Other Wild Card Games Part III

@DH13 posted:

I'd say Hafley showed DET on MIN's last 2-3 possessions vs GB the week before.  They were finally getting to him and he just started short circuiting.  Errant throws and bad decisions.

Yeah, that’s what was so irritating. We know Jefferson is great. We also know Addison and Hockenson are very good. Even Nailor is a pretty decent 4th/5th option as Jones is a good receiver out of the backfield. Playing containment basically hadn’t worked all year against them, and the trademark of the Hafley defense was supposed to be pressed aggression.

I know Alexander being hurt left them with fuck all for decent press man corners and the edge rushers were pretty much shit, but the old Joe Barry death by a thousand paper cuts really cost them against good teams.

@Fandame posted:

Saw somewhere that on every sack Darnold took, it was between 3.2 to 4.5 seconds. If that's true, either KOC kept calling longer pass plays where no one was open or Darnold just wilted like a hothouse flower in a January power outage. KOC had a very good year and got more out of Darnold than anyone else, but the real test will be how McCarthy plays next year.

It was a lot of the former. It wasn’t as if the guy getting the sack was always the first one to him. As in my other post, most teams followed the analytics and tried to play contain all year and the general trend has been for defenses to run a shit load of zone with minimal rushers.

O’Connell’s offense has been designed to dissect those defenses because they have receivers who can still get open against them. They had redundancies in protection with an extra blocker or two to help pick up lapses. The Lions and Rams spent full games saying “fuck that, we’re going QB hunting” and the Vikings didn’t adjust.

I agree. Like I said somewhere else, when the Rams chased him from the pocket on the second play of their first possession, I turned to my son and said, "Game over." Detroit shook him up the week before and the Rams continued that. Why we played contain was dumb when we saw what Detroit and the Rams showed earlier in the season when they beat the Vikings with pressure.

Chances are if Hafley had sent a bunch at him from the start GB might have gotten burned on a play or two, but it's more likely Darnold would have been tossing up hopes-and-prayers and then folding.  (And looking at their schedule and scores again, wow, did they play some bad teams that ended in very close scores.)

@Pikes Peak posted:

Refixed,  you could throw a flag for holding on every play for every team in the NFL except the Packers.

I could be wrong on this but if you called a holding penalty on every play for every team except the Packers, then the Packers would win every Super Bowl. Seems fair to me.

Nevermind, that won’t work because games can’t end on a penalty.

Couldn't a team decline the penalty to end the game?

@bdplant posted:

I think it’s worth the risk to blitz early in the game. All the pass rush has to do is hit the QB a few times to get into his head and make him uncomfortable. Once the QB gets happy feet, then he’s more than likely not going to be playing his best for the rest of the game.

I’d rather see a defense play aggressive and give up the occasional big play as opposed to watching a QB complete pass after pass with no concern about pass rushers.

THIS