Stampede Blue
In times like these, I remind myself that the NFL is the ultimate “week-to-week league”. It does not matter if you are 0-5 or 5-0, you can get beat every single Sunday if you aren’t at your best.
If you’re an NFL fan or tune in to a press conference, you’ve heard every cliche in the book. “It’s hard to win in this league”, “It’s about going 1-0 every single week”.. you know the ones I’m talking about.
The reality is that they are all 100% true.
In college football resumes are king and style points matter. But in the NFL, the only thing that matters is the W.
Make no mistake, the Cardinals may be 2-4 right now and had came off a brutal loss to the Titans, but they are not a bad football team—especially on defense.
I just love the way the Colts have used motion this year. There are a lot of reasons and intent behind why you might use motion. It can help you gain coverage clues, it can force the defense to communicate, force favorable matchups, and it can gain you free releases.
That’s what happens here. The Colts are running an option route from Josh Downs. Look at how the motion gets Josh a good matchup on a LB, instead of press coverage.
An option route is really hard to run vs. press coverage because it eliminates the space that the WR can attack in order to gain separation. The motion here makes it so Josh can force the LB into bad leverage and move the chains.
If you study Shane Steichen’s offense as thoroughly as I’ve tried to in his time in Indianapolis, you’d notice that he hasn’t liked to “scat” the back, or release the back into the route pattern.
This was because he likes to keep the back in to protect or use on RPO’s as a mechanism to attack space and numbers.
But Daniel Jones likes to have a check down in the progression that he can get to and Jonathan Taylor has vastly improved his ability to be a force on passing down, so that has inevitably changed this year.
Ok, now for this play. This may get a bit complicated, but stay with me because I promise it will make sense at the end.
There’s really two main types of zone defense. The first is vision zone, this is traditional zone defenses where the defense has their eyes on the QB while dropping to spots on a field. The second is zone match is where a defense is matching routes as they distribute into the pattern and into their zone.
The Cardinals are playing a a zone match quarters defense. This defense is all about matching routes vertical down the field. When a RB “releases” fast into the flat, it forces the defense to have an answer, because it’s way too easy in a match defense to outflank a LB without proper leverage. To counter this,...
