a recipe for getting your QB killed. (NOT DONE)

4) Quick Hook: We never got the chance to pull our starters because we never had a 20 point lead. However, the contingency plan of hammering the football was also not even glanced at. (NOT DONE)

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OLB Haason Reddick with one of of his two sacks

This week 2 of the Four Things was enough for us to grab a the “Dub”. Next week we go to Dallas to clinch the NFC East, and guarantee home-field advantage (and then a neutral site), throughout the playoffs.

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On The Whole:

WR A.J. Brown gets the catch, but no laundry for “some” reason.

Let me get this gripe in, first. I’ve been very vocal about how much wear and tear all the running will put on Hurts. I haven’t talked about punishment. I’ve talked about wear and tear. I don’t know if YOU noticed it, but Hurts looks slower running these days. More catchable. That’s the wear and tear. Like on your own joints!

With Hurts being easier to catch, that means he’s now easier to hit. Notice the kind of hits he took in this game? In September/October no one repeatedly got those sort of shots on him. They did in this one! And he’s only going to keep getting up slower and slower. You want to watch the Cowboys knock him out of a game? Me either. They have to ease up on the called runs.

Thanks to QB Tom Brady and Deflate-gate, I’ve repeatedly talked about how cold weather affects footballs. Early in the game I figured this was why Hurts’ ball placement was so spotty. Turns out his hands were numb, and he was having trouble seeing. He doesn’t think Philly will get as cold as Chicago did. Somebody tell him!

Do I think this team looked past Chicago, to next week’s match-up with Dallas? In the fourth quarter, on the two point conversion, Miles Sanders went into motion, setting off a series of pre-snap shifts. When he went by the TE, Sanders touched him on the rear, that TE shifted and touched the rear of the next man to go into a shift.

For those who don’t know what that was, it was the Eagles running silent, to handle noise. Soldier Field wasn’t loud at that point, so why do that? Because it was practice for next week. The Eagles used this Bears game as a first practice for Dallas. It’s not just players that looked past the Bears. The coaching staff was doing it too.

This is only the beginning.

COWBOYS ADD PAST RUSH

Posted by The BEAST on 2020/08/14
Posted in: Conversations, Defense, free agents, NFC East, Players, Rants, Rivals, Roster. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

bruce springsteen.jpg

LOOKS like the Cowboys have done it again! Yet again, they’ve put on Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and reached into the fog, and back through the ages. They grabbed onto DE Everson Griffen’s 2017 reputation, and pulled it into the present. They stood over it proudly. Then they gave it some money. Never considering that Griffen’s body comes with his past reputation.

Griffen is coming off of an 8 sack season in Minnesota. He started 15 games, playing 848 defensive snaps. Apparently the Vikings felt that his back-up, DE Ifeadi Odenigbo (7 sacks, 0 starts, 368 snaps) made Griffen expendable enough to just let walk. That is telling. It makes me wonder about what went on in the treatment room.

Cowboys mainstay DE Demarcus Lawrence hasn’t been the same guy since his 14.5 sack season three years ago. Funny, that was also a contract year. Since getting his money, Lawrence has provided diminishing returns, despite having reliable help along the line.

lane jonson stonewalls demarcus lawrence as carson wentz sets to deliver.

Having not played a snap since 2015, it seemed that DE Aldon Smith was more like All Done Smith. Even before his 4 year hiatus, Smith had spent his last three seasons being a shadow of the player he’d been in his first two seasons. Frankly, the addition of Griffen, this late in the game, doesn’t indicate much faith in Smith.

The team also added DT’s Dontari Poe and Gerald Warren. Both are solid pass rushers, but they both saw diminished snaps in 2019, and were allowed to just walk out the door after the season.

Po Teletubbies

So the Cowboys went out and assembled, what would have been a really good defensive line in 2012. Except well…Demarcus Lawrence wasn’t in the NFL back then. He and Aldon Smith have never been good at the same time.

Past rush, or pass rust, Griffen’s signing seems to indicate that the Cowboys are already disappointed with the firepower they added months ago.

In the blink of a young girl’s eye, glory days!

Bruce-Springsteen.jpg

#10 SEND FIVE

Posted by The BEAST on 2020/02/19
Posted in: Coaching, Conversations, Defense, Players, Rants, The 12. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

THE 12 2020.10

 

WANNA see something stupid?

ccard.jim.schwartz

 

What is this happy horseshit where we usually rush four, rarely blitz, but when we do, we end up in crap like Cover Zero? We need to send five so that-  Hold on. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me roll this back a bit.

Last year in almost every game the commentators would mention that our pass rush isn’t as potent as it’s been in the past. At first that sounded weird, because our sacks have gone up two years in a row. If sacks were the only metric used, it would just seem like the typical media down-talk directed at the Eagles. Which we fans are used to.

Then you think about our opponent completion percentages. And their QB ratings! Seriously. We even made Haskins look good… The eyeball test makes it clear that we don’t bring the heat like we used to.

Part of that is because the only player on our D-Line who requires a double-team is DT Fletcher Cox. Us rushing four vs an opponent’s five man o-line, plays directly into our opponent’s plan. We have a pair of complete DE’s in Brandon Graham and Vinny Curry, but we don’t have a guy who alters blocking schemes. (DE Derek Barnett too often bails early on his contain responsibility.)

We need to send five rushers more often, to get Cox more 1-on-1 match-ups. That way he can do to blocking schemes what he does to marriages. We don’t have to do it all the time, but it has to stop being rare.

 

WHAT MICHAEL BENNETT MEANS

Posted by The BEAST on 2018/03/08
Posted in: Conversations, Defense, Front Office (F.O.), Players, Roster, trade. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments

(2a.m., coffee bathes the lower halves of my pupils, fingers flying, ‘No Church In the Wild’ on repeat, on repeat, on repeat.)

(Whispering) Run with me.

TRADING away a 5th round pick and WR Marcus Johnson, to get DE Michael Bennett and a 7th round pick, seems like a steal on the surface. A fiery, veteran pass rusher, who’s used to winning? That sounds like a guy any defense would be happy to have in their starting line-up. Clearly we crushed the fuck out of this trade.

Whoa now. Pump the brakes. While there’s no knocking the addition of Bennett, his being added to the roster signals two things.

curry cam

The first thing is that, the Eagles are about to release DE Vinny Curry, in move that’s designed to save the team $5M of the $11M he’s scheduled to be paid in 2018. (Initially I’d put my feelings about that in this article, but it hijacked the article’s tone. So, I decided to relocate those paragraphs. They’re still part of the original draft, they just weren’t added to what you can see here.)

barnett sack

The second thing it signals is, Derek Barnett will now become our starting RDE. No surprise there. That was the plan from the moment he was drafted on the steps to the Art Museum’s East Door last Spring. However, Curry’s contract still had guaranteed money on it, and that didn’t facilitate Curry being a back-up in 2017. So Barnett sat lat year.

That was last year.

It remains to be seen how this will affect our run defense however, since Curry was our best DE against the run in 2017. Curry did an excellent job of setting the edge of the defense last season, and keeping runs from successfully bouncing wide, on his side. It remains to be seen if Barnett can hold it down the same way.

For his part, Bennett is here to be the 2018 version of Chris Long. A veteran player who probably isn’t as good as he used to be over 16 full games, but might be awesome over 16 half games. There can be no doubt that he will put heat on QB’s, and probably make our four man pass rush even more effective than it was in 2017.

bennett v prescott

While Bennett can be moved around pretty much anywhere on the Defensive Line, he’s likely to mainly line up at RDE. I love that. A QB who sees Bennett lined up on his blind-side, is already thinking of quickly dumping the ball. Even before the ball is snapped. That’s already a rushed pass.

Basically Bennett means we can intimidate opposing passers, just because of where we line him up. Not bad Howie Roseman. Not bad at all.

Oh yeah, just because I put this out, doesn’t mean I skipped out on today’s THE 12 article.  You can find that right HERE

SMUG ON TAP.jpg

 

THE 12: #7 TURN UP THE HEAT

Posted by The BEAST on 2017/03/23
Posted in: Coaching, Defense, NFL, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

THE122017#7.jpg

DEFENSIVE Coordinator Jim Schwartz likes to rush QB’s with four, and to blitz sporadically. I’ve been waiting for a DC who favored this approach. I’m not a fan of the “send the kitchen sink” approach that hasn’t really been working for us for years now. For the most part I liked what I saw from our front four last year, but we need to blitz more this season.

By blitzing more, I don’t mean we should adopt the “kitchen sink” approach. Week in and week out last year, we did a pretty solid job of applying pressure with just four. This year we just need to send that fifth man more often than we did last year. Not a big change, just a small tweak.

We got good pressure last year, but we didn’t get a ton of sacks or cause many interceptions off of hurries. Many analysts will say that hurries are almost as good as sacks, and they are entirely wrong about that. Hurries (on their own) don’t cost yards or knock teams out of field goal range. Hurries don’t cause sideline arguments over whether the blocking was poor, or if the ball was held too long. Hurries don’t build reputations that demand double-teams and dictate gameplans. You need sacks for that.

I’d like to see between 6 to 8, five man blitzes per game. Instead of having a designated “pass rush LB”, give each spot (SAM, MIKE, WILL), a couple of legit cracks at it each week. Scheme for it. Threaten to blitz 20 times a game, but bring it less than half the time. This preserves the element of surprise while still forcing teams to tip their hand when adjusting to pick-up the possible blitz.

Keep in mind, on the downs we don’t blitz, our opponent still has to deal with our front four, so there is no easy down here. Like I said, we did solid job last season, so there’s no need to overhaul our approach. It was a good start that taught us some things about ourselves. This year let’s apply those lessons learned, and take this team to the next level.

THE 12: #3 IN YOUR FACE!

Posted by The BEAST on 2017/03/17
Posted in: Coaching, Defense, NFL, Players, Rants, X's and O's. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

THE122017#3

DURING the beginning of 2016 our Safeties were making plays on the ball, because opposing QB’s were testing our entire Secondary looking for soft spots. Well they found those soft spots along the sidelines vs our CB’s. After that there was no reason to risk throwing at the Safeties much.

While some of the blame can be laid at the feet of players “getting comfortable in the new system”, most of it can be put on the Corners themselves. Too often they gave up huge cushions, and didn’t do a good job of leveraging their coverage to trap WR’s on the outside, to narrow the passing windows. They just didn’t get in anybody’s face last year, and that has to change in 2017.

Our CB’s have to be more physical and do a better job of disrupting timing routes. They have to not allow “Crosses”, “Drags”, and “Slants” to develop cleanly. Anything our Defense can do to throw off the rhythm of opposing offenses, forces those offenses to improvise. This gets away from what they practiced and so not everyone is on the same page. That will usually work in favor of our Defense. It will also force opposing QB’s to hold the ball a little longer, and that gives our pass rush time to get home.