Last week, I did a big film breakdown of what we saw from Anthony Richardson in the Indianapolis Colts’ Week 8 loss to the Texans. While the film wasn’t quite as bad as the 10/32 stat line would have you believe, there still were enough recurring issues with Richardson’s process/footwork that I was fine with him getting benched. “Get some competent play from Joe Flacco while Richardson works on his core issues.”
What did we get from Joe Flacco? Well…
If you use your imagination, you can almost picture the outline of Oogie Boogie.
(I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.)
The standard numbers are bad. He completed 59.3% of his passes for 6.6 Yards Per Attempt and a negative CPOE (Completion Percentage Over Expected). That’s on an ADOT (Average Depth of Target) of 7.6 yards, the lowest mark of this season for Flacco (per PFF).
The advanced numbers aren’t much better. His adjusted completion percentage was 68%. He was kept clean on 56.7% of his dropbacks, completing 64.7% of his passes for 124 yards (7.3 YPA).
It’s not just the numbers: he straight-up missed multiple guys. Some of the misses could potentially be on the receivers not throttling down against zone, but most of his misses just looked like misses.
The silver lining here is that the Vikings are the #1 defense in the league (per DVOA). While the Bills aren’t exactly a walk in the park, they have the 15th ranked pass defense per DVOA (12th overall) and don’t run half the funky stuff up front that the Vikings do. So we’re likely to see a better showing from the passing game this week, which would certainly be a nice change of pace.
To the film. As we try to do in this space, we’re finding a fun play from this past weekend and digging in a bit. Because, even as frustrating as the game can be at times, there are always fun and cool things happening.
This play sees the Colts getting to Dagger – a core passing concept in pretty much every offense in the league – in a creative way. The throw goes elsewhere, but this is still a really cool concept.
Dagger is a two-man concept, consisting of the inside receiver running a clear-out route and the outside receiver running an in-cutting route behind it. The idea is that the inside receiver helps clear space for the outside receiver in the middle of the field.
The Colts are in 11 personnel (1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR) in shotgun. They have a bunch to the left, with Mo Alie-Cox [81] at the point, Michael Pittman Jr. [11] as the inside man and Josh Downs [1] as the outside man.
At the snap, Pittman bubbles outside, with the initial step from Alie-Cox and Downs going up the field. This looks like a bubble screen to Pittman, something the Colts show a lot. They’re trying to trigger the Vikings down on the bubble screen, then release vertically behind it.
After that initial action, Alie-Cox releases vertically as the clear-out man and Pittman works back inside and behind Alie-Cox.
Flacco is looking to attack the middle of the field. He’s looking to Alie-Cox first, then working back to Pittman. But the Vikings are a tricky bunch. They’re showing a single-high defense pre-snap, with Cam Bynum [24] playing the post. At the snap, they switch to an inverted Cover 2 look, with Bynum dropping down to the middle of the field: the exact area the Colts are looking to attack.
With Flacco starting to feel the pressure, he moves off the middle and finds his way down to hit Downs in space.
Downs gets the ball and picks up 5 yards on 2nd & 9. I’ve seen a couple different measurements for Success Rate over the years, but the one I’ve heard most recently from coaching circles is gaining 50% of the necessary yards on 1st or 2nd down and 100% of the necessary yards on 3rd or 4th down. By that standard, this was a successful play.
Really fun way to get to one of your core passing concepts, by working it off a horizontal, behind-the-line-of-scrimmage play you show quite a bit.
Albums listened to: The Raveonettes – Pe’ahi; Bon Iver – i,i