Joe Marino All-22 review - "The coaches were duds"

[HaldimandBills]

1 hour ago, GunnerBill said:

 

I don't understand how putting more guys in the box when those guys are bad is going down swinging. They tried the going down swinging approach the first two drives of the 2nd half. They basically just told Williams and Spector, screw your normal responsibilities and crash the line every play. And they forced two three and outs before the turnover. The issue was as soon as Henry did break the line on 2nd down on the next drive running round the left end he was away for serious yardage because there was no 2nd level we'd emptied it out. Now if you want to argue they should have gone to that plan sooner, sure, I'll listen to it because that was a "we gotta try and stop them dictating" throw of the dice. But the just put more men in the box and bigger bodies.... I mean Morrow actually got a decent run stop grade from PFF - the best on the Bills - but he also got the worst coverage grade by a LONG stretch (27 fwiw) and he was in coverage for 5 of Justice Hill's 6 receptions. That is my point. We gave them a light box, they ran it. We tried going heavier they brutalised Morrow in the pass game (Hill was their leading receiver). You get to a point where you can't stop anything. 

 

I think Joe is great but I'd have gone the other way. I'd have stayed in nickel and accepted that they might run it down the field as much as they wanted and tried to rally and tackle and then stiffen in the redzone. What you might call the Frazier, 2020 Chiefs regular season, plan. Because with the personnel available we didn't have the personnel to stop them otherwise. Whichever way we went they had an answer.

My issue with our defense is summed up right here. Every playoffs we do the safe cover 2 nickle of letting opposing offenses slowly march down the field and inevitably score on us. Why? Same thing last night. We stay in our base nickle theyre going to score. We weren't stopping them in the redzone. Good offenses find a way into the endzone. Bad teams do not. The fight to the redzone doesn't work against good offenses and leaves Allen sitting on the sideline and allows the opposing offense to find their rhythm.

 

Bengals, Chiefs(except against us oddly enough), and Ravens mastered the screw it just create chaos defense come playoff time. Sure they give up some big plays but they also have far more 3 and outs. If you truly believe in Josh Allen why not give him more drives and play a defense that is capable of more stops at the risk of a few big broken plays.

 

Bengals before all their playoff games basically have the attitude that they will give up 21 points for sure but they also drive up the percentage of 3 and outs they'll get and they know being aggressive will also lead to more defensive turnovers.

[RoscoeParrish]

1 hour ago, Coach Tuesday said:

It sure looked like a coaching failure watching it in realtime.  I agree with @GunnerBill that a 3rd linebacker was not the solution (given who that LB is) but a 5th DL may have been, and/or run blitzing (to try to prevent Henry from gaining steam and getting to the second level).  But being passive - on both offense and defense - and waiting to get hit in the mouth (which they then were, repeatedly) by a physical team needing a win playing at home on primetime - was an incredibly stupid strategy.  It does bug me that McD seems to get outcoached several times per season (and the playoffs) and that often that takes the form of being passive/reactive trying to "find their feet" before adjusting.  For goodness sake just come out aggressive in big games Sean.  Belichek and Reid seem to have a much lower rate of this kind of thing happening.

I have some thoughts on this.

 

I feel like every year, there are a couple games where a “contender” whoops another “contender.” The Ravens whooped the Niners just last year for example. Doesn’t necessarily mean a team is a fraud or not. And I’m not talking about divisional opponents where there’s lots of history to gameplan for.

 

The Bills seem to very rarely be on the GIVING end of those beatdowns. The last I can remember where we just mollywhooped a good non-divisional team was when we blew out KC in 2021.

[Ballhawk]

I can't help but question the usage rate of the nickel defense. I get when the Bills have a lead, but man it feels like they use it too much. I get that Nickel is a different compromise when we have our full personnel (i.e. Taron and Milano) but I'd still like to see more 3 LB sets. If the main argument against this is personnel, I would expect that to change once Bernard, Taron and Milano return. I'd be very curious to see Milano, Bernard and Williams out there 50% of the time with the nickel package the other 50%. 

We keep talking about the value of being multiple on offense, but seem pretty predictable on defense. 

Edited October 1 by Ballhawk

[Sweats]

3 minutes ago, Ballhawk said:

I can't help but question the usage rate of the nickel defense. I get when the Bills have a lead, but man it feels like they use it too much. I get that Nickel is a different compromise when we have our full personnel (i.e. Taron and Milano) but I'd still like to see more 3 LB sets. If the main argument against this is personnel, I would expect that to change once Bernard, Taron and Milano return. I'd be very curious to see Milano, Bernard and Williams out there 50% of the time with the nickel package the other 50%. 

We keep talking about the value of being multiple on offense, but seem pretty predictable on defense. 

 

 

 

 

Our coaching staff, for whatever reason, loves the Nickle......and yes our D is wayyyyyyy too predictable. Its fairly easy for other teams to gameplan against us when they know that it'll be Nickle 80% of the time and when we have a D minded HC, i would think that he would pick up on that, but he's the smartest guy in the room, so......

[BrooklynBills]

I think the assessment of the game is correct but I'm not sure the main takeaway should be that our defensive coaches are inept.  This is a week 4 game against a team that you are likely going to see in the playoffs.  I don't know if I'm coming up with a 100% bespoke defensive gameplan for a week 4 game.

[boyst]

gunner we agree! celebrate this, eh?

 

we had no answers to the ravens with the personnel we had for this game. i'm honestly not sure we will when/if we play again and everyone is healthy. their offense exposed our defensive weaknesses in every way. their db's pushed our slow wr's to the edge every time and shut down the middle, too.

 

i'd love to see the scheme this team can use to beat the ravens. i don't know why we didn't try to do what the chiefs did. we have the same quality of personnel.

[Buffalo Boy]

3 hours ago, HappyDays said:

Joe breaks down losses better than anyone else in the Bills media sphere. I highly recommend listening to the entire episode. Here are my notes:

 

-Joe was blown away (in a bad way) by our plan on defense. He points out that the Ravens ran the ball out of heavy personnel 82% of the time. The Bills responded by giving them light boxes on 41.2% of rushing plays... Heavy boxes on only 8.8% of rushing plays... Derrick Henry was getting 5.57 yards before contact, and the Ravens as a whole were gaining 8.0 YPC, but we never adjusted. And this was coming off a week where the Ravens rushed for over 270 yards against Dallas so it's not like their offensive game plan was a big shocker. Our defensive game plan gave the Ravens the exact game script they wanted. 

 

-Joe says the Ravens also took advantage of our defensive line tendencies. We run a penetration style defense and the Ravens repeatedly invited Ed Oliver to get up field before wham blocking him out of the play. Again Joe blames defensive coaching for never adjusting to get away from our tendencies, which made things too easy on the Ravens.

 

-Overall on defense he says he wishes some of the players at all levels played better, but he mostly blames the coaches for putting the players into positions where they couldn't be successful. He says Derrick Henry is obviously a great player, but that any RB could have ripped off his two biggest runs where we didn't even lay a finger on him. We needed to force the Ravens to run their offense through the passing game, and instead we gave them easy opportunities to run against light or neutral boxes and they gashed us all night long because of it.

 

-On offense Joe doesn't have as much to say. His big takeaway is that the failures on offense were less about pass catchers uncovering, and more about complete breakdowns in the protection scheme. He points out the Ravens only blitzed 25% of the time, but the threat of the blitz forced us to max protect so frequently that we were sometimes sending 2-3 pass catchers into 5-6 coverage players. The OL did an awful job of passing rushers off which led to too many jailbreaks before routes could develop.

 

So those are his takeaways. Less on the players, more on coaching. On defense we were stubborn and decided to just "do what we do" instead of adjusting our style for the opponent. On offense Brady did not have his players ready to deal with any of the Ravens pressure looks and he never found any answers. We got out coached in pretty much every facet of the game and it showed up on the scoreboard.

 

One positive takeaway - all of these issues are solvable. Failure to execute is a tough problem to figure out in the middle of a season, but failure to gameplan and adjust is entirely fixable if the coaches hold themselves accountable.

   We knew coming into this season that this was a game that could expose us, largely due to our lack of decent personnel at safety and LB.

    Our back seven use to be small, fast and football smart. Now they are small, slow and football inexperienced ( at best).

    Watching the first play as Henry outran the whole back field and then Hill gashing us….Oy vey!!!

   After the stop at the beginning of the third quarter I hoped the Ravens  might implode but then Brady called the STUPID play with everyone flowing to Josh and I went to bed.

    Lastly, it is no surprise that Babich got awarded play calling duties this year. Another in a lengthening line of scapegoats, me thinks

[Alphadawg7]

This is why I kept telling people who just arbitrarily kept saying it was our receivers that were the problem that it was what was going on upfront that was killing us.  

 

The worst part about that game was we had a number of times where we were moving the ball on offense and looked like we were starting to get some momentum and rhythm and we had self inflicted mistakes kill it.  Kincaid kills that first drive with a bad drop.  Later Coleman torched his man on the outside and had him beat by 5 yards running down field for a would be TD by O'Cyrus just got blown up and gave up the instant sack on Allen to end the drive.  Then there was the infamous trick play that Brady has owned up to as a critical mistake on his end.  Then Coleman didn't catch that first deep shot.  Penalties affected others.  

 

I came out of the game less worried about the offense as it was more execution and protection issues more than anything.  Defense though had me a lot more concerned, but good to Marino feel like it was a coaching as that can be fixed.  But I do think this defense really needs Taron and Bernard back and hopefully they are both back this week.  

[Success]

Just like players, coaches can have a bad game.  And we see it w/ every coaching staff out there.

 

I don't read too much into this beyond that - they just blew it w/ the gameplan & the in-game decisions.  They were stellar for the 1st 3 games.  

 

Looking around the league, I'm still glad we have the coaches that we have.  There is so much bad coaching out there week to week.  Our coaches earned some benefit of the doubt, and I think they just had a bad one on Sunday and will rebound.

 

[K-9]

Glad he made the point about max protect and the corresponding 2-3 receivers left to face 6-7 defenders playing coverage. I don't care who the the receivers are, you are NOT gonna get separation on any consistent basis. 

[HappyDays]

51 minutes ago, Buffalo Boy said:

Watching the first play as Henry outran the whole back field and then Hill gashing us….Oy vey!!!

 

I consider that play a coaching mistake too. Reminds me of the 83 yard Breece Hall run against us last year. The defense was not aligned correctly... Ravens have heavy personnel to the right of the formation but our LBs are aligned to the left. As a result we didn't have every gap covered and the Ravens easily got to all their blocks, and all Henry had to was run forward in a straight line through wide open space. That's a coaching 101 failure. I'm kind of surprised McDermott didn't see it and call a timeout. Annoying to have to call a timeout on the 1st play, but better than letting the Ravens just get that play off when we weren't in the correct alignment.

[Johnnycage46]

4 hours ago, GunnerBill said:

The light boxes point is a fair one, but I'm not sure I agree the answer was to go heavier boxes. With who? The two series they tried to play base and brought Morrow in and played with more in the box they were brutal. Jackson just kept throwing dump offs to Justice Hill on Morrow's side and watching him zoom by. Could they have brought their safeties up more often? Yea but they are worried about doing that because they know they don't have a safety on the roster capable of playing center field on his own. It's easy to say "do all this stuff differently" in isolation. Personally I think you have to look at the personnel they have available. 

 

I think Babich panicked in the first half and made bad adjustments. Monken definitely won that battle, hands down, but I think the defensive talent is a definite limiting factor in a game like that. Who did he want to bring into the box to help? His options are Nicholas Morrow (doesn't belong on an NFL roster), Cam Lewis (backup at best), Damar Hamlin (backup at best), Cole Bishop (rookie barely getting his feet wet), Joe Andreessen (rookie UDFA). Hell you could have put all five of them in together and I'm not sure it would have made a difference. 

 

 

EDIT: on offense I'm in a bit more agreement. They weren't beaten by blitzes. They were beaten by confusion. They didn't know who was coming and who was dropping and the OL was constantly missing assignments more than whiffing on blocks. It was that they weren't passing off, were doubling guys while free rushers came, the communication and the execution was dreadful. Maybe a game where they missed Mitch Morse's experience?

 That was my thought as well. Also didn't help that our starting center went out for several plays. Overall just not great offensive line play.

[Neo]

Great listen.

 

My conclusion:  The Buffalo Bills prepared to be the best Buffalo Bills.  The Ravens prepared to beat the best Buffalo Bills.

[GoBills808]

I agree on defense. The dline was bad bad

like look at this pocket Jackson has on the TD to Hill ffs...it's like the coaches have them so worried about gap integrity they completely forgot how to passrush (notice Ravens are totally comfortable leaving Oliver 1v1 here)

 

 

on offense i am not sure i agree. I saw numerous little weird things going on like the read option w throw tag to Knox on third and short (this was drive before iirc the throw behind Hollins that almost got picked, not sure whether Allen just missed him or if Hollins is supposed to squat and not bring his route into Roquan Smith, either way it looked like a Davis style miscommunication)...they motion Cook right before snap and i think that throws the timing of the mesh off but the spacing/angles are so bad that he's also able to grab Allen while crashing on the give. The oline looks like they're blocking for another play entirely. I mean look at this mess: zero chance of success

 

 

and yes the right side of the oline was a disaster all night...but still i saw some decisions from Allen that weren't pressure related that give me some cause for concern, namely that he's being told to take the underneath or checkdown way too fast. saw numerous examples of him getting the ball out immediately at the top of his drop from relatively clean pockets where if he holds off just a bit a second level route comes available.

 

also wideouts were not QB friendly. poor leverage and not presenting easy targets as a result of both willingness to accept defender's coverage and some clunky route/play designs. it looks even more a mess on the all22 than it did on broadcast tbh

[K-9]

28 minutes ago, HappyDays said:

 

I consider that play a coaching mistake too. Reminds me of the 83 yard Breece Hall run against us last year. The defense was not aligned correctly... Ravens have heavy personnel to the right of the formation but our LBs are aligned to the left. As a result we didn't have every gap covered and the Ravens easily got to all their blocks, and all Henry had to was run forward in a straight line through wide open space. That's a coaching 101 failure. I'm kind of surprised McDermott didn't see it and call a timeout. Annoying to have to call a timeout on the 1st play, but better than letting the Ravens just get that play off when we weren't in the correct alignment.

Watch the A22 of the Henry run and you’ll see Dorian Williams is lined up in line with his gap a step to right of Henry before the snap and he proceeded to take himself out of the play post snap. He bit hard on the Picard blocking motion and made it easy for him to get swallowed up by the OLman. Williams often bites too easily on these kinds of fakes and guesses wrong. 

[GoBills808]

9 minutes ago, K-9 said:

Watch the A22 of the Henry run and you’ll see Dorian Williams is lined up in line with his gap a step to right of Henry before the snap and he proceeded to take himself out of the play post snap. He bit hard on the Picard blocking motion and made it easy for him to get swallowed up by the OLman. Williams often bites too easily on these kinds of fakes and guesses wrong. 

i believe they are coached to do that. line blocks left, now your gap is shaded left. like how we bump gaps when the ravens would motion. i think Williams plays his assignment fine and the problem is just that every single Raven wins their rep

[HappyDays]

17 minutes ago, GoBills808 said:

still i saw some decisions from Allen that weren't pressure related that give me some cause for concern, namely that he's being told to take the underneath or checkdown way too fast. saw numerous examples of him getting the ball out immediately at the top of his drop from relatively clean pockets where if he holds off just a bit a second level route comes available.

 

They are scheming the reads low to high now. For better or worse that's the new philosophy. They've gotten away with it until this game because of great YAC production and great 3rd down conversion percentage. In this game Baltimore shut the YAC down and we threw away too many 2nd/3rd and short opportunities with poor play calls and poor execution. Everything we've been getting away with on offense kind of snowballed on us all at once and it produced a totally nonfunctional offense except for one unicorn play. I don't know that the solution is to change the entire structure of the offense. Brady has to do a better job being ready to adjust to defenses that are dictating terms, the OL needs to be way better at handling pressure looks, and the pass catchers need to execute as well as they were in the first few weeks. With this offense's low margin for error a single drop or protection breakdown could be an immediate drive killer. If they want to change the structure of the offense they will need to add a legit outside WR.

 

Edited October 1 by HappyDays

[Sweats]

53 minutes ago, HappyDays said:

 

I consider that play a coaching mistake too. Reminds me of the 83 yard Breece Hall run against us last year. The defense was not aligned correctly... Ravens have heavy personnel to the right of the formation but our LBs are aligned to the left. As a result we didn't have every gap covered and the Ravens easily got to all their blocks, and all Henry had to was run forward in a straight line through wide open space. That's a coaching 101 failure. I'm kind of surprised McDermott didn't see it and call a timeout. Annoying to have to call a timeout on the 1st play, but better than letting the Ravens just get that play off when we weren't in the correct alignment.

 

 

 

Better to use a TO to manage correct formation on the 1st play, then go into halftime with all 3 in your pocket and having used none.

[GoBills808]

7 minutes ago, HappyDays said:

 

They are scheming the reads low to high now. For better or worse that's the new philosophy. They've gotten away with it until this game because of great YAC production and great 3rd down conversion percentage. In this game Baltimore shut the YAC down and we threw away too many 2nd/3rd and short opportunities with poor play calls and poor execution. Everything we've been getting away with on offense kind of snowballed on us all at once and it produced a totally nonfunctional offense except for one unicorn play. I don't know that the solution is to change the entire structure of the offense. Brady has to do a better job being ready to adjust to defenses that are dictating terms, the OL needs to be way better at handling pressure looks, and the pass catchers need to execute as well as they were in the first few weeks. With this offense's low margin for error a single drop or protection breakdowns could be an immediate drive killer. If they want to change the structure of the offense they will need to add a legit outside WR.

could not agree more

 

for example i think this is second and short and yes I KNOW- we want to move the chains, we want to grind out yards, we want to play complementary football, we want everything small ball is good for. but holy hell he would have thrown this past the safety's ear to Hollins for a TD back in the day

 

[RoscoeParrish]

7 minutes ago, GoBills808 said:

could not agree more

 

for example i think this is second and short and yes I KNOW- we want to move the chains, we want to grind out yards, we want to play complementary football, we want everything small ball is good for. but holy hell he would have thrown this past the safety's ear to Hollins for a TD back in the day

 

It would help if the player running that route was a trusted receiving threat. 
 

Josh is already in the wind up in that screenshot. He made the decision to throw before Mack cleared that defender.