The Bills were without Mitch Morse in Week 10 against the Arizona Cardinals. Buffalo’s starting center was at the game, but he didn’t play.
Sounds a lot like he was benched.
But wait, what? Was he? No he wasn’t, per Bills head coach Sean McDermott on Monday. The bench boss gave some of the most eye-raise responses of his entire tenure with the Bills on this one.
First, McDermott confirmed Morse is currently healthy after suffering a concussion in Week 8 against the Patriots. But classified him not playing as a “coach’s decision.” Here’s McDermott’s first full response to why Morse was dressed and on the team’s active roster against the Cardinals, but did not play:
“He was healthy, coach’s decision right there. Mitch is a good player. Just felt like that week, being last week, we felt like we had some momentum with the group we had in when Mitch went down and we wanted to take one more look at it.”
Later in his weekly video conference call, McDermott was short. Also kind of confusing as well.
“No he was not benched,” McDermott said, before adding: “That lineup will be determined every week” when responding to whether or not Morse is his starting center moving forward.
Finally, McDermott fully classified the choice to not play Morse was “strictly a football decision.” Morse’s health did not factor into the situation, nor did any off-field actions like missing a practice session or being late to a meeting.
The whole thing was a pretty interesting set of exchanges for the head coach. Offensive coordinator Brian Daboll also echoed the explanation on the decision.
“[The starting O-line vs. the Cards] played a couple games together and that’s the direction we decided to go with last game. That doesn’t mean anything for next week or the week after that. Just had some continuity going with those guys, they’ve done a good job in there together, and we’ll see where we go with that,” Daboll said.
The five the Bills let take every snap along the offensive line against the Cardinals, from left to right, was Dion Dawkins, Ike Boettger, Jon Feliciano, Brian Winters and Daryl Williams.
Along with Morse not playing, Cody Ford, who’s dealing with an ankle injury himself, did not play, either. McDermott said he doesn’t know for sure when Ford will be back at this point, but the Bills are heading into their bye week, anyway. Perhaps because of that, the coaching staff did not want to be pressed into calling one guy their starter or not. They have two weeks to make that decision, but at least for one game, Morse wasn’t.
Now, for the numbers. Or the only ones we’ve got, which come via the folks at Pro Football Focus. Subjective numbers, yes, but some context.
Morse originally went down against the Patriots in Week 8 and both McDermott and Daboll referenced that game in their responses. What they could’ve liked from that outing was Boettger.
In that contest, PFF graded him the Bills’ top player on offense, a 94.1 overall mark. His performance went hand-in-hand with the best run game effort the Bills got all season, in due part to the offensive line’s efforts. The Bills had 190 rushing yards in Week 8.
Against the Seahawks last week, perhaps the Bills thought the game just… didn’t go the way of a rushing style of attack. Against a Russell Wilson-led team, the Bills probably knew it’d be a shootout vs. the Seahawks, and they guessed right considering it was a 44-34 final score.
So over that time period, Morse gets healthy, and maybe the Bills don’t want to say he was benched, but losing your job due to injury is one way guys benched all the time.
We wish Morse the best in terms of health, but we’re trying to break down a coaching decision here.
Via the eye test against the Cardinals, the Bills offensive line… wasn’t great. They never really are better than an average unit, but despite not being sacked, quarterback Josh Allen was certainly on the run a bit more in Week 10. The run game, as usual, was just never established.
Using PFF’s guidance, the position that provided the most let down? Feliciano at center, Morse’s spot.
Feliciano’s PFF mark had a huge overall drop from Weeks 9 to 10, 68.4 to 61.8, respectively. By comparison, Boettger and Winters saw their numbers move up slightly, just a point or two.
So where could the Bills go from here? We’ve got a bye week so we don’t know. But perhaps the Bills might look to keep Botteger at left guard with Morse at center and Feliciano at right guard. The best way to explain way this is to just to lay out exactly how the interior offensive line’s numbers current stand heading into the bye week via PFF’s grading system, player-by-player:
- Ike Boettger: 72.0
- Mitch Morse: 65.6
- Jon Feliciano: 61.8
- Brian Winters: 58.2
- Cody Ford: 53.8
Again, we can take PFF with a grain of salt. Maybe even a massive one. But another thing worth noting is that the Bills have tried to stick Ford into the lineup as much as possible when he’s healthy this season, despite any poor play or grades from the analytics folks.
Because of that, it might be a better guess that Ford, the former second-round pick the Bills traded up for, gets out there over Boettger, a former undrafted rookie free agent.
Regardless of all that, some verbal tip-toeing for sure from McDermott which should turn some heads.
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