Monthly Archives: August 2017

The Dress Rehearsal

31 Thursday Aug 2017

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The third pre-season game is usually seen as the dress rehearsal for a team, but even then there is no set formula on who plays as the coaches are most interested in preparing for the season whilst minimising the risk to their starters. You can also see rookies and other players stepping up so they can get reps with the starters against other quality players to get a better evaluation. This complicates what we can interpret from the outside, which is why it is important not to put too much stock in what you see in pre-season, but for those involved the football is important despite what some might tell you.

With all of the fourth pre-season games taking place on Thursday night, a logistical challenge is facing the teams as for the first time they are cutting from ninety without a cut down to seventy-five before tonight’s games, although many teams have already started to make some cuts. There is also a challenge for the Hard Knocks crew as they prepare everything for next Tuesday’s episode with a more compressed time frame. Sadly being in the UK I won’t get to see episode four of Hard Knocks before the week four games start tonight, so I’ll have to run through the week three games without the extra insight of the behind the scenes footage of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who played the Cleveland Browns in their third pre-season game.

A number of players were held out or played limited snaps, so Jameis Winston was working without his full complement of options in the offence, and this did show. He floated a pass at a tight end that was intercepted, although he also escaped pressure and made a good pass to Freddie Martino later in the game, but it was rookie receiver Chris Goodwin who finished with most yards of any receiver. I think with a full complement of starters the Buccaneers will have an offence going in the right direction so we shouldn’t take too much from this game, but Winston will need to limit his interceptions. No one wants to lose their starting quarterback, and there are not enough quality starters floating around for teams to have a really good backup, but the Bucs might be concerned with the way Ryan Fitzpatrick has turned the ball over so far and they will be hoping that if he does get called upon in meaningful games that he reproduces some of his form from his 2015 season with the New York Jets and not what he has displayed so far.

As for the defence, they gave up some worrying plays to a Browns team that I think are going to cause some trouble for teams this season. You are always going to miss a player of Gerald McCoy’s ability, but he should be back for the regular season after being held out of this game with an injury, still there were not a lot of players that stood out to me. Part of that is due to not having coaching tape yet. This always makes it hard to truly see what is going on, you just can’t evaluate a secondary without the all twenty-two view, and the end zone view is brilliant for seeing how the front seven line up and play. Still, I did notice that Riley Bullough, a player I have mentioned multiple times this pre-season having been a player highlighted on Hard Knocks, did not get into the game on defence until the last drive on defence, and so whilst I did see him on special teams, he will be desperate to put up good tape tonight to try to catch on to a team, be it the Buccaneers or somebody else who has liked what they have seen.

For the Cincinnati Bengals, who took on Washington in their third warm up game, it has been a pre-season of questions rather than answers. Still, it was good to see John Ross get on the field, even if he didn’t make a catch, he demonstrated his speed on an end around run, and it will take a couple of weeks to shake of the rust as he makes his way back from a shoulder injury. I was also not expecting to see Andy Dalton over throwing the fastest man in combine history on a deep ball! It was much better to see the first team score a touchdown, and whilst the Bengals’ young tackles still had their problems, the offence functioned and has the potential to come alive if things break right for them during the season and the young players bed in.

The defence will be looking to make do round Shawn Williams injury, and he will be missed at safety, but the pass rush still looks good with defensive end Chris Smith catching the eye in every game and looks to be a potential bargain given the conditional pick the Bengals gave up to the Jacksonville Jaguars to get him. The young linebacker group got even younger with the trade of special teams stalwart Marquis Flowers to the New England Patriots and they will be without Vontaze Burfict for three games after his appeal against suspension was not successful. I can see why Marvin Lewis and the Bengals will be upset given their reasoning about the Kansas City Chiefs player being hit with a shoulder within five yards of the line of scrimmage, the player being in line with the target of a pump fake, and the ball being in Alex Smith’s hands, but Burfict has a history that precedes him and clearly is not being given the benefit of the doubt.

There’s a lot of questions about the Bengals, but at least they look to have made it to the start of the season relatively healthy and I still think they will do better than many have predicted, even if I’m not going to guarantee a playoff berth. I will say, I’m still deeply uncomfortable every time Mixon takes the field and I find it hard to see how I will ever resolve that pick.

Finally, having spoken about the hope I saw for the LA Rams offence on our last podcast, Jared Goff did not play well against the LA Chargers. More worrying for him will be the fact that the offence is designed well and seemed to run better with Sean Mannion as their quarterback. Whether Goff’s struggles can be partly put down to rookie receiver Cooper Kupp being withheld from the game due to a minor groin pull I don’t know, but the Rams third game did not go as well as their second, and it would surprise no one if the Rams had another rocky season. Still, I do see some signs of hope, I’m just unsure whether Goff can, or will be given the time to, become a franchise quarterback. It is also too early to tell how Sean McVay will do as a head coach, but I have a feeling he will turn out well given time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean things will work out for him in LA.

One last thing before the final pre-season games start last night. I stated on our last podcast that if you were going to watch pre-season games, that week three were the ones to watch as that was when the starters would play most. And I stand by that. But for those of us who have the disease as Ross Tucker puts it, these final games will be fascinating as the players we have never heard off, are playing for a chance to catch onto a roster, or practise squad. They just want to make the team and no one should question their efforts, and I intend to honour it by watching all three teams I have been following.

Still, next week the season starts.

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2017 Pre-Season: The Starters Emerge

28 Monday Aug 2017

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The starters began to emerge last week as they played more than a handful of snaps in the second pre-season games and we saw this covered in the third Hard Knocks episode.

For the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the stars of Hard Knocks stayed the same, and I continued to be impressed by them. However, we did get another lesson in the harsh realities of the NFL. The undrafted rookie Maruice Fleming was shown arriving early and running extra drills, telling us that he had asked Jameis Winston what time he got up and deciding to do the same. It had not gone unnoticed by the coaching staff either, but sadly he hurt his knee and whilst he gutted out the game, which was a hard thing to watch, he was too injured to carry on and was cut. Fleming will have impressed with his toughness, but he’s now done for training camp and let’s hope the injury is not too bad so he can have another chance.

The other thing that grabbed my attention in episode three is the theme of Winston’s development. In earlier episodes we had seen Jameis talking to his head coach about risk versus reward, and having played well with his offence looking good, he then heaved the ball up in the air as he was sacked and it was picked off in the end zone. You can understand Dirk Koetter’s frustration and the resulting dressing down he gave his quarterback, but Winston already knew his mistake and the important thing for Winston going forward will be if he can temper his risk taking without losing what makes him special.

Still in their second pre-season game the Buccaneers’ defence smothered the struggling Jacksonville Jaguars offence in the first half and then held out for a narrow win. They would want the offence to be running more smoothly, and having had one field goal blocked and another miss, they will be hoping that things settle down for Nick Folk.

Moving away from the Buccaneers, the Cincinnati Bengals hosted the Kansas City Chiefs and I would definitely say I am nervous given that the Bengals lost heavily. It is not time to panic yet, but the offensive failed to score any touchdowns despite moving the ball, and only time will tell if game planning will help with efficiency as Andy Dalton suggested it might. There were also signs that left tackle Cedric Ogbuehi could still struggle, although there were only snaps he had problems rather than constant issues.

The good news on defence is that the pass rush continues to look good, but there were times where the middle of the defence looked soft against both run and pass. There is a lot of youth in the front seven of the defence at the moment, and losing safety Shawn Williams to a dislocated elbow will not help this area either. Still given the problems covering tight ends last season, the Bengals will be hoping things come together soon.

Across the country in LA, fans of the Rams got their first hint of what a difference it will make to have an offensive minded head coach in charge. It is way too early to pronounce on Jared Goff, but the offence definitely looked like it could do something this year. The Rams managed to move the ball as they eked out a win, and although Todd Gurley did not look great, Goff looked to be developing some chemistry with Cooper Kupp and completed passes as players were schemed open.

The defence continues to look solid, and the hope is that the Rams can show development and find out what they have in their young quarterback. This might not sound like amazing progress, but it is the start of building a team to do more than hover round eight wins. I am curious to see how things unfold for Sean McVay over the coming season and how the Rams develop in the coming years.

I had better get on with watching the week three games as we are rapidly approaching the start of a new season.

Football is coming.

2017 Pre-Season So Far

20 Sunday Aug 2017

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I like to follow a couple of teams through pre-season alongside my own Bengals and the major storylines. This will include the team being featured on HBO’s Hard Knocks as that gives you a chance to see all of the games that you get the highlights of and gives me an in to a team I don’t know.

So this year I am following the Tampa Bay Buccaneers thanks to them being on Hard Knocks, and the LA Rams who happen to have been last year’s Hard Knocks and Amazon’s All or Nothing team, but mainly I’m watching the Rams this pre-season to see how their new head coach Sean McVay does in turning around their offence. Even if at thirty-one he is making me feel like I’ve done nothing with my life…

I will pick up the week two games next week, but what have I learnt in the first two Hard Knocks episodes and the week one pre-season games?

Well, this years Hard Knocks has mostly been good fun with a strong cast of characters. I’ve been impressed with Jameis Winston who is clearly invested in trying to be a good leader for his team. Not only is he working hard and making his way round the whole team, but the moment that was eye opening to me was when he approached a group of smiling linemen during the Buccaneers game against the Bengals and almost quietly dropped a line about being glad they were enjoying themselves but that Ryan (Ryan Griffin, backup quarterback fighting for a roster spot with newly signed Ryan Fitzpatrick) was injured. It was an effective way of making his point.

Winston is still searching for the right blend of risk taking and protecting the ball, a discussion we saw him having with head coach Dirk Koetter, but only time will tell if he can find it.

Winston is not the only player showing leadership, and it was a surprise to number 49, Riley Bullogh, to be singled out by Koetter in a meeting about displaying leadership, since he was their third string mike linebacker. Most teams don’t carry three mike linebackers if they play a 4-3 defence, but I was impressed not only with the way Bullogh has been portrayed on Hard Knocks, but also with the way he played and he also managed to catch the eye whilst I was watching the game against the Bengals. I think he may well make the team.

Sadly, we’ve already had our first painful cut, and it is always hard to watch someone go through this, but second year kicker Robert Aguayo seems to have struggled ever since being picked in the second round by the Buccaneers last year. He was an incredibly accurate kicker in college, but whether it is the pressure of being such a high round pick for a kicker, or simply the reality of kicking in the NFL, he has not managed to be consistent in the NFL and although he was picked up on waivers by the Chicago Bears, it hard to know if he’ll be able to turn things round. The problem is likely to be that this narrative will follow him around, as will the questions about his career, and you would have to be incredibly tough minded to set this aside when you know it will keep following you. I hope he turns things around, but only time will tell.

I’ll pick up other players as we go forward, the duo of new signing DeSean Jackson and establish receiver Mike Evans have featured heavily and should provide Winston with a nice balance on offence, but the other player who seems to be a genuinely good guy as well as a wrecker of offences, both in practice on game day is Gerald McCoy. Seeing this seven-year veteran carrying others pads around, dressed in a kimono, and testing the waters of what is an acceptable celebration has been a lot of fun. It’s always nice to see a different side of players who you so often only get to see in a helmet and pads.

So as the Buccaneers played and lost to the Bengals, what is there to say about the team from Cincinnati?

Well apart from getting a win, the Bengals offence line seemed to hold up and there were promising signs on offence, although you can only tell so much in pre-season. However, with a running and passing touchdown, third string quarterback Jeff Driskel made a claim that the Bengals should keep three quarterbacks on the roster this season. Given the number of receivers that they might want to keep, this could be difficult as the Bengals have only been keeping two recently, but I suspect Driskel would get snapped up by another team if they tried to stash him on the practice squad.

It is hard to say too much about pass coverage when you only have the TV copy to watch, but on defence the pass rush did catch the eye, particularly Jordan Willis although Carl Lawson looked good as well and I think both players could help add and an extra pass rush element to the defence this season. However, the pass coverage in the middle of the field was soft, and this is definitely something to keep an eye on.

So if the Bengals looked solid, how did the LA Rams go in their first game against the Dallas Cowboys?

Well the major thing that struck me on the offensive side of the ball was ball security. I suspect this will be a point of emphasis in the coming weeks as the ball was put on the ground a lot. Fumbles and drops hampered the team, and although McVay won his first game, there is still a lot of work to do. That said rookie running back Justin Davis caught the eye when he wasn’t fumbling with his burst and ability to make defenders miss, and so if he can secure the ball he could become a useful backup to Todd Gurley. Only time will tell if the o-line will play better through the season, but it was certainly strange to see Andrew Whitworth playing in the blue and white of the Rams. I’ll need to see more of second year quarterback Jared Goff to form any serious opinion, but he hasn’t shone yet and that has to be worrying given what the Rams gave up to select him number one in the 2016 draft.

Still, the Rams traded for Sammy Watkins last week and it will be fun to see if Watkins can stay fit this season, and if he can help the Rams turn round their passing attack.

The defence for the Rams looked good though, they seemed to be picking up the defence of new co-ordinator Wade Philips quickly and this was without Aaron Donald, although I will be interested to see how the disruptive tackle lines up in Philips’ 3-4 defence.

This leaves with one final point to make about the pre-season so far before I start catching up with the week two game, the Rams switch to the blue and white helmets with the white face-masks is definitely a good one as they look great.

Who says you do not learn anything in pre-season!

The Tao of The Wrong Football

06 Sunday Aug 2017

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Training camps have started and with the Hall of Fame game out of the way, preseason football starts in earnest in the coming week.

Dan and I have been podcasting roughly every other week for a while now, and this blog has been bubbling under since April , but if I don’t get it written soon then it won’t happen so embracing Andrew Brandt’s maxim that deadlines spur action, let’s talk a little bit about our plans for the upcoming season.

The idea for this blog post was hatched over a pub table as we started to make plans for the new season, and it is slightly scary that this was already nearly four months ago. I’m now heading into my fourth season of blogging about the NFL and I have always tried to find ways to improve as a writer and make the blog better. Dan was involved from the start through our pick competition and after a season and a half came to me with the idea of us doing a podcast, which I was very happy to do as long as it was his baby and so Dan became a podcast producer.

I like to take time off during the offseason to refresh, and so whilst still following the draft and free agency, I lay off the writing although if I can I’ll read some books about coaching/American Football. One of the books that left a lasting impression on me was Pete Carroll’s Win Forever – as it crystallised one of the things that I had come to believe about successful sports teams. I do not believe there is only one way to run an NFL franchise that can bring you success, but I do think it is important that there is a coherent approach, and it is surprising how often it feels like there isn’t one guiding a team. In his book Carroll lays out how he came to believe it is vitally important for a coach to set down his coaching philosophy so you can explain it and enact it, and he takes you through his and invites you to come up with one of your own.

I could never get mine down below the twenty-five word target, which given some of my posts on here and the fact that I write novels, perhaps should not be a surprise. But it did set me thinking.

So, whilst talking about our plans for the new season, how to balance the work involved with our day jobs and other hobbies, I thought we should try to flesh out the guiding philosophy of the site.

In the about page of the site, that was pretty much written when the site was setup back in 2014, I set out the goals as follows:

“This site shall be a place of reasoned arguments, opinions, and factual writing unless things go very wrong for the Bengals. There will be traditional film study and analytics, as both have things to offer the football fan, and it gives me the opportunity to be wholly wrong in more than one area.”

This has not changed in three seasons and whilst is still a reasonable place to start, the way that I write on this site as I’ve tried to improve what I do and make it more manageable with the rest of my life has definitely evolved.

So I took the notes I had used to try to craft a philosophy having read Carroll’s book and started to adapt them to the blog. I also asked Dan to make a list of his personal characteristics, which turned out to be not too dissimilar to mine:

Gee: competitive, obsessive, patient, engineer, drummer, writer, goal orientated, scientific approach

Dan: driven, competitive, persevering, improvement oriented, fanatical, organised.

It probably makes sense given our shared interests in football and music, our time spent together in bands, and the similarities in the above lists that during our time working together on the podcast there has been hard work, but never been any conflict. There has been plenty of constructive criticism, but nothing coming close to an argument.

Using the above lists I fleshed out the other notes I had been taking and having worked it through with Dan, I will now lay them out for you.

“In an infinite universe, all things are possible, but anything worth doing is too complex to guarantee success so all you can do is commit to the best possible process to optimise your outcome.”

It is not quite Bill Walsh’s book title, The Score Takes Care of Itself, but I love physics and I wanted to stress the universalness of the guiding philosophy.

Dan put in his list of characteristics improvement orientated, and I very much believe in practice and the idea that you improve through multiple incremental steps. This is something you will often hear mentioned by sports teams with a technical focus such as British cycling, but for me it is also born out of being an engineer and trying to take a scientific approach to things.

As an IT engineer, when you have a strange new problem to solve, you don’t just dive in and start randomly changing things. You have to do your research and then work through the problem systematically, changing one thing at a time so you can eliminate possibilities and identify the true source of the problem. I think this approach to diagnostics and problem solving can pretty much be applied to anything.

I also think it is important to focus on what you can control, i.e. the content and how you produce it. So we will focus on continuing to assess and improve what we do so the site does not stand still but keeps moving forward.

So if this is the guiding philosophy, how do we do this and what are we actually aiming for?

The aims are fairly straightforward:

  1. To entertain and inform
  2. We will not be afraid to be wrong or tackle big issues, but we will not lecture
  3. Endeavour to tell the whole story and embrace nuance.

Mostly these speak for themselves, but I will expand a little as these aims are born out of something I wanted to embrace about blogging. I have never set out to chase traffic, this site was setup to help me get better at writing by giving me a structured outlet to practice, but this also meant I was free to write how I wanted. You will probably have heard me talk about the hot take culture on the podcast, but in case you have not I dislike it intensely. There is nothing wrong with taking a position, in fact there is no point in endlessly hedging and saying nothing, but this should be a position you genuinely believe in rather than an a point made to artificially create an argument between two people or generate traffic. Life is infinitely complex, and this can be reflected in sport, and so should in my opinion be reflected in thoughtful commentary, which can still be fun!

It also doesn’t hurt to demonstrate that it is possible to disagree respectfully and to engage in thoughtful discussion rather than dismiss out of hand any point you disagree with. A cursory look round the internet might show how seldom this idea is observed these days.

Given these aims, what are the rules that we put in place to ensure this happens? Well in truth, given the way we work that comes down to two things:

  1. Produce the best content you can
  2. Own your role and trust in each other

Rule one works because we are both trying to improve what we do with a guiding philosophy born out of an existing approach rather than trying to apply an external idea we’ve borrowed and trying to make fit. Stated on its own, rule one is meaningless, but within the context of what I have laid out it is all that is required. Essentially it is a reminder.

Rule two was born out of necessity, but is also grounded in something I’ve come to believe through over twenty years of playing in bands. When Dan came to me about the podcast, I had to be practical as I was already watching games and writing a blog whilst leading a busy life and not wanting to be disowned by my partner. I wanted to try it, but I made sure to let Dan know that it had to be his project. He writes the notes and plans the pod, edits our separate recordings into a coherent conversation and sorts out distribution. We collaborate on news stories in terms of discussing stories, but he basically runs the show and does a great job.

The best bands I have been in have been based around everyone having an equal say, and using the best idea no matter whose it was. This only works if you take care of what you are meant to, and trust the others to do the same.

Circling back to football, it is also how a team has to operate as on every play, elven people are working together to carry out a set sequence of actions, which works best if everybody focuses on their own role and trust the others to do the same i.e. teamwork. The rule should speak for itself, but it is good to have the reminder.

So there you have it, the Tao of The Wrong Football.