There is a time in every young quarterback’s life whereupon he will ascend to a certain point based on his own development, and then he will come across a defense (or defenses) that will send him straight back down the mountain with coverage looks he’s not seen before, and doesn’t know how to handle. When that happens, the quarterback has two career choices — figure it out and continue to progress, or keep sliding down the mountain and right out of the league.
In Super Bowl LIII, the Patriots’ defense drove Jared Goff nuts by giving him one look pre-snap, and another look post-snap, over and over. Goff was never able to reconcile what he saw before and after the snap, and the Rams tied the Dolphins in Super Bowl VI with a historically low point total of 3. And as great as Patrick Mahomes has been in his young career, two kinds of defenses have forced him to think more than he would like — match blitzes as the Broncos showed him in 2018, and late-moving zone coverages as the Chargers and other teams have shown him at other times.
In last season’s divisional playoffs, the Titans threw all kinds of delayed coverage looks at Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson, who would later become the second player in league history to win the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award by a unanimous vote. It was the penultimate game for Tennessee defensive coordinator Dean Pees, as the Titans fell to Mahomes’ Chiefs in the AFC Championship game, but the Titans showed a template for limiting Jackson with their advanced coverage concepts that pushed the young quarterback, as great as he is, past his breaking point from a field-reading perspective.
Pees is retired now, but the Titans have shown another young quarterback with tremendous potential just how tough this NFL thing can be even when you seem to have it all figured out. Last Tuesday, in a 42-16 loss to Tennessee, Bills quarterback Josh Allen was hoisted on his own petard in a game where he completed 26 of 41 passes for 263 yards, two touchdowns, and two interceptions. Not the worst numbers you’ll see all season, but for a guy who had completed 70.9% of his passes for 9.0 yards per attempt, 21 touchdowns, and one interception through the season’s first four weeks, it was a reversal of fortune. Allen led the NFL in Passing DYAR after four weeks, in large part because with the help of offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, he was ripping man coverage to bits.
So, how did the Titans counter that? They did what you do against a young quarterback on the upswing — reverse course, and see what happens. Per Greg Cosell of NFL Films and ESPN’s NFL Matchup, Tennessee played zone coverage on 75% of Buffalo’s offensive snaps — a highly unusual (and in this case, highly successful) rate for any defense.
Both of Allen’s interceptions came against Cover-2, and both came against post-snap switches in which safety Kevin Byard was the post-snap “spinner,” from single-high to two-deep, and a linebacker dropped to muddy Allen’s looks over the middle. Allen didn’t want to contend with that late look from Byard to his front side, or the coverage drops in front of him, so he worked to the left side of the field.
The first interception actually would have been a nice catch from Andre Roberts, who curled around cornerback Malcolm Butler, but Roberts couldn’t hold on, and Butler made the play. It’s a point of encouragement that Allen was patient from a clean pocket and waited for his receiver to work through his route.
The second Butler pick was more on the quarterback — he targeted receiver Gabe Davis outside and to the left, but there was obvious miscommunication between Allen and Davis, and Butler took advantage again. Allen had Cole Beasley open in the slot against cornerback Kareem Orr, and this was a second-and-4 play. No need to do anything but take a profit against a defense that is confounding you.
“I got greedy and made a bad decision, threw a bad ball, and really cost our team,” Allen said after the game.
When Allen faces the Chiefs on Monday afternoon, he’ll be dealing with another defense that likes to show single-high looks, and then spin a safety into two-high instead. Kansas City parlayed this into their Week 4 status as the NFL’s best defense per Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted metrics — the problem for them was, the Raiders blew apart everything they tried in Week 5, especially with rookie speed receiver Henry Ruggs. But the defense Kansas City showed against Las Vegas on this 46-yard Ruggs reception is quite similar to the one that Allen saw on both of his interceptions — it’s just that cornerback Rashad Fenton broke late to cover Ruggs after cornerback Charvarius Ward appeared to pass Ruggs off to Fenton.
The Chiefs will have to clean this up if they want to replicate Tennessee’s success against Allen, but Allen will also have to take a crash course in reading beyond the first chapter of the book if he is to avoid the fate of quarterbacks with far less raw talent who could not put it all together. Every young quarterback has a plan until he gets hit, and it’s time for Allen to hit back.