Brian Baldinger, best known for his ‘Baldy’s Breakdowns’, highlighted how intense the Steelers pass rush was against the Browns in Week 14.
Fans of the old-school style of great Pittsburgh Steelers defenses have surely enjoyed the 2024 season so far. The team boasts one of the most elite defensive lines in the NFL, featuring several of the league’s top defenders, including T.J. Watt, Alex Highsmith, Nick Herbig, and Cam Heyward, to name a few.
Brian Baldinger, an NFL analyst, highlighted a play that showcased what all four of these players are capable of when on the field together.
Baldinger’s description of the four Steelers defenders perfectly captures their impact, as these elite players consistently hunt down opposing quarterbacks come game time.
While there was much debate about how the Pittsburgh Steelers should utilize OLBs Highsmith, Watt, and Herbig together, Week 14 proved that the defense is at its best when all three are available.
The Black and Gold will need these defenders at their peak when they head to Philadelphia to face the Eagles in Week 15, on December 15 at 4:25 PM EST.
Injuries up, stats down, scoring off – where is my lucky shirt?
I like to think I know stats. I’ve analyzed and reviewed every player in every NFL game for the last 27 years. I’ve projected and ranked every fantasy-relevant player, every football week, since 1997. So I stay close to stats. During the season, I literally dream about stats and players and games.
So.
What’s wrong with the NFL?
For many years, decades even, Week 1 and 2 produced misleading stats suggesting the NFL was in for a high-scoring year. It was clear back then that the defenses needed to catch up to the offenses – which eventually they would do – but for especially Week 1, more monster games and performances happened than would for the rest of the season.
The old mantra was “don’t get excited about Week 1” since it was always artificially high. After the last two weeks, it feels more like the mantra needs to change to a Marine Corps sergeant strolling down the barrack, banging a nightstick on an empty metal trashcan while yelling, “Wake up, ladies!”
Let’s start with the quarterbacks over the last seven years. Below are the measurements of the position for each year after two games played:
It isn’t just that there are the fewest passing yards, it is that the NFL is considered to be a “passing league.” Or at least it was. After 32 games, there have only been five quarterbacks that threw for at least 300 yards. Last year, almost one in four quarterbacks threw for 300 yards in those weeks. This year? Only five in the first two weeks.
Think that’s stark? Those five quarterbacks were Jared Goff, Brock Purdy, Geno Smith, Tua Tagovailoa, and Matt Stafford. It is possible that none of them started in your league. And, none of those five 300-yard passers threw more than one touchdown.
So the quarterbacks are at historic ineffective and unproductive levels to open the season. Let’s break down how that trickles into the receivers:
Touchdowns are on a sharp decline for both positions. Yardage hasn’t been lower for both positions. The number of 100-yard receivers and 50-yard tight ends remained about the same but not the scores and yardage overall. Tight-end scoring has all but evaporated.
The passing stats are down, significantly in several areas and that depresses fantasy points. But, what about those running backs? How big of a hit have they taken? They’ve been devalued and underpaid due to their short shelf life, so have they been as bad or even worse?
Wait, what?
Running backs opened the year with some of the highest rushing yardage and scores in the last seven years? The receiving stats are lower for the last two seasons, surprising given the number of third-down backs and dual-threat running backs. So, the only category of fantasy football interest that thrived was rushing stats from running backs.
It’s a passing league my …
But my drafts picks are okay, right?
No. No they are not. At least most of them are not.
Using The Huddle 12-team expert league draft results from the last three seasons as a sample, I compared each pick to where they ranked within their position after the first two weeks of that season. I marked in red those picks that I viewed as disappointing to the team owner. Again – two weeks into their season, this is how the first three rounds looked to fantasy owners.
Chances are that every fantasy team owner has at least a player or two who disappointed after two games. Those first three picks are precious and really need to at least meet expectations.
There were 11 disappointments in both 2022 and 2023 over their first three rounds, – about a third of the picks. In 2022, there were only four disappointments in the first 23 picks which meant that those first two rounds paid off pretty well for almost every fantasy owner. It worsened in 2023, but still only 11 players in the first 36 were a disappointment.
This season? Half of all picks in the first three rounds have been disappointment and they were skewed more towards the first round that only had four picks come through for fantasy drafts. By the end of the second round, 14 of the 24 selections had not delivered. So, not only half have not delivered, but they were mostly in the first two rounds that you need to get right to compete.
Credit: Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
Does the NFL hate my fantasy team?
No. I cannot rule you out personally, but not your fantasy team.
So, what in the NFL is going on? Is it possible that only defenses practiced this summer while offenses spent their time on Zoom calls and everyone secretly played solitaire? There are two schools of thought why the NFL has throttled back the yards and scores, in direct contrast to how seasons used to start.
Doh! Not the two high safeties! – More defenses employ two split safeties to cover the deep part of the field to eliminate deep plays and force offenses to rely on short or intermediate passes. Or just run the ball.
Offenses can’t move in chunks of yardage down the field, in theory, and instead have to string together consistently positive plays to always get a first down in three tries. Secondaries play more Cover-2 and Cover-4 than ever, and that means fewer defenders in the box, so that running the ball is easier.
That is what has happened with fewer high-yardage passing games and an increase in rushing success, but not the receptions for running backs. The NFL is, or at least was, a passing league and defenses have backed up. Nothing on offense or defense that is successful is left alone. The other side always catches up. Golf clap for the NFL secondaries for devaluing those wide receivers. And maybe don’t start your next fantasy draft with five straight wideouts.
The shifting in defensive philosophy is to credit – at least partially. But the Cover-2 or Tampa-2 was created 30 years ago. Tony Dungy and the Buccaneers are credited with the scheme, though it was just an evolution from the Steel Curtain defense in Pittsburgh back in the 1970’s. Offenses act and defenses react. It will always be a give-or-take situation, occasionally boosted for the offense when they tweak the rules to prompt higher scores.
Maybe it is time for a new rule? Maybe make the defensive line count to three before they rush like in sandlot football?
Offenses will catch up. They always do. And then the defenses will catch up…
Credit: Eric Hartline-Imagn Images
But wait, there’s more!
In 2021, the NFL Competition Committee voted to extend the regular season to 18 weeks (cha-ching) and the preseason was reduced to only three total shams that parade as games. In years past, the first two games were more like scrimmages with the occasional starter showing up for a series. The third game was the chance to play all the starters and tune up for the season against the starters for their opponent. Sometimes for an entire half – it was TV worth watching and a glimpse of what to expect for the season.
The final game was resting the starters and determining which players they needed to cut to reach the 53-man roster limit.
The last three seasons, the three-game preseason is entirely used to determine which 40 or so guys are going to be released and who makes the final roster. There’s no reason to watch preseason games other than it looks like a real NFL game if you squint your eyes and don’t listen to the names the announcers are trying to pronounce.
A greater focus on safety, reducing injuries, and adding an extra dollar-driven regular season game seem to have just moved all the injuries to the regular season. Aside from the Vikings J.J. McCarthy, who was seriously injured this summer? Every season by December, there are usually few notable injuries. It is said that is because everyone is already playing injured, and the guys that were going to have serious injuries already did. Only now, that starts in Week 1 instead of the summer.
Teams practice less and offenses do not get in synch as well as they once did. That mostly waits for the regular season, and now face defenses that are committed to slowing down the passing that already is starting out sloppier and less effective than ever.
Just five years back, the first two weeks would serve up around 20 300-yard passers. Now there were only five – and they only threw one score, if even that.
So just party like it is 1999?
It is an interesting question – is this merely a part of the cyclic nature of offense vs. defense that will start to swing back towards higher yards and scores? Or is this a more fundamental change to the game?
The preseason has become nothing more than the interview process for which players make the final roster, and install new schemes mostly using overhead projectors and walk-throughs. Player safety is paramount and the NFL and NFLPA don’t want to lose players in the summer. So the precision and timing needed to complete a pass may suffer at first. And the passing stats will decrease. Maybe we’ve already witnessed the Golden Age of Passing.
The problem appears two-fold in nature – defenses are dedicated to stopping deep passes and maybe more so, it is an unintended consequence for shortening the preseason and adding another revenue-generating game that actually ends up degrading the product. They are never going back, so say hello to the new normal.
Having followed this very closely for 27 years, it is a throwback to see running backs rushing more and catching less. And great quarterbacks are starting to turn in sub-200 yard passing games. And a decline in scoring from many of our fantasy players. And the season opens with what feels like far more injuries than usual. One thought occurs to me as I run through the game-by-game stats this year.
Maybe this is your father’s NFL, just with an astronomic operating budget.
Here’s who we thought shined and who we thought struggled in Tampa Bay’s second consecutive win:
It was rough, but it was a win.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Atlanta Falcons in a tight one 29-25 on Sunday, extending their winning streak to two games and putting them back on top in the NFC South. It wasn’t a game that saw any unit fire on all cylinders, but turnovers from the defense and a last-minute drive executed well put the Bucs back in it and in the win column at the end of the day.
As always, there were some individuals who stood out for the Bucs and there were others who had a more negative impact. Here are our studs and duds from Tampa Bay’s Atlanta victory:
Bill Walsh is known for all kinds of innovations. Add an elevated understanding of pre-snap motion to that list.
Part 1 of Doug Farrar’s “Emotions in Motion” series presented an overall view of the advantages of pre-snap motion, and some level of angst as to the percentage of coaches who refuse to avail themselves of this cheat code. Part 2 took a deep dive into Aaron Rodgers’ enlightened views on the concept through the eyes of head coach Matt LaFleur. In Part 3 of the series, let’s get into the Wayback Machine to discover how Bill Walsh (no surprise there) became the first offensive play-designer to make pre-snap motion a primary construct of his playbooks.
Though most professional football offenses were far more formationally stationary in previous eras than they are today, there were those coaches who experimented with throwing defenses off-kilter with pre-snap motion. Sid Gillman and Tom Landry were two in a small group, and the fact that those coaches are among the game’s all-time greatest innovators fits nicely with the idea of thinking outside the box to throw off defenses that were also far more cookie-cutter in previous eras.
But it was Bill Walsh, more than any other coach, who brought the gospel of pre-snap motion to the field in highly effective ways. Starting with his time as the Oakland Raiders’ running backs coach in 1966 — where he worked under Al Davis, who ingested most of what he knew about the passing game from his earlier time with Gillman — and then as the Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive coordinator under Paul Brown from 1968 to 1975, and certainly as the San Francisco 49ers’ head coach from 1979 through 1988, Walsh saw no issue with using pre-snap movement as a force multiplier in an offense that was as much art as it was science.
But as voluminous and well-thought as most of his innovations were, this came from random chance. In his autobiography, “Building a Champion,” Walsh described how he started to use the tight end in motion from one side of the formation to the other.
“We used the tight end in motion first by mistake,” he said. “Cincinnati was playing the Raiders in Oakland. In the third quarter, Bob Trumpy lined up on the wrong side by mistake. He had to shift over quickly to the other side, and all hell broke loose. At that time, the Raiders had very specialized [defenders]. They had a weak-side linebacker, they had a strong-side linebacker, they had a defensive end who only played on the tight-end side, and they would shift their two inside linebackers. They all ran into each other in the middle of the field, trying to adjust.”
After the game, offensive line coach Bill Johnson suggested to Walsh that the Bengals put motion in the playbook on purpose. Walsh said that they looked at each other and doubled over laughing at first, but that’s how motion became a seminal part of the Walsh offense. And the motion concept was mostly nightmarish for the more static defenses of the time. Against defenses with specific linebacker designations (weak-side and strong-side, strong-side being the linebacker lined up over the tight end), Walsh could direct his tight end to create unfavorable matchups.
“If a weak-side linebacker was fast but had trouble handling a big, blocking tight end, we could force him to defend on the strong side anytime we wanted, simply by moving the tight end to his side,” Walsh said.
Of course, when Trumpy went in motion, quarterback Ken Anderson still had to throw the ball to the right team, which didn’t always happen when the Bengals faced the Raiders in Week 5 of that season.
And here’s receiver Isaac Curtis motioning from outside to the slot against Oakland in the 1975 divisional playoffs. A nifty concept that would have worked but for the fact that linebacker Ted Hendricks sacked Anderson — one of four sacks the future Hall-of-Famer had on the day.
So… it took a few minutes to work out the kinks.
In any event, Walsh started to split Trumpy outside of the formation, forcing those linebackers to stray from their preferred places and opening up other alternatives. By the time he was hired in San Francisco as the 49ers’ head coach in 1979, Walsh was using receivers in motion, backs in motion… everything was about getting the defense off-balance before the snap even happened. Walsh saw the defense as a moveable canvas onto which he would paint exacting structural concepts, and motion was a major part of this. Walsh discovered that by putting different players in motion, a quarterback could discern whether the defense he was facing was man or zone.
“If a back goes in motion and the linebackers begin to loosen, the quarterback can expect a zone,” he wrote. “If a linebacker immediately moves with the back in motion, the quarterback can see man-to-man coverage.”
Again, this worked at a basic level because defenses were relatively rudimentary in the 1970s — the substitutions and hybrid positions of the current era were rarely seen. Teams use motion to discern coverage concepts to this day, though disguised and split coverage concepts are the norm in the modern age. Back then? Teams didn’t know how to adapt.
By the early 1980s, Walsh was designing all kinds of new alchemies. This 23-yard pass from quarterback Matt Cavanaugh to running back/tight end Earl Cooper against the New Orleans Saints looked like something straight out of Andy Reid’s Chiefs playbook in any of the last three seasons, with Cooper as the motion receiver from left to right, and both guards pulling the other way. The pulling guards influenced the defense to head away from Cooper, and the motion — not to mention Cavanaugh’s bootleg to the right — helped to negate the Saints’ all-out blitz. (H/T to John Turney of the awesome Pro Football Journal site for the video assist).
“We called that play because we thought they would be blitzing,” quarterbacks coach Paul Hackett said. “That’s why we wanted Matt to be moving. We used the misdirect action to buy him time, but that pass is delivered quickly anyway.”
By the last game of his time as the 49ers’ head coach and offensive genius, Walsh had developed it to his usual standard — ruthlessly effective, incredibly multi-faceted, and with more wrinkles than anybody else would have considered. The game-winning touchdown in Super Bowl XXIII against Paul Brown’s Bengals was a play called “Red Right Tight F Left 20 Halfback Curl X Up,” and here’s Walsh drawing it up, Michelangelo-style:
As you can see, Jerry Rice is motioning from right to left pre-snap, and as Joe Montana told me this week, that was not only by specific design to open things up for other receivers, it also turned Rice into an option receiver, which just seems unfair.
“The one thing Bill noticed was that … I mean, we used [pre-snap] motion for a reason,” Montana said. “We’d used motions with Jerry [Rice] coming across the formation — this was right to left, but a lot of times, we’d run it the other way as fast as we could before the defender could catch up to him — the man trailing him. We’d bring him across again after throwing it to Jerry in the flat right away, and let him turn it [upfield]. The next time, we’d bring him over in the same look, and we’d start him into the flat, and he’d run an angle back in.
“So, we were hoping that if they were playing man-to-man, they would put him into that, but if not, that motion also kicked [the Bengals] into two deep safeties. That’s where the “X Up” comes into play, where J.T. [John Taylor] had to read. If there’s a free safety, he hooks it outside. And if they were split, and there was no safety in the middle, he does a little nod-out like he’s going to hook, and then he goes to the post. There’s not a lot of time and space between when he runs that hook and before he runs out of space in the end zone. You have to anticipate that.”
Montana also said that when Rice motioned and didn’t have a specific following defender, he knew he was facing a zone defense — one of the primary reasons teams use pre-snap motion to this day.
It’s not surprising that Bill Walsh was able to take something like pre-snap motion that was considered to be something between gimmickry and heresy for other coaches and turn it into a key element of his offensive designs. It’s also not a surprise that even to this day, a lot of coaches are still lagging behind his enterprising genius in this regard.
In Part 4 of the “Emotions n Motion” series, we’ll take a look at the teams who benefited the most in the 2020 season from pre-snap motion… and the teams who, despite that obvious advantage, used it at an unhelpfully low rate.
