NFL 2013: Week 1

Uh oh. Jj Watt doing that thing again...

McFinn wrote:

What? I could use an explanation on that one.

I still don't know.

Holy crap... tie game

I just had one.

The ghost of Norv Turner lurks.

I also wish Weddle would go to another team. Like the Niners.

Run that clock!

I guarantee this one.

So that was a tale of two halves...

My man! Fightin' Texas Aggie Randy Bullock, Groza Award winner!

Also Fightin' Texas Aggie Gary Kubiak, as usual.

Fightin' Texas Aggie Shane Lechler, too.

I guarantee I double post trying to make sure I get my guarantee up before the kick.

THE CHIP KELLY REVOLUTION BEGINS!!!!

And it has nothing to do with the complete lack of offense by the Redskins in the 1st half. Nothing I say!

Seriously, we have now seen a complete revolution in how offense is played in the NFL, and things will never be the same. What we saw yesterday represents a fundamental change in the very nature of football itself, and I cannot imagine any defensive philosophy ever being able to handle the sort of innovation we saw last ni--

Oops, sorry, those are my notes on when Miami first ran the Wildcat back in 2008.

I bring some admitted bias to the table as an Eagles fan, and even with that, I am only cautiously optimistic at this point.

I have a feeling that we haven't seen near what Kelly has in mind. As much as they talked about multiiple multiple multiple during the game, all we really saw was a handful of formations and a couple of packaged plays. There is nothing wrong with that, and it worked quite well, but we won't really know if this is going to work till we get past the first third of the season and the DC's have tape on the depth of Philly's playbook.

That said, this offense is simple to run and strives for 2 things. Numerical advantages and playmakers in space. If Kelly can use the first to get the second, it could get interesting. God help the Eagles if LeSean McCoy goes down though.

A reasoned article from Grantland in re the Chip Kelly offense.

So, it is entirely possible that, by the fourth week of the season, what Chip Kelly has wrought with the Philadelphia Eagles may either already be edging into obsolescence, or strangled through by natural attrition of the game, as Kelly tries to make it work with whoever's well down the depth chart behind LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson. But, for one night — the opening night of Monday Night Football — the Eagles got to go out there against the Washington Ethnic Degradations and reinvent the game … for a couple of hours, anyway.
"That was a lot of fun for the first half and a lot of nerve-racking, bad play in the second half," said Eagles center Jason Kelce. "Like I said, when we're doing our tempo things, and the things we've been working on a lot, it went really well for us. But then we have to be able to close out the game. We have to be able to slow it down and trim some clock when we have that many points on the board. That's really when we began to fall apart as a unit."

By the end of the game, Washington was almost even with Philadelphia in first downs (25-26), and the margin in total yards had narrowed to 382-443. The game slowed, and Philadelphia was ill-prepared for it, and it looked like the future was being ground into the mundane present almost by the second. Kelce saw it. The system Kelly brought from Oregon is especially tough on offensive linemen, who don't get any more time to rest than do the people on the other side of the ball whom the offense is designed to exhaust. The new offense, as much fun as it is, can sometimes idle too high for the people running it, and it can throw a rod if it's throttled back too suddenly.

I think those quotes say it all. In the end it will come down to conditioning and controlling the pace to match your players' abilities. Looks good so far, but they'll need to fine tune that control in response to how other teams react.

Pierce's critique seems to be Kelly's offense stopped working when Kelly stopped running it. Well, yeah.

I'm guessing that was less of a problem at Oregon, which had more talent than most of the teams it played as well as a larger roster and more depth (did ORE sub a lot? I don't know) than the Eagles do. The talent gap in the NFL isn't nearly as pronounced.

My Google Fu turned up a couple of detailed explanations of how Stanford derailed Oregon last year. (Part 1 / Part 2). TL,DR: The key for Stanford was smart, solid line play.

There's a lot to like about what the Eagles did, and it wasn't the wacky formations. It's getting the RBs out into a nice empty patch of grass and letting them run toward the end zone. Most teams seem content with drafting 4.4 guys and throwing them into 300-pound D-linemen. Last night McCoy hit the line at full steam and just ran past the second level of the DC D. That was fun to watch.

Jolly Bill wrote:

I think those quotes say it all. In the end it will come down to conditioning and controlling the pace to match your players' abilities. Looks good so far, but they'll need to fine tune that control in response to how other teams react.

Yep, conditioning is critical. Your guys have to be better conditioned that the other team, or you're not going to get the results you're looking for.

Fedaykin98 wrote:
Jolly Bill wrote:

I think those quotes say it all. In the end it will come down to conditioning and controlling the pace to match your players' abilities. Looks good so far, but they'll need to fine tune that control in response to how other teams react.

Yep, conditioning is critical. Your guys have to be better conditioned that the other team, or you're not going to get the results you're looking for.

You can make up for a lot of that conditioning by messing with the defense and pace of play, though. I'm curious to see him throw a few really long snap counts into the end of a long series or some such, looking for ways to rest your players in mid possession without reverting back to the huddle / slow play. Quick releases by the QB early in the game so that the O-line isn't spending forever protecting him sure helps a lot.

You know, Suh went #2 in the draft and was such a monster his first two years, and Gerald McCoy went #3 and was injured most of those first two seasons. Now, McCoy's been healthy, he's been incredibly disruptive, plus he's a great citizen and teammate. I'd wager in a re-draft, everybody would pick him over Suh. Right now, he's a better player, and he's not an idiot/thug/stinky jerkface/take your pick.

The interesting bit here is that, thanks to Suh's restructuring of his deal to make his base salary very low, it was necessary to fine him rather than suspend him in order to make any sort of dent moneywise. Suh's game checks are only $37,000 this year, as his base salary dropped to $630,000 while the rest was converted into bonus money.

I think fines are too arbitrary in cost, and should be calculated by average game compensation (ie. all bonus and salary money in a contract, divided by the number of games in the contract, to come up with the average compensation per game). Fines should be expressed in these terms, eg. 25% of average game compensation for a small fine, 200% of average game compensation to more effectively dock someone for two games worth of pay, etc.

Or, for a simpler formula, current year's cap figure divided by number of games. That number varies a lot more year to year, but at least it scales bigger for high paid players, and small for low paid players.

For Suh, a one-game fine from his cap number would be around $650,000.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

You know, Suh went #2 in the draft and was such a monster his first two years, and Gerald McCoy went #3 and was injured most of those first two seasons. Now, McCoy's been healthy, he's been incredibly disruptive, plus he's a great citizen and teammate. I'd wager in a re-draft, everybody would pick him over Suh. Right now, he's a better player, and he's not an idiot/thug/stinky jerkface/take your pick.

I said it when the man was drafted, but Gerald is awesome. He was always super nice whenever I was hanging out with a buddy at a sandwich place in norman and he came in.
Super nice guy, glad to see him doing work in Tampa.

I hate Suh. Talk about a dirty player. I'll never forget him stomping on a prone player on freaking Thanksgiving Day.

With Brady throwing to all second stringers and rookies I'm sure he is going to miss Welker's durability this week. Somehow they are still 13 pt favorites. Are the Jets really THAT bad?