Oklahoma Sooners’ Caleb Williams remained the highest graded Power Five quarterback by Pro Football Focus through week 10.
The Sooners have another Heisman hopeful at the quarterback position. It’s virtually been the standard operating procedure for the better part of the last five years of the Oklahoma football program. The catch is, the guy that’s the Heisman hopeful is not the guy that started the season under center for Oklahoma. True freshman Caleb Williams usurped Spencer Rattler as the starter after relieving him in the Texas game and providing a spark in one of the biggest Oklahoma comebacks in years.
The Sooners were off this week, but we are going to find out exactly what this team is made of going forward. They play Baylor, Iowa State and Oklahoma State to finish out the season. Luckily for them, it seems like they’ve found their next great quarterback. Williams remains on top of the rankings for another week and is one of four quarterbacks with a yards-per-attempt figure above 10.0 — his 10.8 mark ranks third-highest in the country. – Galina
Caleb Williams has galvanized this Oklahoma program which in some ways seemed sluggish. Williams in the starting role has been like putting fresh batteries in a remote-controlled car and seeing how fast it zips around afterward. The Sooners have games coming up against formidable conference foes, and all three teams boast stiff defenses that are familiar with Oklahoma’s offense.
Williams ultimately may be the ex-factor. His cool head and his ability to make plays with his feet may be the difference between the Sooners running through this three-game stretch undefeated or with a loss. A single defeat that could derail Oklahoma’s chances at holding up a conference championship trophy or contending for the national title.
As many of us know, the sport of football is highly dependent on the play of quarterbacks. This team will go where this seemingly transcendent talent at quarterback will take them. There’s a level of mystique like we’ve seen with Sooners quarterbacks of the past that makes you feel confident that Oklahoma has a shot against anyone. With a game this week on the road against Baylor, we’ll see just how good he is.
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Mitchell Trubisky struggled in 2019, both on film and statistically. His reward? A declined fifth-year option and Nick Foles coming to town.
(In this series, Touchdown Wire’s Mark Schofield takes a look at one important metric per NFL team to uncover a crucial problem to solve for the 2020 season. In this installment, it’s time to look at how the Chicago Bears offense, and quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, struggled in 2019 and why Nick Foles might be the answer).
By almost any measure, 2019 was a year to forget for third-year quarterback Mitchell Trubisky.
Coming off a season that saw the Chicago Bears win the NFC North, and Trubisky make it to a Pro Bowl as an alternate, Bears fans had high expectations for their team and their passer entering 2019.
It did not take long for those expectations to be dashed.
Changing convention, the NFL opened up the 2019 regular season with the Bears squaring off with the Green Bay Packers on Thursday night, rather than the New England Patriots, the defending Super Bowl Champions, raising a banner at Gillette Stadium. The league wanted to highlight the long rivalry between the two NFC North teams in honor of “NFL 100.” What Bears fans saw that night was a sign of what would come from Trubisky in 2019.
This is how that game ended:
This is bad and it does not get better with the benefit of All-22 hindsight.
The Bears come out in a Y-Iso formation using 21 personnel. Tight end Ben Braunecker is along on the right while the Bears use a trips formation on the left. Taylor Gabriel is on the outside, running back Tarik Cohen is the middle receiver and Allen Robinson is the inside receiver. Chicago runs Double In to the trips side, with Gabriel and Cohen cutting inside while Robinson runs the corner route. Braunecker and running back David Montgomery run an out/in combination on the right.
Now, the corner route is the primary read on this play, and with just 2:03 remaining in the game, down by 7, facing 3rd and 10, you would like to hit on a big play. This route concept is designed to create space for that corner route from the #3 receiver by hopefully pulling the outside defenders to the middle of the field, and against single-high coverage, giving the corner route receiver the leverage advantage against the free safety.
Chicago does get single-high coverage, but there is a twist. The Packers use a bracket on Robinson. Cornerback Tramon Williams drops off of Cohen to take an outside leverage position over Robinson, allowing free safety Adrian Amos to work slowly from the middle of the field, knowing he has help on Robinson from the outside.
Even still, this throw can be completed, provided the quarterback does something besides stare at Robinson from the snap to the throw. Trubisky is pulling the trigger in this second image, and perhaps he has not seen Williams peel off Cohen. Provided he has been smart with his eyes, there is still a chance:
Instead, he stares at Robinson the entire route, and you can see the jump Amos gets on this. If he looks elsewhere – at Braunecker, Cohen, the dude in the front row chomping on popcorn, anywhere else – this play might have a chance.
Instead he throws Amos a can of corn.
That throw, in my opinion, was not even the worst of the night from Trubisky. This one was:
The Packers show Trubisky a two deep safety look before the snap, but after the play begins they adjust it somewhat, dropping rookie safety Darnell Savage into the middle of the field. The rookie safety reads this the entire way, nearly stepping in front of Robinson for what could have been a critical interception. But again, Trubisky stares this down. Other than a cursory glance in the direction of Patterson, he is locked onto Robinson:
This is not the most complex secondary rotation Trubisky will see in his career, but it nearly baits him into a bad interception.
His season went on from there, and there were even worse moments. Such as his continued struggles with ball placement, particularly on throws to his left. Look at these examples from a Week 7 loss to the New Orleans Saints. First is this miss in the direction of Taylor Gabriel:
This is a simple out route against off coverage on a 3rd and 5, and the quarterback cannot even keep the throw inbounds. You can see the frustration in the receiver’s reaction.
Look at this miss on a curl route to Robinson from late in the first quarter:
Yet again, the pass is well off the mark and misses short and to the left. When you watch the replay of Trubisky’s throwing motion on this pass, you will see why:
Look at the disconnect between his lower body and the upper body. Trubisky flares his left – or lead – hip open early and then the arm and upper body rotate throw much later. Instead of the hip turn helping to drive the throwing motion, all in one fluid movement, Trubisky jerks the left hip open and then starts the upper body motion.
Then there was, this, which made my pal Seth Galina famous:
*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that's me, Mitchell, and you're probably wondering how I found myself in this situation. Well, it all started about 6 seconds ago when my coach, Matt Nagy, called the simplest RPO in the playbook! ~a short thread~ pic.twitter.com/ZJLYfrV2Fl
I could go on, but you probably get the picture by now.
What did these mistakes add up to? A statistically poor season for the quarterback by almost any measure. Trubisky’s Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt of 5.04 placed him 30th in the league among qualified passers, ahead of only Mason Rudolph, Kyle Allen and Dwayne Haskins. His NFL passer rating of 83.0 on the season was 28th in the league, ahead of only Rudolph, Allen, Baker Mayfield and Andy Dalton. Trubisky’s Adjusted Completion Percentage of 55.0% when pressured was the lowest recorded by Pro Football Focus, behind every other qualified passer in the league. According to Next Gen Stats, Trubisky’s completion percentage of 63.2% was lower than his expected completion percentage of 64.2%, a difficult mark for a West Coast passer.
So how do the Bears fix this?
The problem with Trubisky at this point is that this just might be who he is. Returning to that play highlighted by Seth Galina, that play was eerily reminiscent of a play that he put on film during his one year as a starter at UNC. A simple curl concept against the University of Virginia that is the first play broken down in this video:
Pre-snap, Trubisky sees the the inside receiver in this trips formation is uncovered, and he expects to be able to throw to him on a simple curl route. But when the slot corner vacates the number two receiver in the trips and jumps Trubisky’s pre-snap intended target, rather than simply go to his next receiver in the progression the quarterback pulls the football down and panics, taking a sack in the process.
It seems little has changed in a few years.
Some might point to Matt Nagy, and what he has done – or failed to do – to develop Trubisky. But if he is making these same mistakes at this point in his career, mistakes that date back to his time in college, what can a coach do? At one point last year, I argued that Nagy should turn Trubisky into the NFL’s highest-paid Wing-T quarterback. Maybe there is something to that…
However, Ryan Pace and the organization might be moving in a different direction.
The team declined to pick up Trubisky’s fifth-year option, signaling that he certainly does need to improve if the team is going to turn around and place the franchise tag on him. But beyond that, you know what they did. They added another quarterback. Not via the draft, as many expected, but through a trade. The Bears acquired Nick Foles from the Jacksonville Jaguars, who struggled with injuries in his first season in the AFC South.
What does Foles offer that Trubisky does not? Besides his veteran leadership and a Super Bowl title, he has experience in Nagy’s system. In fact, Foles credits Nagy for rekindling his love for the game, back during a 2016 season where Foles barely saw the field in Kansas City. “Just being around Nagy, being in the room with him, talking with him, being with Alex Smith, being with Tyler Bray and those guys, it was being around the people. It had nothing to do with football. It had to do with the culture and the energy from the human beings within the organization. Four days into training camp, I started loving the game. This love of the game poured in.”
If and when he does see the field, Foles offers something that Trubisky has yet to provide for the Bears’ offense: An ability to make the right read and throw, accurately and on time. As we discussed with the Philadelphia Eagles, West Coast systems such as Chicago’s are predicated on yardage after the catch. While the Eagles were bad in that area, the Bears were even worse. The Philadelphia offense averaged just 4.80 yards after the catch per reception (YAC/R) in 2019. Where did that rank among all 32 NFL teams? 28th. Only the Detroit Lions (4.44 YAC/R), Miami Dolphins (4.42 YAC/R), Chicago Bears (4.36 YAC/R) and Atlanta Falcons (4.17 YAC/R) had worse numbers.
The Bears were second-to-last in YAC/R in 2019.
Yardage after the catch is a quarterback statistic, not a receiver statistic. The QB plays a critical role in a receiver’s ability to get yardage after the reception, in terms of ball placement, timing and rhythm. If the QB is placing throws poorly, forcing the receiver to adjust, or if the QB is getting the ball out late, eliminating any pre-throw cushion enjoyed by the WR, the receiver cannot get those critical yards after the catch. Offenses in the West Coast system, that are built on YAC, will struggle if the QB is not doing his job.
But don’t take that from me, take it from Bill Walsh. As Ron Jaworski wrote in “The Games that Changed the Game,” Walsh knew that QBs were critical to YAC:
A critical element to the West Coast offense was the run after catch, or RAC: the ability of 49ers receivers to tack on additional yardage once they caught the ball. Bill made a statistical study of quarterbacks who’d thrown for 3,000 yards and found that half of those yards came from the flight of the ball–the rest was yardage made afterward. So he drilled constantly to make sure that 49ers receivers caught passes above the waist. This way, they’d be able to keep running after a completion. Bill understood that the RAC is as dependent upon a quarterback’s passing accuracy as a receiver’s ability to separate from defenders.
By both the eye test, and nearly every metric available, Trubisky struggled in 2019.
