Category: 2023 NFL Playoffs

Jaguars’ historic wild-card win is a testament to the power of belief

Yes, the Chargers collapsed in the wild-card round. But the Jaguars’ historic comeback was more about Doug Pederson’s belief in his team.

Yes, the Chargers Chargered.

But did we expect the Jaguars to… Jaguar?

Not like this.

Down 27-7 at the end of the first half and 27-0 with even 25 seconds left in the first half, seemingly demolished and disheartened by Trevor Lawrence’s four first-half interceptions and three third-quarter interceptions (the only first-quarter interceptions Lawrence had thrown in his NFL career), the Jaguars could have just laid up and folded over. It was a great story that they were hosting a playoff game with new head coach Doug Pederson, one year after Urban Meyer took a brontosaurus dump all over the franchise. Maybe it was time to wait ’til next year.

The only people who didn’t seem to take that in was Pederson and his team. They outscored the Chargers, 31-3, after they were down, 27-0, and there’s absolutely no excuse for that from the Chargers’ side. Head coach Brandon Staley is going to hear a lot of noise about his future with the team, and that’s justified.

But this is not a story about another Chargers collapse — this is a story of how Pederson instilled an unwavering belief in the same building that had been so beaten down by Meyer’s arrogance and incompetence. Pederson, a lightly-recruited coach after the Philadelphia Eagles fired him in January, 2021, and he subsequently took a year off, put this in motion from the start: We are going to believe in our ability to win, no matter the setback. And it didn’t take long for the belief to take effect. This mostly young team was hungry for exactly this message, and you could see it on the field.

Because in the toughest possible situations, you saw the new Jaguars fighting back — not just fighting back to feel better about their ultimately futile efforts, but fighting back because they believed that they were to win.

Saturday’s comeback was one for the books — the third-largest postseason comeback in the history of professional football — but this has been going on for a while. Especially at TIAA Bank Field.

So, in the most improbable situation, Pederson’s team believed in the impossible — and then, they made it happen.

“I’m proud of you for this reason,” Pederson told his team after the game. “You have faith in yourselves. You have faith in each other. You keep encouraging each other, like we talk about all the time. And you believe. Belief is about understanding that you can get it done, and then, it gets done. It just can’t happen, and then you have belief. That’s what faith is about, and you guys have it.”

That belief was never more evident than on running back Travis Etienne’s 25-yard run with 1:27 left in the game. Down 30-28 at the Chargers’ 41-yard line, the Jaguars were seeming to just want to convert the fourth-and-1 and keep pounding the ball down the field so that Riley Patterson would have an opportunity to kick a game-winning field goal. Lawrence came to the line of scrimmage, killed the original call, and then, Pederson called a time-out.

And then, as the Chargers clogged the middle of the formation awaiting a quarterback sneak, Etienne took the ball and bounced outside for what was basically a game-winning run.

We had seen the Jaguars run this kind of T-formation stuff before under Pederson. But not in this type of situation. Pederson has always had a belief that his calls will work (we all remember the Philly Special), and this was a risk of nearly that magnitude.

“I was just trying to win the game,” Etienne said. “I was just trying to ice the game. I’m happy coach called my name, honestly, called my number. And I feel like anytime coach calls my number I’m ready and I was able to show it with that play.”

Pederson explained the process of the play.

“I just didn’t like the look that we had for the play we had called, and so I just took the time-out. We reloaded, regrouped, put our heads together, came up with that call, and just a great effort by Travis to obviously hit an off tackle there and get the first down and more.

“Listen, if they’re outside, you go inside. If they’re inside, you go outside, and Travis is a heck of a back that can do that, and with his speed and ability, made a great play in that moment.”

Lawrence gave further insight into the architecture of the situation.

“We actually had a different call on before, and he didn’t like the look that the defense was in. It was probably smart, looking back at it. Just got the time-out off. I was kind of mad at first because I thought it was going to work. Then [Pederson] told me, and I was like, all right, sounds good. So, then he got the new call in, and just get the ball in Travis’s hands, and he makes a play like that, wins the game for us essentially. Obviously Riley won the game, but putting us in position there. It takes a lot of guts there, fourth-and-1 and game on the line, and just the guys up front, they just mashed them. They set the edge, and Travis was rolling.”

Patterson kicked his 36-yard game-winner two plays later, but you could say that the Jaguars had already won. Not just because they executed, but because they believed. They believed before they hit the field, they believed when they were making their comeback, and they believed when it was time to put the game away. The Jaguars were on the wrong side of the score on every offensive play in the second half, and they still won this game.

Yes, this was about the Chargers’ collapse. But it was even more about a structure of manifestation and belief instilled by Doug Pederson that paid enormous dividends when it was needed most.

Officials miss obvious penalty by Asante Samuel Jr. on Trevor Lawrence interception

Officials missed an obvious illegal contact penalty on Trevor Lawrence’s second interception, leading to more concern about NFL officiating.

Saturday night’s wild-card playoff game between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Jacksonville Jaguars did not begin as anybody expected. Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw interceptions on each of Jacksonville’s two drives, and the Chargers scored 10 points on those two picks.

Lawrence’s first interception was entirely legitimate – defensive lineman Sebastian Joseph-Day deflected Lawrence’s pass, and linebacker Drue Tranquill picked off the ball from the air.

Chargers pick off 2 Trevor Lawrence passes in first 5 minutes

However, the officiating crew, led by referee Shawn Smith, missed an obvious penalty on Lawrence’s second interception — which, if called, would have negated the pick. Receiver Zay Jones was Lawrence’s target, and Smith’s crew missed what was an obvious hold by cornerback Asante Samuel Jr. on Jones. Samuel is a good player, but it’s easier to pick off a pass when you’ve got your receiver in a passionate embrace.

Coming into the playoffs, several NFL coaches and executives had expressed concern about the state of officiating in the league. Based on that horrible no-call, we’d have to say that things are not going to work themselves out on the field

The NFL is now Very Concerned about officiating. What took the NFL so long?

How the 49ers kill defenses in the passing game with the threat of the run

The San Francisco 49ers have interesting ways of killing defenses in the passing game with run threats and pre-snap motion.

It’s a long-held belief that you need a strong run game to be effective with play-action. Not true, and it’s been proven over time that it’s not true. What you need as an offense is the threat of the run, and run looks, to displace and fool a defense into thinking you’re going to zig, when zagging is all that’s on your mind.

If you have a great run game, however, and your offensive play-designer understands perfectly how to upset defensive assignments with play-action and pre-snap motion… well, you have what the San Francisco 49ers did to the Seattle Seahawks with 14:02 left in the fourth quarter of their Saturday wild-card game.

49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan comes into a stadium with a serious advantage in this regard, because the run game he’s designed over time is one of the NFL’s most diverse and effective. In-game, the little wrinkles he throws at defenses can open things up in ways defenses just can’t stop.

The play in question was a seven-yard pass from Brock Purdy to running back Elijah Mitchell. Pre-snap, this looked like a run — the 49ers had fullback Kyle Juszczyk motioning from left to right, and left guard Aaron Banks pulling the same way. With Mitchell in the backfield, this could have easily been a run, and you can see that Seattle’s linebackers reacted completely to that idea.

Purdy’s first read was backside to receiver Brandon Aiyuk, but Seattle cornerback Tariq Woolen had Aiyuk locked down. Now, Purdy had to deal with pressure, and he rolled right to get away from it.

Seattle’s defenders missed Mitchell entirely, which gave Mitchell a wide-open shot.

“Kyle is going to make you have to defend the entire field,” Seahawks defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt said this week. “Because of the amount of weapons that he has, you have to account for everybody, so it makes it a difficult challenge. It’s not like you can rotate a coverage or do things where you can eliminate one guy, you have to defend all 11 guys out there on the field. He does a great job of scheming up, calling it, and everything else, so like I said, it’s a great challenge that we have in front of us.”

That touchdown put the 49ers up 31-17, and San Francisco put the final nail in on their next drive, with this 74-yard touchdown on a short pass from Purdy to Deebo Samuel. Again, we have Juszczyk as a motion variable — this time, moving from the formation to the backfield. And again, a fake to the running back (Christian McCaffrey this time), and San Francisco’s offense was off to the races.

Good luck to any team having to deal with this offense throughout the rest of the postseason.

Tariq Woolen is faster than you, and he’s happy to let you know

Once again, Seahawks cornerback Tariq Woolen proved that he’s faster than anybody else on the field.

Now that Seattle Seahawks first-year cornerback Tariq Woolen is justifiably in the discussion for Defensive Rookie of the Year, we can go back and wonder why it was that Woolen lasted until the fifth round of the 2022 draft out of the University of Texas-San Antonio. Some NFL shot-callers believed Woolen to be too raw in coverage, and some questioned his strength of competition.

1,135 snaps, 38 receptions on 68 targets for 549 yards, 207 yards after the catch, five touchdowns, six interceptions, and an opponent passer rating of 70.0 later, nobody is wondering about Woolen’s NFL potential.

And the 4.26 40-yard dash speed Woolen put up at the 2022 scouting combine has showed up more than once this season with Woolen’s ungodly recovery speed in coverage. Woolen showed it off once again with 10:19 left in the first quarter of Seattle’s Saturday wild-card game against the San Francisco 49ers.

49ers quarterback Brock Purdy tried to get the ball deep to receiver Jauan Jennings, and Woolen just wasn’t having it. This despite getting baked a bit on the route. When you can play catchup to this degree, you can erase a lot of mistakes.

Not the first time this season that Woolen has shocked an opposing offense with his downfield speed.

Tariq Woolen is faster than everybody else, and the Chiefs just found that out

The NFL is now Very Concerned about officiating. What took the NFL so long?

The NFL has decided to become concerned about officiating after Week 18’s Seahawks-Rams game. We say, what took the NFL so long?

Several big-time shot-callers in the NFL are now Very Concerned about the state of officiating in the league based on the performance of Craig Wrolstad’s crew in Week 18’s game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Seattle Seahawks. Seattle won that game 19-16 in overtime, and the result put the Seahawks in the playoffs, knocking the Detroit Lions out even before Detroit’s Sunday night game against the Green Bay Packers.

Multiple executives and coaches told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that the officiating had several lapses, all in Seattle’s favor, and all key elements in Seattle’s eventual win.

One anonymous source said that it was “The worst officiated game of the year.”

Schefter wrote that it wasn’t just the Rams and the Lions who were upset by the officiating in this particular game — the NFL’s Competition Committee also stood up and took notice.

From Schefter’s report:

One source told ESPN this week that the NFL must do a better job of screening, hiring and training its officials; the league can’t have games in which teams’ seasons are on the line and have questionable and impactful calls such as the ones in the Rams-Seahawks Week 18 game.

Officiating is an imperfect science, but the source said to ESPN that there should be ways to mitigate those types of mistakes.

All true, but where has this outrage been all season? NFL officiating has been a major problem all along, and Week 18 wasn’t the worst week. Not even close. You can go back to Week 15, when multiple crews blew multiple calls that affected games to various degrees.

The worst officiating moments from a NFL Week 15 that was full of them

There were the two fumble recovery touchdowns by Minnesota Vikings cornerback Chandon Sullivan that were called back — the only reason those didn’t affect Minnesota’s eventual win over the Indianapolis Colts is that the Vikings performed the greatest comeback win in NFL history.

There was the touchdown pass from Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr to receiver Keelan Cole late in the Raiders’ game against the New England Patriots that shouldn’t have been a touchdown upon review — Cole’s second foot went out of bounds, but the crew didn’t see sufficient evidence to overturn the touchdown call — even though there was ample evidence on the FOX television replays.

And there were the series of officiating bungles that helped the New York Giants beat the Washington Commanders — primarily an obvious and missed pass interference penalty on New York cornerback Darnay Holmes — which referee John Hussey referred to as a “judgment call.”

Talk about a series of officiating decisions that affected playoff seedings? The 9-7-1 Giants wound up with the NFC’s six-seed, while the 8-8-1 Commanders were not in the postseason. Had Washington won that game, they would have flipped records with the Giants, and as the teams’ tie game was against each other, that’s another example of officiating deciding in part who gets to play in the tournament.

We have horrible roughing the passer penalties just about every week, based on rules that are flawed by design. We have officials who are confused about which team they want to penalize. And we have a VP of Officiating in former referee Walt Anderson who tends to take over postgame pool reports, leaving the officials in question to skate without any real public accountability.

So, it’s nice that some people in the league are concerned about the state of officiating as the postseason begins. Not that it will have any effect on the quality of work this weekend and beyond, but our question is: Where has this concern been all season? Because what happened in the Seahawks-Rams game was more par for the course than any kind of outlier in performance.

NFL Playoffs: Secret Superstars of the wild-card round — the defense

Which unknown players will step up in the wild-card round? Here are this week’s Secret Superstars on the defensive side of the ball.

If your team is going to win a Super Bowl, at some point along that ride, your team will have to get at least one remarkable postseason performance from a player nobody saw coming. Yes, we all expect the big names to come up big in big moments in big games, and other attendant cliches, but somewhere along the line, you will need a Secret Superstar to get the job done.

If you expected Buffalo Bills receiver Gabe Davis to go off for four touchdown catches against the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2021 divisional round, you should probably be working for a team. Because, with all due respect to Davis, I don’t think even the Bills were expecting that.

The same could be said for Houston Oilers defensive back Vernon Perry in the divisional round of the 1979 playoffs against the San Diego Chargers of Don Coryell and Dan Fouts. The undrafted rookie from Jackson State picked off four of Fouts’ passes, and blocked a field goal for good measure. As the game ended 17-14 in Houston’s favor, that block was as important as any of the picks.

You get the idea. At some point in the wild-card round of the upcoming playoffs, there will be at least one player whose name you don’t know who will pop up on the screen, and grab your attention. Here are my most likely players to do just that on the defensive side of the ball; the Secret Superstars on offense for the wild-card round can be found here.

NFL Playoffs: Secret Superstars of the wild-card round — the offense

And here’s the wild-card schedule for all who are curious; I tried to focus on repeat matchups as much as possible.

NFL sets Super Wild-Card Weekend schedule: Times, days, and networks

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It’s time for the Buccaneers to get their offense on the right track

Can the Buccaneers fix their dormant offense in time for Monday night’s playoff game against the Cowboys? Laurie Fitzpatrick has a few ideas.

For the third consecutive season, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are in the playoffs But this is the first year of that three-year stretch in which it didn’t feel completely… deserved. It doesn’t feel the same at 8-9. Even with Tom Brady leading the league in completions and attempts, their run game is sitting dead last in the NFL. So, their offense hasn’t really clicked. Injuries are a big part of that, too. Especially on their offensive line. Because of this, they have been unable to establish that run game, which in turn has affected their passing game, more specifically the play action the pass.

Their offense has been flat.

But even though the Buccaneers only have eight wins, they are still in the playoffs, and that’s all Brady ever needs — a game, a quarter, a drive, or just one chance.

Brady has turned it up over these last few games and their offense made a slight improvement despite losing to the Atlanta Falcons week 18.

Let’s look into the Buccaneers’ offense and see what they have to do to make it past the Dallas Cowboys in their wild-card matchup.

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NFL Playoffs: Secret Superstars of the wild-card round — the offense

Which players whose names you might now know could go off in the wild-card round of the playoffs? Here’s our potential Secret Superstars.

If your team is going to win a Super Bowl, at some point along that ride, your team will have to get at least one remarkable postseason performance from a player nobody saw coming. Yes, we all expect the big names to come up big in big moments in big games, and other attendant cliches, but somewhere along the line, you will need a Secret Superstar to get the job done.

If you expected Buffalo Bills receiver Gabe Davis to go off for four touchdown catches against the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2021 divisional round, you should probably be working for a team. Because, with all due respect to Davis, I don’t think even the Bills were expecting that.

The same could be said for Houston Oilers defensive back Vernon Perry in the divisional round of the 1979 playoffs against the San Diego Chargers of Don Coryell and Dan Fouts. The undrafted rookie from Jackson State picked off four of Fouts’ passes, and blocked a field goal for good measure. As the game ended 17-14 in Houston’s favor, that block was as important as any of the picks.

You get the idea. At some point in the wild-card round of the upcoming playoffs, there will be at least one player whose name you don’t know who will pop up on the screen, and grab your attention. Here are my most likely players to do just that on the offensive side of the ball; the defensive players on this week’s Secret Superstars team will be up shortly.

And here’s the wild-card schedule for all who are curious; I tried to focus on repeat matchups as much as possible.

NFL sets Super Wild-Card Weekend schedule: Times, days, and networks

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