Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - TMLG: If Kubiak retires, what should the Vikings look for in an OC?

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Former Minnesota Viking Jeremiah Sirles goes in depth on what makes a great offensive coordinator based on his experience with Pat Shurmur and Frank Reich. He talks about adapting to players' skills and how Justin Jefferson should be used going forward. What system does Kirk Cousins work best in? How does the next OC need to design his offense and how does Mike Zimmer play into all this? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get Coors Light in the new look delivered straight to your door with Drizzly or Instacart, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado, and as always, celebrate! Welcome to another episode of Tuesday Morning Left Guard. Matthew Collar here along with former Minnesota Viking Jeremiah Searle. And it's over! You're free from your t tape hell of having to grind very poor offensive and defensive line performances from the Vikings in 2020. You're free.

Go run. Go frolic in the offseason. I'm just ready to watch good football in the playoffs. I don't have to watch any more poor football. I think there might be a couple blowouts in wild card weekend. There always is. But I think the majority you a couple blowouts in wild card weekend. There always is. But I think the majority you look across the board in the playoffs right now, it's going to be some really tough, fought, good, earned games

besides Tampa Bay versus the NFC least. So I saw. That's good. And, you know, what's funny about that is Washington can actually stay in a game with anybody because of their defense, because Chase Young is not from this earth. And they're, I mean, really, they can stay in a game with almost anybody, I think. So even the teams that you don't believe in have a chance.

And I'm excited about it. The other thing is, too, that aside from the NFC East, there's a ton of, like, 10, 11 or more win teams. And I saw today that there were more 11 plus win teams than like the last 20 years in a single season, which I think this year I really felt the separation between the bad teams and the good teams and even certain teams that went seven and nine that weren't particularly good. You felt like there was an ocean between them and the good teams. And yes, I mean the Vikings versus, say, the New Orleans Saints, for example. But what I wanted to talk about rather than going through the tape and having you break down Rashad Hill's performance against the Lions

was what makes a good offensive coordinator? Because the Vikings, it appears, could be on the market for one. There was a report today that Gary Kubiak is leaning toward retirement. We'll see if we get an announcement on that. I think he will. He certainly sounded like he was going to the last time we talked to him. So you've played for a myriad of different offensive coordinators in your career, including Pat Shermer, who was fantastic in 2017 for the Vikings. So I want to start out with what makes a good offensive

coordinator with Shermer and what worked in 2017, because I think that that resonates with people, how well that offense ticks, despite, you know, having a backup quarterback in there. So I'm just going to broadly leave that to you like what what worked with pat schirmer in 2017 that the vikings can carry over to what they have now yeah so i'm actually i'm actually going to rewind a little bit further and go back to 2014 with my first experience with an oc with frank reich who was the offensive coordinator with uh philip rivers and company in san diego and that was really my first look at what a quality offensive coordinator in the NFL looked like.

And that was such a change for me from college, where in college very much like the coordinators essentially, he's always the quarterback's coach, and they just kind of do their thing and it all goes from there, versus you get into the NFL and it's now such a collaborative thing with the players and with the veterans on the offense that it really showed me and opened my eyes. Like, Phillip has ideas.

Frank has ideas. McCoy, the head coach, had ideas. And Gates, the tight end, had ideas. And it almost turned into this huge collaboration of we're working through this thing together. So then I get here and I get traded and I come to Minnesota in 2015 and I have Norv Turner, right? A little bit of the same, but I watched now a young quarterback, right?

And I watched how Norv kind of was molding a young quarterback and how they were working together and how he'd still be like, Teddy, do you like this? Do you like this? Like, hey, let's try this. Let's open your eyes to this. Let's go in this direction. And I got to watch them go, and then you go to Shermer, right? So then you go to Shermer, and what I always tell people, and I was actually on Broncos country talking about this before the season,

is what made Pat Schirmer so special is he doesn't have what I would call a certain style. He is very adaptive to what his players do best. He's not a this is my system, square peg, ground hole, we're just going to shove it down your throats, we're just going to do it, do it, do it, because it's what I do and I know I'm good at. It's okay. I lose Sam Bradford. I have Case Keenum, who was the backup quarterback. Here's what he does really well. Okay, here I have a bunch of hurt offensive linemen. Maybe we were supposed to be more of a downhill

scheme. It's like, hey, the guys that I have in there right now, they're running zone really well. Let's stick back to the zone scheme. And Okay, Phelan loves the dig inside. Dig route, perfect. Digs can stretch it, perfect. Let's throw the ball to Kyle Rudolph 100 times, perfect. Right? Like he just understood the flow. And then when I leave Minnesota and I go to Buffalo and Brian Dable,

I get to see yet another guy with a young stud quarterback and how he taught him and how he worked with him and how he worked with the whole offense to complement him. And it just goes to show me in every place that I've been that if the quarterback and the offensive coordinator have a very collaborative effort together, that's where the success comes in the NFL. It comes from when those two guys are one mind.

Those two guys understand what makes everyone tick, what makes an offense go, what are the absolute things that kill an offense. I mean, for so many times, I can remember Dable on the sideline, Joshua, just screaming at Josh Allen because he threw a pick when he knew it wasn't supposed to because he didn't run it. But you see how when you can have an offensive coordinator for longer than one year, Vikings,

how you see what Dable has done with Josh Allen, right? I mean, where he was as a rookie to where he is now is why Coach Dable is going to be a head coach in the NFL next year because he's shown his consistency to grow. And so I think that the hardest thing is when you're looking for a Vikings offensive coordinator right now is who's in it for the long haul? Who's going to come in and be the guy that's going to look and say, okay, I have Dalvin Cook, I have Jefferson, I have Thielen,

I have all these weapons, and we need to build it together with a heavy offensive line and put that together, and then me and Kirk can work together to find out what we're good at. Because so many times you and I talked around on the show, like, what's the identity of this offense? Like, okay, yeah, play action, throw the ball deep the ball deep cool well you can't do that against everyone and when you got to throw the ball this team couldn't do it so I think that a good corner I know it's a little bit long-winded there but a good coordinator is someone who can meld with the mind of the quarterback but also is someone that

understands that your vision might not be the best vision for the pieces that you have. Yeah, no, that's a great point. And I remember Pat Shermer talking about that often and players talking about that often about Shermer and why the offense really melded together was it was basically taking all the puzzle pieces together of very talented players and then putting them into where they fit the best. And I always wondered about, in 2016,

they started to use Cordero Patterson as a playmaker, like bubble screens and reverses, and they never really got all the way down the road with that. But that was always kind of an example of, Schermer wants to do that and not try to make him into a guy who's going to run, like you said, 15-yard dig routes and get open. It's just not his thing. Contested catches, not his thing.

But can you get him the ball in space and have him make special plays? And I remember Zimmer even saying, like, regretting that they hadn't done that more. That was before Schirmer. Schirmer was like the tight ends coach and then became the offensive coordinator. But they just kind of started that ball rolling a little bit. And I think that there's some examples that could be used here in the future going forward. I do think overall that Kubiak does a decent job with that. Kirk needs the play action system. He needs time to throw the ball. He needs time to step into his throws, which gosh, there are just some games

you watch around the league where you're like, oh yeah, that quarterback didn't have to step into the ball at all, and it went like 40 yards. And that's just not something your guy's capable of. So you have to roll them out. You have to give them bootlegs and things like that. And they've done that really effectively. You have to put them in the right situations for play action.

They've run the ball super, super well. I know that the run-pass ratio gets harped on on the show here, but they fit the offensive line with the running game really well and then with what delvin cook does they've they've just locked that in nicely and so now it's about finding the extra two percent finding a playmaker who fits somebody who can run faster than a four six that's your number three wide receiver and then pairing him with how can you get that guy involved more? How can you run some more slants with Justin Jefferson to get the ball in his hands?

Reverses, quick passes, things like that to really fit what they have as an offense, because this was a good offense. It was a decent offense, but there was just meat on the bone left, I felt like, at the end of the year, and that's where somebody, I think, who picks up from Kubiak can build on what he did, but I also think that you have to stay with that idea, that sort of system, the Kubiak-Shanahan play-action-wide zone stuff, because it has worked for the quarterback specifically. Yeah, and I think that, again, that's what this team's built to do, right? I mean, it showed. You brought Div Filippo in, and he tried saying, we're going to be a passing, and we're going to throw the ball 60 times.

And he's kind of what I talk about, the square peg, round hole. Like, that's not what this team was built to do. And that's kind of like you talk about a rebuild. That's more of like a rebrand, right? You come in, and you're just like, we're going to redo everything. But I think that Kubiak had his style, which melded with the build of the team well. And now you just kind of think, okay, can you extend on that? Like you've built the ground floor,

but that's what you usually see in years two and three of a coordinator. He starts to finally get his pieces. And I mean, you want to look at 2018. I was in Buffalo with Josh's rookie year. We were terrible. We went six and 10. We couldn't do anything. We were terrible. We went 6-10. We couldn't do anything. We couldn't throw.

We couldn't run. We didn't know what we were. In 2019, they say, we're going to go sign eight offensive linemen because that's the part that we needed. We're going to go sign John Brown because you need receivers. We're going to go sign Cole Beasley because you need receivers. And then Dable's like, okay, I know Josh loves to be an empty. If you watch the Bills, they still, to this day, love to run empty

because that's where Josh feels most comfortable running the football. But that was because they built that over that first two years. Now you can see that they just all stick together. And so I think there's a great groundwork built for what Kirk likes to do, what Dalvin likes to do. Now you just need to bolster up the pieces around it, and we're not far away from being a very successful offense. The question is who's going to be wearing the headset on the sideline getting yelled

at to run the football by the head? Right, right. And this is a key point, I think, as I'm writing as we speak, an article about kind of things they need to look for for their next offensive coordinator, should there be one, if Kubiak decides that he's going to retire. And one of the things that I wrote was experience, and not because I believe that you need to be experienced as an NFL offensive coordinator or head coach to succeed. I think you do to succeed here.

You know, I think that, you know, you could be the guy like Joe Brady who was in college and he had had NFL experience some before, but then you get that job. And I liked what he did, even though their team overall was not good. But I liked what he did schematically. And we've seen some guys succeed, some don't. Sean McVay gets a job, and he looks younger than I do. And you think, well, what the heck is going on here? And then all of a sudden he turns around to franchise.

But then there are other guys like Zach Taylor in Cincinnati who I couldn't pick out of a line. It's my Husker. It's my Husker guy. Oh, he is? Okay. Still, if he was standing in this room next to me, I'd be like, who are you? I wouldn't recognize him.

That's right. Anyway, you never know, right? But I do know that the DeFilippo experiment should be a lesson, that in the interview with the offensive coordinator that you want to hire, you need to ask, are you going to run a Shanahan Kubiak offense? Not, are you going to run out of the shotgun in a dropback offense where you throw all the time, which I think could have worked, but Kirk got strip sacked a million times that year. And I think that drove Zimmer insane. But I think it's somebody who needs to know how to handle an NFL situation where maybe the head coach is not always the most affable fella after games and will pin it on you.

He absolutely will. If you do something he doesn't like, he'll pin it on one of your players if he can. And, you know, I think that, you know, someone like Kubiak is not going to get overly shaken by stuff like that or that Zimmer will respect him because he's got rings and he's been around but if it's somebody like DiFilippo who hasn't really proven himself then it's going to be like oh okay kid and you know there were even times with the Stefanski where it was like that and Stefanski was a really well respected coach here so I think experience does matter here. Yeah, and I agree. You nailed it.

It's not experience of, well, this guy's coached for 25 years. It's who has he coached with, right? Who has he been under? Who has he been able to handle? Like, has he been with the Brucerians where Brucerians is losing his mind on the sideline and you're just sitting there going, okay, get it out, get it out, okay, stay the course. Or has he been under a guy that's not used to that and it's going to completely rattle him he's going to go call something that was on week four's

install when it's week 11 right like so I think that's extremely important too and I think it has to be someone from a newer system I don't I think that as much as the Kubiak Shanahan offense as far as the groundwork anyone can really come in and say, okay, here's what we did last year. Like, we can run that. But I think you need a little bit of fresh blood in there to change up, to change a pace, to do some of the – not the gimmick, but the cuter things, the more exciting things. You see the Mahomes.

You see the Naggies and those guys running out there now. Just to add a little bit of another level, another tier to what this offense could be. The way that I put it in my article was knowledge of proven modern concepts. There it is. That's why you write and I just talk. Exactly. So like with Kevin Stefanski, a good example would just be motion and things like that, where I thought that Stefanski understood what was working for

the innovators and how to take from them, you know, and then people have put these together where Cleveland is using plays directly out of Kyle Shanahan's playbook, which everyone should do. They work, take them from him. And there were times this year, I know you and I both saw this on film, where linebackers kind of knew like, oh, this is one of them play action looks and play action downs. And they always run a crosser here. And so I'm just going to drop right back into where that guy's coming across. We saw it a lot.

And I thought even though the offensive numbers were good, that there were some space for early on, they weren't using motion at all. And then they started to kind of kick it up as they went along and that kind of thing. They're running on second down and 10 and there's also also schematic things like you see my friend Bobby Peters was pointing out to me he was on the show a while ago he's a he's a coach and he studies these offenses just how you know Shanahan would do something simple as putting two tight ends on the same side and then just use it in a million different ways this guy's going to block that direction or it's going to be a fake or it's going to be a screen.

And there's just, there's all these things that I feel like McVay and Shanahan have set the tone with. And I want the next person to understand everything they did. Now the question is, who do you go get to do that? Right. I mean,

I don't know. That's a big wishlist you and I have. And we're like, yes, awesome. Like we want McVay's mind. We want kids. get to do that right i mean i don't know we that's a big wish list you and i have and we're like yes would be awesome like we want mcveigh's mind we want it's like when you build the quarterback like i wish you had newton's body and alan's leg but rogers and like pick it up and so that's the big question is who do you go get to do that now and i mean i saw before i jumped on the show here that like anthony lynn is someone that they're talking about maybe doing that and you're like okay maybe I don't know but I think a lot of it is going to be I don't

necessarily know if you want to bring in someone that was a head coach last year yeah and is going to move down to OC this year right right I don't think that would be a good fit someone that's used to having a lot of say a lot of power I feel like there could be a very clashing between him and Zimmer I think it needs to be more of a lateral move of OC to OC or maybe a quarterback's coach to OC or a run game coordinator to OC. I think it can't be this big guy that took a step down from head coach. I think we need to stay away from that. If it was a run game coordinator, I just can imagine Twitter.com. Like, of course Zimmer hired a run game manager. Yeah, I think that the – now here's – so here's the question though. Should people be unhappy if they completely stay the course

and go Clint Kubiak or Rick Dennison as the offensive coordinator? Because that would mean we're happy with this. We're going to go forward with this. I don't know Clint Kubiak very well, but I think that there are things that need to be built on because, as you mentioned, it's a tough road to build an elite defense. I had a good comment on this on the website from someone who listened to the podcast. And you can certainly get to a good defense next year can you get to a number one defense no I don't see a path to that unless something goes crazy

in the offseason and I really don't see it but that means you're gonna have to have an elite offense if you want to be a real contender this This was okay, but this was not an elite offense. This was a decent offense that finished 11th in points and turned the ball over too much. Yeah, I think if you're going to, but the question is, I don't think Zimmer's ever going to look at it and go, we're going to win with offense, right? I mean, as long as he's got the head coach hat on, that's never going to be his sole focus.

That's never going to be the focus of the Vikings, and that's fine. Each coach has their own way, right? Pete Carroll's kind of the same way. You look around the league, Nick Saban down in Alabama. Coaches that are very good and have McVay's complete right way, we're going to win with offense. We're going to score 30 points because I'm a genius. But I think that if you're going to want to stay the course,

I wouldn't be super mad with staying the course and promoting from within. For me me it gives a little bit of continuity with everybody it gives a lot less install next offseason it gives a lot more of self-scout like hey this is where we were good this is the room for improvements versus like all right scorch earth burn it over here's my system start all over again because a lot of times if an oc decides to retire and they bring a new, sometimes that OC wants to bring in some of his guys, right? And so now you've got position coaches changing, and for the sixth time it could be just a complete nightmare.

So I think that if we do just stick with and promote from within and handle that, that's not the worst thing in the world. I want to remind you to go to SodaStick.com to get your original Minnesota sports-inspired goods. There are many great designs. Someone on Twitter recently sent their John Randall shirt, and there's the Can't Stop the Thielen hats, the Tecmo Bowl throwback shirt, and much more. All of their apparel is screen-printed here in Minnesota on Super Stops,

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I don't want to be Rick or Mike. Call me George Payton. George is the best guy. Everybody likes George. So I'm going to be George, and I'm going to call you up, and you're my offensive coordinator potential candidate. And I say, all right, well, let me tell you this, Jeremiah. We know what we have in Kirk Cousins.

We know what we got in Delvin Cook. But this Justin Jefferson kid is our ticket. So tell me, offensive coordinator candidate, how are you getting even more out of Justin Jefferson than they just got in a record-setting season? How are you using our meal ticket to greatness? Well, Mr. Payton, I'll tell you this. I'm going to draft a left tackle in the first round so that I can protect Kirk Cousins.

How did I know this was coming? So I can protect Kirk Cousins and allow him more time to throw the ball to Jefferson even more. And then we're going to draft another offensive lineman in the second round. And we're just going to keep doing that until we just have a really good offensive line. Because I really do think that they're going to say, hey, we're going to throw the ball to Jefferson a ton, right? It showed it. But the only reason that they can throw the football to Stephon Diggs a million times in Buffalo is because Josh Allen's got

all day to throw the football to Stephon Diggs up there. Right? If you look at it, the great quarterbacks, Aaron Rodgers, that throws the ball a hundred times to Devontae Adams, has all pro offensive linemen. And so, I mean, it doesn't matter. We could go get I mean, the heavens could open and they could

send down the best offensive coordinator put together from all the pieces of all the dead ones in heaven. It would not matter if we don't have time to throw the football to these superstars. And I know this is get off your horse, Jeremiah, get off the offensive line horse. But it's true. You look at the elite quarterbacks in the NFL. They have elite offensive linemen in front of them. You look at the elite wide receivers, elite offensive linemen blocking for them to get open. And so if I'm the offensive coordinator,

that's my number one priority goal is to sure up this offensive line because you're looking at a vacancy at left tackle, a freaking huge hole at left guard, building with your first round pick who's an average center. Who's going to play right guard? Is it Ezra Cleveland? Are you moving him to tackle? And then you've got to extend your right tackle.

And it all starts up front, and so you have to get that shirt up before you're going to, like, make sure you start talking about these superstars. I'm going to back you up here, actually, on this. Finally. I know I love to give you a hard time about the offensive lineman thing, but just if you give me one second, I'm going to back you up on this because I'm just going to search by pro football focus the lowest guards and centers and pass blocking efficiency and i'm going to find a bunch of vikings for you i mean this this is the like ezra cleveland at

guard uh it didn't work out like i don't i'm i think he's got a lot of potential but it didn't work out he was the 12th worst in terms of pass blocking efficiency. Dakota Dozier was 10th worst. And I mean, this is among all interior linemen. And Garrett Bradbury was in the bottom third of the league in terms of just, did they allow pressures or not on a given play? Like that can't exist. That can't happen because every time it's a big situation,

they're going to pressure you up the middle for the whatever number of the year in a row. And I agree with you. And I think it's a great draft to start addressing that even more. They've poured some assets into it. They put some money into it. They put some draft picks into it, but it's not enough clearly from the results. And what you have here though, and this was part of my list of things that you must have for the next offensive coordinator, was a passing-focused personnel decisions, or however I need to properly grammatically phrase that. But play Brett Jones instead of Dakota Dozier. I know Dozier's faster, but Brett Jones is going to protect against twists and stunts and everything else better. He's a better pass protector. He has been for his full career.

Make a decision to get a third wide receiver. Make decisions around Justin Jefferson that are not just get him the ball, but make everything easier to get him the ball. If there's three receivers that scare the other team on third down, it's easier to get Justin Jefferson the ball. Or if you can't, you don't have only one other guy or Tyler Conklin who you're looking to. No disrespect to Conklin who played well. But you want somebody with a 4-3 to catch that ball and run if you're not going to Justin

Jefferson. And that's where I have a tough time believing they'll do it. But I think it's the right answer. Yeah. And to back you up on that point a little bit, you can really coach offensive line run footwork in the NFL much easier than you can say, hey, this guy's just a very athletic, true pass protector. Like you see guys on tape that's like, man, this guy can pass protect his ass off. He can move left and right.

He uses his hands really well. Not saying he's ready to go and be an all-pro right away, but if you can find a guy that you think, okay, he can pass protect really well, but we're going to have to develop him a little bit more on the run game as an offensive lineman it's much easier to say hey put your foot here put your foot here put your hat here than it is to just have the true natural athletic ability to just pass protect these monsters right and you're going against freak shows on the other side you're going against the mon stars half the time on the other side of the ball and so if you can look at guys in the draft and focus like you said on passing personnel versus hey this guy's a road grader phone book phone booth type guy in the run game like cool great there's

there's a dime a dozen of those guys on the street right now if you want to be an elite offensive lineman you have to be able to pass protect and that starts with coming out of college and start looking at guys and i mean i've started looking more and more. The problem is that the way that the college game is going, the true drop back pass protecting offensive linemen just aren't what they used to be anymore when it comes to it, because the game in college has changed so much. So I want to get to some playoff things we're excited about before we wrap up. But let me just ask you one question. We may have on the first day of the offseason gotten the answer on Kubiak,

and there's many, many questions. What is the question about the Vikings offseason that most intrigues you? You've got all sorts of stuff. We've got the quarterback thing. We've got Daniil Hunter and his contract. I mean, there's just a wide, vast array of wonderfulness for us to talk about what's the one thing that is at the top of your list that you really just want to find out i'm curious what they do with anthony harris i think that's one thing i mean i don't think that you can say oh he took such a huge

step just kick him out the door but at the time, you easily could be in that camp too. I mean, I think it's a very polarizing camp of, well, look, Rick was a genius because he didn't extend Anthony Harris. I think I talked about my hate to see. It's like I hated that he didn't take the jump that he should have this year. Right. I don't think he's a guy that you now just usher out the door and say, that's just another hole we have to fill, right?

Maybe he doesn't get his max contract that he gets, but you can still give him a decent deal because he's a still pretty damn good safety i mean he's not out there as a liability i don't think and so i'd like to see kind of early on in offseason what is their plan with anthony harris are they going to say hey test them agent or test the free agency market and come back we'll give you an offer or hey just see ya or they're going to try extend them beforehand but i think that's a key piece coming back next year that isn't gonna be a huge storyline but it's definitely gonna be something that helps either hold this team in this back end together or it's just gonna be another cog in the wheel that's missing one thing with Anthony Harris is I would love to know and

he wouldn't tell me on a zoom call for sure but how much his job had to change this year would be, I think, a big question that I would love to know. And that, to be honest with you, watching on film is hard to tell as a reporter. I mean, you know this. I mean, you guys don't even know coverages 100% of the time when you're an NFL player or an NFL coach, right? I mean, what were they playing there? What was their assignments there? You don't always know. So I don't want to go out on a limb and say for sure that, Oh, well, his job significantly changed and that's why it looked different.

There were also more missed tackles than I ever would have expected from him. Sometimes guys are playing through injuries and you just don't know, but do you know that he's going to be a solid baseline player? If you bring him back, you, you do. But that's, that's a position to probably try to go on the cheap also when you are still in salary cap trouble so yes um let me what's your what's your biggest one to look at i'm curious well look i mean the quarterback is always i mean right like are you going to draft a quarterback but let's just say that's off the table because that's very unlikely.

But to me, it's Daniel hunting an offensive lineman. Yeah, I know. To me, it's a defense. To me, it's a Daniel Hunter. This actually is, from my understanding, a good draft for offensive lineman in the middle of the first round. So so I am not disrespecting that point. Um, just cause you looked like you wanted to fight me there for a second, but, um, I think it's, you know, with Hunter, his agent leaks out on the first day after he has surgery that he wants to be traded or paid as the highest paid guy. I mean, what a goofball move to do, um, by his agent. I think a bad play, um, but also truth to it, right?

So how are you going to manage that situation? You look at, and maybe this isn't the best comparison because of the teams being different spots, but Khalil Mack was traded from the Raiders to Chicago, and Chicago's made the playoffs a couple times and the Raiders haven't, so I get that. But the Vegas Raiders were not in a spot to pay khalil mac at that point because they weren't ready to win and when miami traded away laramie tunsell

and now drafting third overall what a what a trade but people went like what's your franchise player what are you doing and you think like well you know sometimes these guys when you compare the money that they need not always worth it to what the draft capital coming back is. And so I think Daniil Hunter's at the top of the list. I mean, he's definitely the first thing you've got to say. We talk about building the offense around Justin Jefferson. You've got to build the offense, especially the front, around Daniil Hunter. How do we get so that they're not sliding to him every time?

How do we get him some good pass rushes on whatever tackle we want to pick on that week? So that's definitely a big one because you can build pieces around him, much like on the offensive side. I want to tell you about Blue Wire Hustle, a brand new program where you can host your very own podcast here at Blue Wire. Hustle was created to give everyone the opportunity to take your podcast to the next level. Or if you want to host a podcast and just don't know where to start, Hustle is the perfect

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but those people have been beaten down the football fans of Cleveland. I remember thinking about how long ago this was. I was working at McDonald's when they played their last playoff game as a, I think sophomore in high school was the last time that they, and I missed the games. I was working. And then I came home and went, wait,

what happened? Are you serious serious so love to see it cleveland browns in the playoffs my love to see it is the whiny baby giant that are blaming everybody else under the sun for their six and ten season not getting into the playoffs like you just love you love to see joe judge come out and just be like well i would never do something like that it's like dude win seven games you never have to worry about it like if everyone is seeming like the eagles were just like somehow took this 20 or 12 win team and snubbed them out of the playoffs it's like no dude you were six and ten the eagles are trying to get a better draft pick. Sucks to be you. Deal with it.

So love to see the whiny baby Giants fans, but also love to see Alex Smith, what he's been through. The ability to come back and get into the playoffs and lead that team with all the Dwayne Haskins drama and the Ron Rivera beating cancer and the name change and just everything that could have went wrong for that program and that organization to see what Alex Smith was able to do when he entered the football field there goes hand in hand with that for me. I think that having a professional coach who has a sense for how to do the job um it means a lot like somebody with experience and

character just alone sets you at a baseline of acting like a professional franchise that maybe washington hasn't always had and there are certainly some other teams like detroit and currently the new york giants who do not have coaches that act that way um they act more like they coach florida university or something like that so um my hate to see it is chicago in the playoffs you've got to be kidding me right like what like you you bench trubisky you're horrible with nick foals your offense is garbage you run a handful of play actions against bad defenses with trubisky then you're sold on him for the future i mean what in the world?

Like, Arizona would have been more fun in the playoffs because of Kyler Murray. It stinks that he got hurt and they lose the way that they did, and you just hate to see that entire situation. Yeah, that's such a terrible, like, you just look at it and you're like, really? Like, you guys really did this? Like, they're going to go get dirt stomped in the first round, I think. I could be wrong.

I agree. But I think they absolutely would. Okay, my hate to see it, playoff edition, is the fact that I don't like the matchup of the Colts versus the Bills. You scared? A little nervous. It bothers me. You've got veteran quarterback in Phillip Rivers.

You've got a veteran team with Justin Houston on it. And a lot of guys that have been there done that on the Colts roster, right? You've got a young team in Josh Allen. I know they went to the playoffs last year, but you've got a young team. How do they handle the success that they've had? They've done a great job with it, but everyone who's played in the NFL knows that the playoffs,

everything gets heightened up to another level, man. Everything gets turned up a notch. I mean, these guys aren't playing for their contracts anymore. Everyone takes a pay cut going to the playoffs. Now it's about pride and winning a championship. And I don't like this matchup against the Bills Colts. It gives me a little bit of anxiety. Well, you did see Stephon Diggs destroy Xavier Rhodes in training camp

over and over again. I remember that quite well. So that's – You've got to know Diggs is just going to try and absolutely stick it to him. You just know he is. Those two, every training camp would get in a fight because Diggs would destroy Rhodes and then Rhodes would get upset. But Xavier was one of my favorite guys to cover. He was funny.

He was my locker mate. Yeah, that's right. He was right next to He was funny. He was my locker mate. Yeah, that's right. He was right next to you, yeah. He was my locker mate. He would have some strange – I would have some strange conversations with him while the scrum of TV cameras was chasing around other people like about video games and all sorts of things. But he's – He's a cheap cat. Exactly, exactly.

One of the more aloof people but loved his job and was really obsessed with it. But, you know, nice to see him have a good year because I thought he was really struggling last year in Minnesota. So, well, it'll be great, and you're going to hang around, and we're going to break these games down. And I'm really excited about it. Like you said, we've been watching some bad tape, man. And I also, like, it's been a while since I've been able to just kind of plant myself on the couch and watch football. So I'm excited about that. Your work breaking down 16 of the 17 games this year on tape was phenomenal. Your perspective is great. And I'm just super

glad that we could have this season. And as we do it next year, maybe we'll have some better tape to break down for you. One can hope. One can hope. But I'm excited for playoffs to roll around here. I think it's going to be a really fun playoff. I am not sad about another wild card game. I'm excited about the extra wild card game. More football. More football. I knew it.

I didn't want to, you know, like, okay, the 7C, whatever. I knew once it came, I'd be like, all right, who's playing? Let's go. Let's go. More football. So it'll be great. Thanks, Jeremiah. Absolutely.

See you next week.