Leftovers and recommendations
A few more thoughts to share before you start diving into “the tape.”
If you are on Twitter during the NFL season you might see, say on a Tuesday morning, various NFL writers griping. Especially if the Chicago Bears have just played a home game. Why? Because of the notorious Soldier Field “All-22” angle.
Yeah, it is…not that helpful. Basically just a wider angle of the broadcast tape. So while you might be excited to dive into a ton of film, maybe skip the games where the Bears are at home.
Speaking of the broadcast film, if you are looking at watching wide receivers, replays from the broadcast tape are also a great way to see isolated matchups of a receiver versus a cornerback. Say you wanted to see a closeup of Hill’s “Wasp” route on the big third down conversion, after watching the All-22 of the play. You can switch to the “Broadcast” version of the game, and you will still have the ability to see the list of each play as outlined earlier in the “Coaches Tape” discussion. Scroll to the play in particular and select that play. Now, sometimes the play does not exactly match up (for example if you select the 3rd and 15 conversion it brings you to just before Mahomes releases the pass, so you can rewind with the “-10” button) but eventually you’ll see the replay of Hill’s route:
The replay angles are great to get a detailed look at technique from WRs and CBs.
The other thing to point out is the “Search” function. Now, I’ve been writing about football professionally since the 2014 season. I’m embarassed to tell you know long it took me to figure out how to use it…so I won’t. But I’ll walk you through it.
If you click on “Search” it brings up these three options: “Team Search,” “Player Search” and “In-Game Highlight:”
Team search is similar to the team option already highlighted, as it allows you to search by team through the NFL’s catalog of shows. “In-Game Highlight” looks like this when you select it:
You can change the parameters in terms of play type (here “Complete Passes” are selected but you can also select things like “Big Plays,” Fumbles, Interceptions and other options), season and week. The above still has all complete passes from Week 3 of 2018. And for each play, you can see either the Broadcast angle (the play button) or the All-22 (the film icon):
One thing to keep in mind is that in the search function, every play is listed as a “goal to go” situation, and the game time is listed but not the quarter. The Steelers did not have a 1st and goal on their own 10 yard line anytime in Week 3…
As a result, when using search it helps to have a play-by-play window opened as well, either with Pro Football Reference or ESPN, to sync things up.
The final option is “Player Search.” That looks like this:
This allows you to do specific searches by a player. You can look for, say, all of Julian Edelman’s targets from 2019 by adding his name into the search field, then clicking on “Plays” and selecting both complete passes, interceptions and incomplete passes (to cover all the bases) and then the search button:
Edelman had 153 targets in the regular season and five more in the Wild Card round, so this roughly checks out. Dive in and see what Tom Brady had to throw to last season, if you dare…
So now that you’re ready to start watching the tape, where to begin? Allow me to make a few recommendations. The 2018 Monday night game between the Chiefs and the Los Angeles Rams is a fantastic study from an offensive perspective, as is almost anything from the Rams’ 2018 campaign. You can fire up Lamar Jackson and the Ravens from this past season, two good games are their opener against the Miami Dolphins and their Sunday night dismantling of the New England Patriots. Speaking of New England, their Super Bowl against the Rams was not the most enjoyable to watch live, but that is a great game to study both in terms of how the Patriots defended the Rams, and how the New England offensive line handled Aaron Donald in the trenches.
For my money, given the ability to study safeties, watch some Buffalo Bills games, paying particular attention to their safeties Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer. The Bills and their pair of safeties do a great job at spinning their coverage and confusing quarterbacks from pre-snap to post-snap. Try and study them if you can.
Enjoy the tape!