HappyDays

My concern with McDermott ever winning a Super Bowl, or even getting to one, is that he has a patten of making awful coaching decisions in high leverage moments. 13 seconds has been re-hashed to death but it was a huge coaching failure. This year in our two losses there were critical coaching failures. Against the Jets we had a dumb shotgun run on 2nd and 15 in OT, and then special teams fell apart on the punt. That is coaching malpractice. Maybe Dorsey called the 2nd and 15 run but ultimately those decisions fall on the head coach. Against the Jags, he took Elam out of the game and his replacement Ingram missed a tackle on the game ending Etienne long TD run. What is he thinking taking a superior run stopping CB off the field in favor of a PS player off the bench, in a situation where we know the Jags are trying to run out the clock? His timeout management was also poor in the 2nd half and left us with zero margin for error at the end. Against the Giants, yeah we scraped out a win, but my God the final two minutes was mismanaged to an extreme level. McDermott ran the only series of play calls that could have given the Giants a realistic chance of victory at the end, and if we're being honest his former OC's game plan was better than his own. No reason a game with such a wide talent gap should have come down to basically a coin flip at the end. There are other examples of critical coaching failures in losses and barely scraped out wins that I can think of, but I won't write them all out here. Taking it all together though it paints a picture of a coach that falters in critical moments and those are the moments that win Super Bowls. It's fun when we're beating teams 48-20 but that is not a path to the Super Bowl. We need to beat equally or slightly more talented teams 31-28 and I have yet to see any evidence that McDermott can do this even 50% of the time let alone in consecutive playoff games.

Bills 17 Patriots 7 I'm not convinced our offense is going to get out of its rut this weekend, but we'll see.

Adams accepted the trade to LV because he got to play with his best friend Derek Carr. Now Carr is gone and he knows they have no chance of being a major player in the NFL this year. It's no different than when Diggs forced his way out of Minnesota. We have seen the ups and downs of having that type of player on the team but overall I think every Bills fan would agree it's been 90% positive 10% negative. Diggs/Adams would be arguably the best top 2 WR tandem in the NFL. Two bona fide #1s playing across from each other. You bring him in and renegotiate his deal to lessen the 2024 cap hit which honestly was never going to be paid out anyways. Keep kicking that salary cap can down the road until Josh Allen retires like the Saints did with Brees.

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It's like how a lot of Bills fans thought we made a mistake letting Isaiah Hodgins go last year because he had decent production for the Giants. How's that looking now? Targets and catches have to go somewhere. The #2 passing target in one of the most high volume passing offenses in the league with an elite QB is ALWAYS going to get 800-900 yards. Pointing to Davis's pure volume numbers is a crutch for people who want to avoid talking about his actual capabilities as a player.

As a right handed QB, Allen is never going to throw back across his body while running left. I've only ever seen him do it once, on an incredible TD to Diggs against the Patriots in 2020, and in that case he had to completely stop and readjust his body to make an insane throw whipping his right shoulder around. In those screenshots Cook is not even in his field of vision when he gears up to throw.

With our only island CB out for the year, McDermott has reverted his scheme to "keep everything in front of you, if you give up a catch make sure it doesn't become a big play." It isn't ideal but it's the best we can do with this group of CBs. It's like Elam versus Pickens last year, yeah Pittsburgh moved the ball at will at times but they ended with 3 points. That's going to be our gameplan for the rest of the year. Our front 7 players will have to step up and make those game changing plays.

I think it's time we look at the play again, because I'm seeing a ton of people say it's an easy throw and I saw one poster describe it as a throw that a high school QB would hit. High school QB throw. Lol. I said this in another thread, but we take for granted how hard it is to throw on the run like that because Josh does it all the time. But the precision on that sort of throw is naturally going to be high variance. He has to throw against his own body momentum and make sure he puts it in front of Knox so the trailing defenders can't impact the play. It's ridiculous to expect perfect touch or a pinpoint throw there. An average NFL pass catcher in this situation judges the trajectory of the ball and immediately starts subtly adjusting their body to catch it while falling to the ground. Knox did not have to scoop it off the turf with his fingertips or miraculously contort his body. It is almost identical to the drop he had in OT against the Jets. Knox reminds me of McKenzie, he is too clumsy and unfocused in big moments to ever be a dependable pass catcher. They need to give most of Knox's target share to Kincaid once Kincaid is out of concussion protocol. Whatever that entails with the scheme or the playcalling, it needs to happen.

Allen right now is leading the NFL in completion percentage with 71.7%. Knox is 4th worst of qualifying players in drop percentage with an abysmal 16.0%, and yes that final 3rd down play was officially logged as a drop by Pro Football Reference. When the ball hits both of your hands and it isn't behind you, you have to bring it in. It's the NFL. That is an expected catch every time. If you're expecting Allen to be more accurate than he has been this season, that's almost impossible. Expecting Knox to drop less than 16% of his targets on the other hand is a reasonable ask. Either he has to be better in that area or we have to stop throwing him the ball.

He was looking at Murrary to try and move Okereke with his eyes towards the flat to open the window for Knox. Honestly on that play I tip my cap to Okereke for just making a great play. Josh hits that throw 9 times out of 10. Okereke obviously studied the film so he knew exactly where to drop and timed his jump just right. The Giants back 7 players in general played very disciplined football. They didn't take any of our bait. They stayed right in the middle of their conflict areas when the play called for it. We are going to have to live with INTs since we have an elite QB. Every year the league leaders in INTs are mostly the best QBs. If you want the TD throw to Morris, you have to live with him trying to fit a ball into a tight window that ends up tipped and picked. You don't get one without the other.

This is interesting because you mention quite a few pass protection breakdowns. The Giants have one of the worst pressure rates in the league, I believe bottom 3. Is this a sign that our pass protection isn't quite as good as we were led to believe over the first 4 weeks? Two games in a row now our OL has looked shaky. You can find plays like that in every offense in every game, usually more than once. Allen is following the rules of the play and sometimes it just so happens that a WR ends up wide open while unfortunately not being part of the progression. It seems that a general rule built into this offense is "if things break down, look to Diggs first." A lot of still frame all-22 analysis is not being entirely fair to what the QB has to process in a matter of 3 seconds on every play after the snap.

There are definitely some people that will just complain about the outcome no matter what and aren't consistent in their complaints. Not me. I have been leaning more conservative on issues like this for years now. I swear I have seen many more cases of a coach losing a game being overly aggressive in recent years than I have seeing the opposite. We almost lost this game because we were needlessly aggressive. Frankly we got lucky to pull out a win at the end.

Allen is not a precise thrower while on the move. He can launch the ball but throwing 100% accurate passes while moving is not his strength. Usually when he completes those passes it's because the pass catcher stops in a good position and properly adjusts to the ball. But of course Knox is awful at adjusting to throws and has bad hands to begin with. So you're asking an imprecise thrower to complete a pass to a clumsy pass catcher. The outcome is not a surprise at all. If you had Kincaid on that route I would have been fine with it I guess, but honestly against the Giants I play field position and the clock either way.

Well that's crazy if they believed that. Before last night Knox had an abysmal 15.6% drop rate. His drop on that play was not officially credited as a drop, but that was a predictable outcome. When you combine his drop rate with all the other little things that can go wrong on a pass play, plus you know Knox has a wrist/hand injury, that was inherently a low percentage play. Really just an awful play call in that situation, choosing to rely on a low percentage player in a critical moment.

And then you have him making a show of throwing his tablet and shouting at his QB on the sidelines, as if he doesn't know the camera will pick that up. He's not so subtly gone into pointing fingers mode, trying to buy some time with the fans by insinuating that his players make it impossible for him to be competitive.

I heard Chris Simms talk about this, speaking from his own experience playing QB in the NFL. He says you'd like to see Tyrod as a long-time veteran manage that situation better, but mostly it falls on coaching. He says anywhere he's ever played, the coach would be in the QB's ear before the play making sure they understand the situation and knowing not to check into a run regardless of the look they get. He also said "Daboll likes to let people know when something isn't his fault," like how after the game Daboll in his presser basically blamed Tyrod for that mistake instead of holding himself accountable. Not a good look.

Are the Giants currently experiencing a repeat of our QB controversy in 2015?

Saw this stat:

I hate these newfangled "win probability" calculators. I'm not inherently anti-analytics by any means, but I feel like this tool is fundamentally flawed in a way that no one talks about. The issue is that it doesn't account for a wild swing in momentum depending on the outcome of the play. Like in that example with the Eagles, throwing it on 3rd and 9 has a lot of potentially negative outcomes that wildly swing the win probability in the Jets direction. There is one outstanding outcome that guarantees a win, but also several negative outcomes that make your chances much worse. Whereas playing it safe with a run and then punting, you know with 99% certainty you are just mildly shifting win probability towards the Jets. There isn't much variance in that decision. The win probability calculator can't truly know how likely any given outcome is if you play aggressive or play conservative, so it is just guessing on certain variables and pops out a number that a ton of analytics people treat like gospel. But it isn't, there is still a ton of context that the calculator can't possibly capture. So personally I will almost always take the lower variance option (which is usually the conservative option) unless I am facing an offense or a QB that I expect to move the ball on my defense. I don't know if I explained that too well, but it's bothered me ever since I first saw these win probability calculators pop out of the blue several years ago and everybody immediately bought into them without any hint of skepticism. Our decision at the end of the Giants game is a good example of why I feel this way. We ran the only possible series of plays (pass followed by a FG attempt) that would have given the Giants a decent chance at a win. McDermott would rightfully be getting blasted today if the coin flip ending had gone in the other direction. Honestly he SHOULD be getting blasted but the media forgets those mistakes in a win.

Why is aggressive inherently good? What ever happened to context? We're facing the worst offense in football. They've scored 1 offensive TD in the previous 11 quarters of game time. They have a backup QB, a gimpy RB, and missing several OL including their stud LT. We can pin them back inside the 20 with zero timeouts and 1 minute to drive for a TD, or we can risk giving them the ball at midfield with 1 timeout. Why in that scenario is aggressive the right mindset?

In 6 regular season games against the Pats, Diggs has averaged 95 yards and 1 TD per game. If Diggs played the Pats every game over an entire season he would have 1,600 yards and 17 TDs. I hope we don't adjust. Funnel the ball to the #1 man.

Do you realize how crazy this sounds? You're basically saying Josh should throw the ball to other receivers just for the sake of doing it. The design of every play is meant to maximize the likelihood of a successful outcome. More often than not, throwing the ball in Diggs' general direction - especially in man coverage - is going to give us the highest likelihood of a positive play. Why would we want to divert any of his targets to a vet minimum cast off like Sherfield? Or a roster bubble player like Shakir? Just to feel better about the target share at the end of the game? I get why people are frustrated. It's become clear that the players around Diggs are not close to good enough. But the solution is not "throw the ball to those inferior players more." The solution is "get better players." Until that solution becomes reality, you have to funnel the ball to the best pass catcher on the team.

I don't really understand the great mystery here. Diggs is the only consistently dependable pass catcher we have. Everybody knows that, right? He's the only one that regularly separates and catches the ball. Am I breaking news here? Historically when our offense starts to struggle, funneling the ball to Diggs has set off a spark. It's crazy how many posts I see now to the effect of "I thought Davis could be our full time #2 but it turns out he's not good enough." I mean, why?? What ever made you think that about him? We were having debates during training camp about if he is worth a big extension! It was laughable then and it's more laughable in retrospect. He has literally been the same exact player for four seasons, with one all-time great game smack dab in the middle that I guess led a lot of people astray. All offseason people tried to tell me "We don't need a #2! Davis/Shakir/Harty/Sherfield will be the #2 by committee!" It just doesn't work that way. The biggest problem with the offense by far in the past two games has been the lack of a true #2 pass catching target. The same as it was last year. And we have people complaining that Diggs gets too many targets. Wake up.