Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - The Athletic's Ted Nguyen explains how to watch the Vikings like a film expert

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

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like Shannon Sharp, Tony Gonzalez, Travis Kelsey, and George Kittle. We'll explore how the tight end position has changed over the last 60 years and what it takes to be the very best. Subscribe to TE1 from Blue Wire Studios today so you're ready for the August premiere. Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, and joining me, one of the largest brains out there analyzing the football tape from the athletic Ted Wynn. What is going on, Ted? Nothing much, just quarantining. Thank you for the great intro.

I don't know about biggest brain, biggest head. I got the biggest head, but I don't know how big that brain fills up the head. So thanks for the compliment anyways, and thanks for having me on. Well, you are a very humble man. I will tell the story real quick for people who have not heard it before, that in the Vikings annual golf tournament, I was playing with one of the Vikings scouts, and I was asking them who on the internet they like to read and who is accurate, and somebody brought up your name. Of course, they couldn't pronounce it as well as I could, but they mentioned that your work is about as accurate as it gets when it comes to analyzing the film.

So there you go. I like to mention that to give you some credit there for what you do. A little while ago, Ted, you wrote an article about how to watch football like an expert from the comfort of your couch. So I want to, in this episode, for you to help explain how people can watch football like a football tape analyst. And I want to start at the basic level because you kind of said, like, you know, your tier one, your tier two, and then your tier five is Carson Palmer at the bottom of the article.

But I think when it comes to watching football to understand what's going on better, I like to just start with who's on the field. So on offense and defense, how many wide receivers are out there? Is there a fullback? Is there a tight end? And on the defensive side, is there an extra corner, two extra corners? Is there three linebackers? And right there, you can learn a lot. It's a great starting point for what's going to transpire on the field after everyone lines up. No, exactly. And it's one thing that's easy to pick up for somebody that isn't really, you know, a super football nerd.

But you know who the players are on the field. You could recognize, all right, if there are three receivers on the field, there are two running backs, and defensively, how are they going to match up? Are they going to match up in their nickel, which means that they're taking out a linebacker, putting in an extra defensive back, they're matching up a dime. And you can kind of see some of what NFL coaches

and players are thinking by the way they match up. And you'll start to recognize some tendencies. And, you know, it's like in the article, I talked to Carson Palmer about how a quarterback reads the defense, and one of the first things they look at is the personnel on the field. So, for example, if, you know, you have a running back that's split out wide and you have a linebacker that's out wide with him, then instead of a cornerback, then you know, okay, this is man coverage. If it's zone, the corner would be out with him.

So a linebacker's out matched with them. So I know that it's man-to-man coverage. So, I mean, you get a lot of information just looking at who's on the field and how they're matching up with each other. I'll give you an example. In the AFC Championship game where Tony Romo really emerged as America's favorite. This is a 2018 AFC Championship game. Emerged as America's favorite color analyst.

Right before Tom Brady makes a big throw to Rob Gronkowski, Romo shouts something out like he's going to throw the ball to Gronkowski. And that was because Gronkowski was matched up with a cornerback on the outside. So he just looked at, okay, if Rob Gronkowski is lined up as a wide receiver and he's lined up on a corner, Tom Brady is probably going to throw to Rob Gronkowski lined up on a cornerback. So that's one way you can look at it and say, all right, what are the matchups? Who's on the field? And to tie this into the Vikings, Ted, they love to use the bigger personnel.

And I'm sure that people have seen it written or heard it said like 11, 12 personnel. Maybe you can explain how those things work and how they kind of connect to the Vikings using bigger personnel like fullbacks and tight ends and what that means. Yeah, I mean, so there's 11 players on the field. Five of them are offensive line. One of them's the quarterbacks. That's six players that are always going to be on the field. So you have five left, and when people say 11, 12, the first number is a number of backs on a field. And the second number is a number of tight ends on a field. So if it's 11, one back, one tight end, and you subtract it with five, that's three receivers.

So, you know, it sounds more complicated than it actually is, but once you start doing it, it's pretty easy. So 21, first numbers, two, two backs, one tight end, and you know there's two receivers on the field. So that's basically how you get the numbering system down. And, yeah, I mean, so the heavier personnel, 13, 12, more tight ends on the field, more running backs on the field. It's a little heavier, and that kind of trend towards, okay, maybe the offense is going to run the ball with the heavier personnel on the field, more running backs on the field. It's a little heavier, and that kind of trend towards, okay, maybe the offense is going to run the ball with the heavier personnel on the field.

And the way that the Vikings love to use this is putting heavier personnel on the field and then not running the ball and running play actions off of that. And play actions are another thing that I think is worth bringing up for when people watch them, especially because of how the Vikings offense looks. A lot of offenses will use RPOs. The Vikings don't really. You write in your article, maybe we can go over that real quick, the way that you can watch and know whether it's an RPO or not.

And I know that Chris Collinsworth got a bunch of criticism on the internet after the Super Bowl in which he was calling a lot of Philadelphia Eagles plays RPOs that maybe weren't necessarily RPOs but just regular play actions and then I know that he put a lot of work in that offseason to make sure he was getting that right the next year but that's they can be a little bit tricky when you're trying to figure out exactly what is going on with those play actions. Yeah for sure and. And, you know, I think a lot of people start mistaking any sort of play action, you know, with a play fake to a running back at a shotgun as an RPO, but it's not true. So with a play action play, you're just faking the

run so that you're trying to draw linebackers and defense up so you could throw a pass. But with the RPO or run pass option, what the quarterback is doing is he's reading the defense. He's reading usually one defender to see if that defender comes up on the run. If he comes up on the run, he's going to pull the ball and throw it. And if that defender stays back, that means they have a numbers advantage in the box and he's going to hand the ball off. So that's an important distinction to make.

Another important distinction to make is there's RPOs, run pass options, and there's run options. So a run option is just when a quarterback has the option to either hand the ball off or keep the ball himself. So those are three distinctions you've got to make. RPO, play action, run options. And of course, the Vikings don't use many run options with Kirk Cousins, but they do use a lot of bootlegs. And let's just talk about why this is so effective. I mean, because this is Gary Kubiak's bread and butter. We knew that when Cousins used play action during his career that he was really successful by the numbers, but John DeFilippo, as the Office of Coordinator in 2018, did not use a lot of talking about, you know, having Kirk Cousins play fake on, say, an outside zone look

and then roll way out away from the defense? Yes, so I also wrote another article called About Establishing a Run and what the analytics say about it. And basically what we found is that play action works no matter if you established a run or not, just because linebackers have their run responsibility as well. So anytime they see a run fake or they see any sort of things that indicate run, they're going to, they're going to come up towards the line of scrimmage.

I mean, obviously it's not going to work on third and 10, but on, you know, first and 10 or second and seven or something like that, they're going to move up towards the run. Maybe they won't completely abandon their play assignments and run towards the run like they would on fourth down, but play action is going to affect them. So it works no matter what. And play action, obviously when you get guys out of position, it's going to be easier to hit some passes. And the Vikings really took that philosophy and ran with it last year. There was a report that Kevin Stefanski read, you know, read an article. Maybe it could have been mine. Who knows?

But he talked about how he saw the analytics that prove that play action works no matter what, and they really ran with it. They ran a ton of play action with Kirk Cousins, and they had one of the most effective offenses they had in a long time. Yes, I know that Stefanski pays very close attention to all the analytics and is a very well-read coach, which I think is the reason why a lot of people in the Vikings organization liked him because they want to be progressive like that,

and I wouldn't be surprised if we see Baker Mayfield jump up in his production this year with using a lot of those same concepts. Because no matter how long they've been used in the NFL, they still work when you run that play fake and linebackers jump up forward. And I do wonder, as an aside, Ted, if someday we will see more teams just have their linebackers hang back and say, beat us with the run. But then again, San Francisco beat the tar out of the Green Bay Packers with just the run. So, I mean, it's one of those things when you run this Kubiak or Shanahan style offense, there's a lot of it that's very, very hard to beat. Yeah. And another point is that Shanahan, Kubiak, they all run their outside zone-based system. And I feel like play action from outside zone just works better

because there's not just that vertical threat of you having to come up towards the run. You also have to move a lot laterally too. So you're play faking an outside zone. Linebacks are moving up and they have to move a lot towards the side to maintain their gap integrity. And that's one of the reasons why these bootlegs off of outside zone work so well. Now, something that you wrote about here that I find very interesting is pre-snap motion, because the Los Angeles Rams use it like crazy. The Baltimore Ravens use it like crazy.

And the Vikings, there was an ESPN article about this, do not all that much. They were 28th in the amount of pre-snap motion. And I wrote an article the other day about how if the Vikings want to reproduce what they did last year on offense, minus Stephon Diggs, and maybe with a harder schedule, then they might have to add some of these elements to it. Pre-snap motion really can play games with the defense. Explain. Yeah, I'm actually surprised that they are that low in pre-snap motion because it's one of the calling cards of that Shanahan, Kugiak type of offense is a lot of pre-snap movement.

So, yeah, with pre-snap movement, what Shanahan pre-snap movement it you know just a simple what shanahan does a lot it's just simply do a wide trade which is he's going to move george kiddo tight end from one side to the other right before the snap and what that does is it changes the strength of the defense so uh a defense will call out a strength sometimes they'll have designated strong side ends designated strong side ends, designated strong side linebacks they want on the tight end side because usually you're going to run the ball to the tight end side. But if you just shift the tight end to the other side, usually they're not going to flip their whole defense

and have the strong side end, strong side linebacker flip on the other side. So right there you have an advantage already by switching the strong side. And then the second part of it is you have to communicate. So you have to make adjustments and the defense has to communicate. And most of the time they're going to get their communications right. But that 10%, 15% of the time where they don't get their communication right, you're going to have an advantage. And it's not that costly for an offense to make those motions and adjustments

because they know it's coming. costly for an offense to make those motions and adjustments because they know it's coming. It's an easy install. And then on top of that, you add the fly motions or the jet motions where the receiver goes straight across and there's a threat of him getting the ball and just outflanking the defense. They have to adjust to that as well. So they have to bump their line backwards over a gap, and then you can run plays away from the jet sweep.

You can run play towards the jet sweep and have them over-pursue and try to cut back. So there's a lot of advantages towards pre-snap movements, but a reason why a team might not use a lot of pre-snap movements is because they might emphasize pace more. So if they want to get things going quickly and they want to snap the ball quickly and go no huddle, they might not use as many shifts and motions. back to the conversation in just a minute but first have

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So it kind of forces a linebacker to stop and think for a second. Or the way that Anthony Barr described it to me is that it's sort of like somebody waving their hand in front of your face right before you're supposed to look at something. And it just sort of can throw you off, even though they know and they have their rules for how they want to handle it and for who's going to take it if the ball is handed to the wide receiver, it still is this distraction point for the defense that adds a little bit of an advantage, and I guess I wouldn't be surprised if I see the Vikings use it more often. Now, a question that I get all the time, and you've studied this,

is how the Vikings' defense works, which is very broad. But if we start with the personnel point, they use nickel about 80% of the time or base, and they don't use anything else. They always have Eric Hendricks and Anthony Barr on the field at all times. And something that they do extremely well or have done extremely well, we'll see with a new group of corners is knowing what they're supposed to do when it comes to matching patterns

they're they're very very good at this uh at least the guys who have been in Zimmer's system for a long time and this could be a challenge for this year so can you explain what that means when we hear that they are matching patterns yeah so when they're matching patterns they're not playing regular zone because regular zone you're dropping to a spot and then you're in charge of that spot you're not playing regular man coverage where you just straight up assigned okay i have to cover this guy no matter where he goes uh when you're playing match coverage you are uh assigned you're looking at you know you could be looking at a certain receiver, and you might switch depending on how the pattern distribution goes, but you're

playing kind of a mix of man and zone, so you're going to take a guy man-to-man that goes into your area or goes into whatever rules you have in that coverage. There's like different types of man match coverages, different types of zone match coverages you get really into this. But basically that's what it is. And just to add a side point, this is why the Vikings focus on really smart players because the NFL has become very complicated, especially on defense.

And Zimmer is always tweaking and changing these rules depending on what offenses are doing to stay ahead, and it's one of the reasons he's been successful for so long is if you get the players who can understand what you're asking them to do. That's why he loves Anthony Barr so much, I think, is because Anthony Barr can process everything that he's asking him to do. I guess I would explain it like this. If you have a slot receiver who's running a deep corner,

then your outside corner, if he's matching on that pattern, might stay on his side and stay over the top of that wide receiver, right? If that makes some sense to people, they can sort of visualize a receiver sort of coming your way. And you need to as a corner, and this is where it's crazy, you need to be able to visualize and figure out what type of patterns they're running, like what kind of route combinations they're running at the very beginning of the route.

I mean, at what, a half a second, Ted? It is a crazy game, man. Yeah. No, it definitely is. Just a lot of communication that goes on. I think that's one of the reasons why the Vikings emphasize continuity on their defense so much. You have a lot of the same guys playing year after year.

It's because it takes a lot of communication, it takes a lot of chemistry to get it right. But if you are able to play man-match coverages, it just gives you a really great advantage just because you're always in the right – have the right leverage on routes. You're able to communicate and pass things off. So you don't necessarily need the strongest man coverage corners, which are, you know, are hard to find.

You need guys that are able to communicate, be physical. And yeah, sometimes they do have to play straight up one-on-one, but with man match coverages, when you go into those one-on-ones, hopefully you have a leverage advantage. Right. Another thing that Zimmer's defense gets an advantage with is that they play two deep safeties a lot. Even if Harrison Smith is up at the line of scrimmage and he's making it look like it's only a single deep safety, a lot of times they switch back into it, and this is where you see great quarterbacks even. Aaron Rodgers, this happens to him, drop back, think he knows where he's going with the

ball, and then hesitate because Harrison Smith has played some sort of Jedi mind game with him. But I think that this all starts, Ted, where people should watch for this year is Michael Pierce opting out and the defensive line being able to stop the run by themselves, being able to take up multiple gaps for linebackers to get in there and stop the run because otherwise you need safety help up on the line of scrimmage to stop the run. And if you need that, then you're opening up space or as in your article, you talk about looking for grass. If you're looking for where the ball could potentially go, but this is where I think the Vikings are a little different because they might show you lots of grass and then all of a sudden it's gone as soon as Harrison Smith does something

else. Yeah, and you could argue that safety might be one of the most important positions on this defense because they're asked to do a lot in this style of defense. They have to play man-to-man. They have to play deep zones. They have to play man-to-man. They have to play deep zones. They have to play underneath zones. They have to be able to fit the run from a too-high position, which means they have to fit the run from a deep alignment,

which can be tough. But that's part of this defense. They play a lot too high because they trust that their safeties are going to make the correct reads and come up on a run when they need to. And there's just up to a play action when you do that. If you fall for a play action fake and you're supposed to be in too deep alignment, that's a touchdown happening. So you have to be extremely smart.

And, you know, that's why Harrison Smith is one of the best safeties in the NFL right now. And, yeah, it's a tough position for safeties in this defense. But if you get it right, again, you could potentially have a two-deep defense and a nine-man box. And, you know, a lot of what the front seven is trying to do in this type of defense is they're trying to get the ball to bounce outside so the secondary and safeties have some time to get there, if that makes sense.

No, it definitely does. And I think that anyone who's watched Vikings football can visualize the number of, and this is a testament to Linval Joseph's excellence when he was at his best, the number of times you see them, a team try to run up the middle, and they have to go to the outside, and there's Trey Waynes, and I don't think it's any mistake that the Vikings by PFF rankings have been top five in tackling consistently because they almost filter those players exactly where their guys are going to be able to tackle them as long as you're capable of making that play.

Another thing I want to ask you about is the nickel position because I've mentioned a handful of times that in Zimmer's defense, it's a very complex position where you're sort of a linebacker sometimes and you're doing the pattern matching, of course, but you have to really understand what's going on in the middle of the field. And this is why I think it's not a good idea for a rookie like Jeff Gladney to be asked to play the nickel because it's just really complex these days. Yeah, no, in this type of system, you are taking a linebacker spot

and you're playing pretty much the linebacker position. You might not play in the box as much, but you're still part of the run fit. And, you know, you have to – you're doing multiple things. You're not just taking the slot receiver man-to-man. You're playing those linebacker zones. You have to adjust in motion. Then you might end up being in a box. And I'm sure, you know, in those Viking blitzes, I haven't studied them as much.

You're a big part of the pressure game as well. So there's a lot that nickel has to learn. Definitely. And Mackenzie Alexander got to be good at it after three years. And also speaking of smart players, Terrence Newman in 2017, having never played nickel before, pops into the nickel position as one of the best players there in the NFL. It really tells you a lot about how smart Terrence Newman was. There's a couple other little things I want to ask you about that just come up all the time

on broadcast that I don't think are ever really explained. One of them is quarterbacks going through progressions. This is one that's really funny around draft season, where you'll see somebody respond to a tweet about a draft prospect quarterback. He doesn't go through his progressions, doesn't get across the field, and so far. Can we talk about what that actually means with quarterbacks going through their progressions? Yeah, so on every single play, a quarterback has his set progression of which receivers he's going to go through, who's going to be my first progression, who's going to be the guy I look to first,

who's going to be the guy I look to second, who's going to be the guy I look to third. And that could change based on the defense. So I might have a set progression against a single high defense here where I'm going to read, let's say I'm going to read the post first and then i'm going to read the the out next but it against too high defense that might switch around maybe i look to the backside route first uh so you know that's another reason why playing quarterback is so complicated is you know things change and you have to be able to think on the fly you have to be able to make sure that you're looking at the right guy. And then when the ball snaps, you actually have to execute. So when a quarterback is going through his progressions,

he might look off the safety initially to confirm the coverage, and then he's going to look to his first receiver. And then you're going to see his feet and eyes move, and he's going to hitch at two progression, two progression. And I think some people assume that a quarterback's always looking a guy off if he's looking over here and then looking over there, but he's just going through his regular progressions. And a good pass concept will have that effect of a look-off

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We do have, though, there is the stare down the safety type of thing that you do see sometimes, but it is really hard to tell. And that's what I always think of when I'm watching film back, Ted, is some of this stuff is just really hard to tell what exactly was supposed to happen there. And we often will see on a game day where somebody screen grabs what went on and then they're like, oh, well, this was obviously this, that, or the other thing. Or there'll be incensed that a play-by-play or color analyst had the coverage wrong or the read wrong for the quarterback that they tried to bring up or something. But what in your mind can we not know?

No matter whether we're watching all 22 or whether we're watching just the game live, stuff that we just as reporters and as fans have to acknowledge, the only guys who are going to know that stuff is the guys on the field and the guys who call the plays. Yeah, I mean, there's just, there's some things, I guess it depends on the type of play we're watching in a situation, but there's some play calls where we just won't know, especially when guys make mistakes, you know, because we are looking at, we're looking at a play, we're looking at what we think are their assignments, and we can kind of figure things out based on what we're looking at, but I mean, when guys are making mistakes,

we don't know if it's by design, or we don't know if this guy just messed up, and you know, sometimes they mess up, and a good thing happens, and then we might think, oh, that was by design, but in reality, this guy just kind of did his own thing and made a play there, and we won't know that unless we're in that player's head. Right, yeah, I think that this happens a lot with corners who decide that they're going to try to pick off a pass, and sometimes they do, but they weren't supposed to do that, and so the coach is upset, even though they have a pick six, and then other times, you know, they whiff on it, and we go, well, what was he doing? But half the time, this is like a Marcus Peters type of thing.

Like I'm going for that interception. I don't care what I'm supposed to do here. All right. Well, what do we miss, Ted? Is there anything else that you came across when you were talking with people and then writing this article that fans would get a lot out of looking for on game days that maybe they didn't know before? I think one thing that Carson Palmer talked about

that I didn't even really know was looking at where the open B gap is. So usually when a defense lines up, nowadays all you see is a 4-2-5, which is four defensive linemen, two linebackers and five defensive backs and nickel because, you know, everybody's in spread, 11 personnel. And they're going to – and those defensive linemen are usually going to leave the B-gap open. And Carson Palmer said to usually look at that B-gap and see what's happening there and see if the linebacker's scooting up

or see if there's any movement when you start to cadence because that's usually where blitzes go, and you can get a good idea of where that is just by studying that open B-gap. And he said, you know, usually rookie quarterbacks or younger quarterbacks don't even see this, but as you get older, that's something that you look for. And the A-gap is between your guard and your center for. And the A gap is between your guard and your center. Your B gap is between your guard and your tackle.

Vikings fans might actually know this from the double A gap blitz that Mike Zimmer became famous for and then actually went away from. And this has become my favorite part, Ted, and you can tell me what your favorite part of studying film is, is just watching the advancement from year to year, whether it was on the offensive side for how Kirk Cousins was used differently from 2018 to 19, or on the defensive side from watching Mike Zimmer's defense handle those rocket sweeps differently and do things like different blitzes. The blitzes on third down from Zimmer went from a lot of four-man rushes and a lot of like that double-A gap look, but then they would drop out of it,

to sending cornerbacks, dropping back Stephen Weatherly, who used to be an outside linebacker, and dropping him back in coverage. Like those zone blitzes that he didn't use a lot early in his days in Minnesota. That's my favorite part is just looking for what are they doing different and then trying to figure out why. Yeah, and it's, you know, Zimmer talked about it before, but one of the reasons why he went away from it is because so many people started copying his defense and as more people copy that system, offenses get better at reacting to it. So he did a smart thing, but instead of just trying to just force this thing to work,

he switched it up and made things tougher on the offense. So yeah, I agree. I think, you know, one of the coolest things about following one team, I think, is you really pay attention to the scheme and see how it starts to evolve and try to understand why it's evolving. And a lot of it will have to do with, you know, the personnel, the new personnel, and just paying attention to those things and understanding those things, I think, takes enjoying football to another level. Right. And this year for the Vikings will be extremely fascinating for that reason.

Well, Ted, you are an absolute must-follow on Twitter, at FB underscore film analysis. You're one of those underscore people that just, you know, should have been banned from Twitter a long time ago. But people can read your work at The Athletic. You are the, what do you call it, purveyor of truth of the all 22, is what you call it in your Twitter. And I totally agree.

So there's a lot of people out there trying to do it. I think that you are the best of the best, Ted. So I really appreciate you taking this time. And I hope people learned a lot. There was so much football there, but I think if you kind of look for some of those things, look for the personnel, look for the safeties, look for quarterback progressions and reads, that you're going to get a lot more out of it. Yeah, thanks for having me on, and congr on the success on your your own venture there

thanks man i i really appreciate that so follow ted and look for his work you will become a smarter football person for it and we will talk to you next time here on purple insider