Chris Cooley knows football; he is worth giving your attention. So, here are excerpts from Cooley’s preview of the Commanders Week 5 game when he appeared on the “Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast Friday.
“If they are down 20 points in this game, they are a bad team. Tennessee is in no way the Tennessee Titans they have been the last five years.”
“How do you not keep A.J. Brown if you are Tennessee? … It’s a massive loss. They have nobody that takes the top off of a defense now.”
“Let’s do the obvious, obvious. Derrick Henry cannot have a 220-yard plus game and just gash you all day. If that happens, that is embarrassing.”
He (Henry) is as good a running back as we’ve seen in a long time. He is amazing. Let’s overload boxes here. Let’s out-do numbers as a defense. Let’s make sure we play them in a more condensed space. Let’s make it hard for them to run the ball. ”
“I think if they can keep Derrick Henry under 5 yards a carry, that Tennessee is not going to score a lot of points. Let’s not allow Henry to have two big ones…Let’s make sure we wrap up and wait for the second guy to come. And for the first guy, you might suck a few times; Derrick Henry is going to knock your head off, so just hold his leg.”
“If you don’t focus on gap control, he also has very good vision. You’ve got to try to play it at the line of scrimmage…If you can get him to make his second cut within one yard then nobody is that unless you are Barry Sanders.”
“When they give him that little toss, you can’t let him get to the edge in one-on-one situations. You’ve got to rally to the ball all day.”
“Here is how I am going to attack (the Commanders’ defense). I am going to go with some run-action stuff. I am also going to run the ball early in the game. I am going to attack Kendall Fuller in the intermediate range early…I think Kendall Fuller right now is a guy I would attack a lot on the outside.”
I am going to go vertical early on William Jackson, asking ‘Can you play it without holding?’ You can’t have five penalties that allow for big plays.”
“Offensively, you have to get the receivers going earlier. You have to get touches to your receivers in the first quarter. Move Samuel some into the backfield and get mismatches.”
“Going to have to pick up pressures and blitzes. Washington has struggled immensely to pass off pressures and blitzes. Tennessee will blitz them to keep the back in. They will bring a lot of 5 and 6-man pressures. Washington has not picked up the blitz well, and Tennessee is going to blitz them.”