With Anthony Richardson missing this game due to the hip injury, he sustained against the Steelers, the Indianapolis Colts turned to Joe Flacco to start the game this week against the Jaguars. According to FTN’s DVOA, the Jaguars rank 32nd in the league against the pass, so the Colts clearly came in with a pass-heavy gameplan. How did that look?
Let’s look at the chart:
Woooooooo buddy. Asking a nearly 40-year-old Joe Flacco to throw 44 times in a game is not something I would have anticipated working well, but he’s still got enough gas in the tank to bring it, both with his arms and, apparently, his legs.
He peppered the short-to-intermediate area, threw a fair number of passes behind the line of scrimmage and took the occasional shot. He turned in an ADOT (Average Depth of Target) of 7.9 (per RBSDM), which feels right where he should be. He had a solid 0.27 EPA per play, which was dwarfed by AD Mitchell’s 2.45 EPA per pass play (minimum of 1 attempt).
On the day, Flacco averaged 2.73 seconds to throw, up from the 2.6 seconds he averaged in Week 4 (per PFF). Part of that was the protection up front, but part of that was the Jaguars lack of any sort of pressure. On the day, Flacco was only under pressure on 11 of his dropacks (22.4%) and his average time to throw on those under pressure snaps was 3.27 seconds. So, on average, he was only under pressure because he was holding onto the ball.
When Flacco was kept clean, he was an absolute assassin. On those 38 dropbacks, he was 30/38 (78.9%) for 351 yards (9.2 YPA), 2 TDs & 1 INT (122.7 QB Rating). PFF has the Colts for 2 dropped passes in those 38 dropbacks, giving Flacco an adjusted completion percentage of 84.2%. Not too shabby.
Before we get out of here, let’s take a look at a play from this past week. It’s a concept that I always love seeing, and we got to see it on the second play of the day from the Colts offense.
The Colts come out in 11 personnel (1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR) in a shotgun look. They’re in a 2×2 formation, with Mo Alie-Cox [81] in-line on the right and Tyler Goodson [31] aligned to Flacco’s left. The Jaguars have a 6 man box, with 4 down linemen and 2 linebackers. With a light box, the Jaguars are looking to attack the run.
At the snap, Goodson crosses Flacco’s face and Flacco puts the ball into the belly of Goodson for the playfake. To add to that, Quenton Nelson [56] pulls to the right. That action triggers the linebackers to the presumed point of attack.
Alie-Cox releases at an angle that would be consistent with sealing one of the linebackers on a run play. With the linebackers thinking run, Alie-Cox simply releases through the middle and Flacco hits him as soon as he clears the safeties.
By the time the linebackers realize they’ve been duped, Alie-Cox has the ball in his hands and end up picking up 19 yards.
A beautiful call and nice execution.
Albums listened to: Efterklang – Things We Have in Common; Sunset Rubdown – Always Happy to Explode