HappyDays

Jet lag gave our players a disadvantage, not our coaches. I will cut the defense some slack because they lost players, the offense though has no excuse.

I hate to say it but we were badly out coached on Sunday. On both sides of the ball. Poor clock and timeout management, awful offensive game plan, we let their two best players Etienne and Ridley go off on us.

Officially there are 4 drops credited in this game - 1 each to Diggs (presumably the back shoulder along the sideline), Cook, Davis, and Knox. 4 drops on 40 attempts... not gonna win a lot of games with a 10% overall drop percentage. Knox is back to a rookie-level drop percentage of 15.8%... For all the talk about Kincaid, he has been by far the biggest disappointment on offense IMO.

He is a good blocker but I wouldn't say he excels. And he's an inconsistent route runner and pass catcher to boot. Ideally 12 personnel you would have a blocking specialist. When Beane talked about it after drafting Kincaid, he said our 12 personnel would really be 11 personnel with Kincaid as the SWR taking on Beasley's old role. That was my expectation as well. But that hasn't really come to fruition at all. Which brings me to my point of Dorsey using 2TE sets because he feels like he has to, not because he actually knows how to use that package to create mismatches.

On coaching- It does sometimes feel like Dorsey is making moves reactively versus proactively. "We have two good TEs. Run a lot of 12 personnel." "Defenses are taking away deep passes. Go full on dink and dunk all the time." And then when we end up in games where our usual solutions aren't working, Dorsey is way too slow to adjust. Multiple offensive duds each of the past two years including one in the playoffs. There's too few games in a season to have this many gameplan clunkers. On personnel - Maybe our offensive weapons don't mesh together well, I don't know. We have zero YAC specialists. We have like 4 guys that all perform better in the slot. We run a lot of 12 personnel without a TE that excels as a blocker. Davis is a poor fit as a full time outside WR2. It's kind of just a hodgepodge of guys with incongruous skill sets.

Other top tier offenses don't have persistent issues like that. I guess it could be tunnel vision, like we're Bills fans so we only see bizarre spacing and execution issues like that when it happens to our team. But I feel like the Chiefs, 49ers, Dolphins, etc. don't have those problems. Our offense as a whole just looks a lot less crisp than other championship contenders.

Yeah on balance my biggest takeaway from this game is that we had an elite QB play a terrific game, which multiple sources and grading systems agree on, and we still only scored 7 points for the first 52 minutes of the game... I mean that is a really really bad sign about the offensive structure and supporting cast. Hopefully it was just jet lag leading to a poor performance. The alternative is that teams with decent DLs and a good coaching staff are going to easily stifle our offense, which means we are toast in the playoffs.

There is a professional defensive coach in this thread saying that Joe was wrong and that our failures in the run game had nothing to do with numbers disadvantages. I'm inclined to believe the guy that schemes defenses for a living versus the professional content creator, as much as I respect what Joe does.

From Joe Buscaglia's Athletic article today: This lines up with what I've been seeing. We are almost exclusively using him as a checkdown option near the LOS. Like Joe says this is going to need to change if our offense needs to pick up the slack for a defense missing some of its best players.

Erik Turner is just an amateur who has a lot of time and good video editing tools. A professional like @HoofHearted will make him look clueless on occasion but for video content he's the best we got. Joe Marino at least was a founding member of a professional scouting organization so I think he has more credentials than Turner, but he hasn't worked for any NFL teams as far as I know.

I will say I think this was by far the worst the OL has looked this year. I would like to think that the travel and the jet lag on a tight schedule contributed to some of their struggles in this one, and that they will look much better in normal weeks. Most of football comes down to the trenches and we lost that battle on both sides of the ball.

Thank you for your comments. When you say there were plays to be made, do you mean the RBs missed the plays or do you mean they weren't blocked properly? Or some of both?

But there are at least 5 drives he points out where the skill position players directly led to the drive stalling out. Allen led his offense to more points than Mahomes led his offense to against the Jaguars. Was Mahomes to blame for that one? No. It's a talent issue around the QBs. As far as the run game woes, I tend to blame coaching for that one. If the rules of the offense say check out of a run play against a heavy box, Allen isn't going to just ignore that rule. And in general I find our run designs to be extremely vanilla. No misdirection, no trickery, the 3-4 run plays we have all look exactly the same every time. Like I said in another thread, a lot of the offensive designs both in the run and pass are just "line up and beat your man." But we don't have the talent to do that consistently. Cook isn't the best at reading leverage, we know the pass catchers other than Diggs are not going to win 1v1 coverage matchups. The receivers are getting confused and ending up right next to each other or not getting to their spot according to the timing of the play structure. A lot of it just looks very messy or more difficult than it needs to be. I think Dorsey is fine but I'm not convinced his offense is anywhere near as crisp or creative as some of the best offensive minds in the league, and that's ultimately who we are going to have to overcome to bring home a Lombardi.

These are weird criticisms to make coming out of 4 consecutive games where he has been executing within the structure of the offense and throwing receivers open. Honestly if he has any issues in that area, it's that he doesn't trust anticipatory throws to pass catchers not named Stefon Diggs. But why would he?

Joe Marino does these all-22 review podcasts every week. Mostly he broke down what happened with the offense in this one. Some highlights: -He said the run game failures were mostly a case of running the ball against bad looks. A lot of times the Jaguars had 8 or even 9 men in the box and we chose to run it anyways. The 2nd and 1 pitch to Cook that we lost like 5 yards on, he said we had 2 OL blocking 3 defenders on that side. Unsurprisingly the unblocked defender made an easy tackle for a loss. I don't know if Allen is supposed to audible out of those looks or what, but Dorsey or Allen have to a better job of punishing defenses for heavy boxes. -As far as the passing game, Joe said that Allen played terrific and really wasn't to blame at all for any of our passing struggles. He said there have been times in the past where he's seen Allen turn down easy completions, but in this game he was executing his reads the way they were designed and manipulating the pocket well. -He blames several of our stalled drives on skill players. Cook dropping a pass on the first drive, Knox dropping a pass on a 3rd down, Davis dropping a pass on a 2nd down, all of these he says the pass catcher definitely should have come down with them. He also blames Diggs for the interception after watching a few replays. He says the ball was a tad underthrown but it went 70 yards in the air and Diggs gets both hands on it - that's a situation where he says Diggs simply has to win the catch. He says one run should have gone for 8+ yards, but Cook totally misread the leverage and ran away from his blockers outside for a 0 yard gain. -The Jags did a good job using simulated pressures to get advantages on their pass rush opportunities. All our struggles aside, give their defense credit for confusing us and keeping us off balance. -He says more play action passes wouldn't have worked with the way the Jaguars were loading the box and showing heavy pressure looks. I've seen a lot of people criticize Dorsey for a low play action percentage in this game so I thought that was an interesting point. -An alarming statistic he points out - the Jags missed just 3 tackles in this game. We missed 19 tackles... What else can you even say? -Another alarming statistic - only 22% of our receiving yards in this game were YAC, by far the worst in the league for week 5. For context, Joe points out the 2nd lowest was the Ravens at 33%, and most offenses are in the 45%-50% or higher range. The Dolphins were at 78%. Our YAC issues from last year popped up big time in this game and it killed us. No run game and no YAC means literally our entire offense was dependent on Josh Allen's right arm, and that just isn't sustainable. -A few points on defense - He says Elam wasn't quite as bad as he thought watching it live, but he definitely has some technical issues to clean up. Joe thinks the issues are fixable but he isn't at the level of Jackson or Benford right now. Dorian Williams had issues on misdirection plays and missed a couple tackles before McDermott benched him. For a video breakdown of the offensive struggles, Cover1 just put this video out: I think the play shown at 5:53 summarizes our issues in this game better than anything. You have 4 pass catchers all end up in the same area of the field so the timing of the play is awful and Allen has nowhere to go with the ball. He extends the play and throws a perfect pass to Knox who then drops it. Way too many missed opportunities in this game. Pass protection, run blocking, situational play calling, skill position players, none of it was good enough.

No. My post was referring to one drop from Davis and one drop from Knox. Repeat offenders killing two drives on simple catch opportunities. I don't know what else to tell you, they were backbreaking mistakes. Yeah and I said earlier in the thread Diggs' missed opportunity was the biggest momentum swing of them all. But he is an elite WR1. I'm not saying I expect any player to make zero mistakes, that is totally unrealistic. But when you don't offer much on a play to play basis, the mistakes become more glaring. A WR2 either has to be elite in one area or play fundamentally sound football on an extremely consistent level (a WR1 typically gives you both). Give me Jaylen Waddle or Robert Woods (in his prime). Different types of WR but both give you legit #2 ability. Davis is neither. He's a boom or bust WR that has zero elite traits, doesn't run the full route tree, and misses too many of the easy plays to be a reliable #2 option. In a normal offense with an average QB I honestly think he would be a non-factor. For 3.5 quarters before the game got out of hand Allen throwing the ball to Diggs was pretty much our entire offense. Once again, for the 3rd season in a row, everybody else lower on the depth chart is pitching in a disappointing season with a high degree of inconsistency.

JJ Watt returned from surgery for a torn pec a few years ago, against us actually in the wildcard game at Houston. And his torn pec happened on October 27, almost three full weeks after Jones tore his. Of course Watt is a genetic freak and I would think for a 1T it's harder to bounce back from a pec injury, but there is a small glimmer of hope there that he could be back for the playoffs.

Through 3.5 quarters our WR2 had 28 yards. Very solid? That's crazy. He has an elite WR1 garnering all of the attention across from him and he can't separate from man coverage. On an extremely simple pitch and catch he let the ball get into his body and bounce off his hands. In a game with no margin for error for a myriad of reasons, two drive-killing drops from usual suspects Davis and Knox were big momentum swings. If this was a one-off single game issue you can live with it but it's instead a persistent issue that has directly led to us missing out on the #1 seed each of the past 3 seasons.

@HoofHearted mentioned that Elam did have safety help a few times but incorrectly played his leverage which made the safety help inconsequential. If the safety is playing inside leverage and Elam gives up outside leverage, it will look like there is no safety help. I have no clue how after two years in McDermott's defense he doesn't understand such a fundamental aspect of our coverage scheme but that is probably why he hasn't been active.

This is a game where we should have gone with a bunch of designed Josh Allen runs. I know everyone wants those stricken from the gameplan for some reason. But the Jags were playing man coverage which means coverage players have their back to the QB. The pass catchers were not separating, the blocking on passes and runs was not holding up. In situations like that you have to take the leash off of Josh and let him be a little reckless. Everyone wants Josh to play "normal" QB within the structure of the offense. But what about when the structure isn't working?

Nothing that I've heard. Most of what I hear is on injuries and sometimes low-level signings.

Yes! This game turned into a gritty defensive struggle. It was 11-7 at that point in the game. Every single 1st down in a game like that matters. That being a catch would have at the very least moved the chains, kept the defense on the sidelines longer, and led to us scoring a minimum of 3 points. That was absolutely a huge momentum swing. You're crazy if you try to pretend it wasn't. And now I see Bills fans today pointing to Davis's final stat line as if that wipes away his crushing mistake on a simple pitch and catch? Davis had just 28 yards before the Jaguars went up two scores halfway through the 4th quarter. It was nice of him to wake up at the same time the Jaguars defense started sleepwalking with an assumed victory wrapped up, but overall that is a piss poor performance from WR2.

Here's what I've heard: On Jones - No surprise but right now the team is assuming a torn pec. MRI still to come but that's the initial prognosis. This means likely done for the season but a small chance he could return very late in the season if he has surgery. On Milano - The bad news is surgery is expected which means he's done for the year no matter what. He apparently has a broken tibia which is a 5-6 month recovery. One possible sliver of good news on Milano is that his knee appears to be intact. The MCL appears to be just strained/sprained which would be good news in the realm of possible outcomes. However Milano is still in London - he couldn't fly back with the team - and he will get a 2nd look at the knee when he's back in the US. So as with a lot of initial injury news this prognosis could change after further evaluation (like Von Miller last year). If the initial prognosis of no structural knee or ACL damage is correct, his road to recovery for 2024 is pretty cut and dry. Tibia fracture recovery doesn't typically have a lot of complications because blood supply is good in that area. And in general broken bones don't have major re-injury risks or production drop offs after returning, like torn ACLs sometimes do.

I can't imagine that when Beane used a 1st + a 4th on a player, he envisioned him as nothing more than a 3 yard outlet. It just doesn't feel like Dorsey ever does anything creative to take advantage of his players' skill sets. It's very much a "line up and beat your man" offense, and NFL defenses have gotten way too advanced for that to be the only club in your bag.