The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Examining the parity of the 2021 NFL season with Mike Sando

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Why has this NFL season felt so unpredictable? Where are all the elite teams? Robert Mays and Mike Sando examine why we are experiencing more parity than ever before across the league. They discuss what the numbers tell us, how the quarterbacks are playing a role, the increase in penalties and much more.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the Athletic Football Show. The athletic football show is presented by State Farm. Because like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Get a quote today. Welcome. The Athletic Football Show. Today is Wednesday, December 8th. I'm Robert Mays.

Joining me today is my good friend Mike Sando. Mike, how you doing, man? I am doing well in this, what is it? We into week 14? It can never tell anymore. At a certain point, it all starts to blend together. And we are firmly in that point. When the weeks get into the teens, it's, it's,

done for me until we get to week 1617 because then my fantasy season is locked in and I know that the end of the regular season is coming but we have 12 through week 16 I'm absolutely worthless and we're adding a week 18 oh it's just ridiculous yeah let's let's focus and put it together here we are trying to sort through all this stuff and we're going to try to sort through a lot today so these wednesday shows I like kind of stepping away from the schedule and thinking about the league in kind of a big picture way and one of the conversations that we've been having, everybody, over the last month, over the last six weeks, is, where are the elite teams in the NFL this year? Doesn't it feel wide open in a way that it hasn't

in years past? And as we kept talking about us, think, well, let's just actually explore that. Is it really the case? Why might it be happening? And that's what I wanted to do with you today. I wanted to kind of explore why we seem to be settling into this real parody-filled version of the NFL in 2021 without a lot of clear cut front runners. Obviously, the Patriots win a wild game on Monday night. They've been impressive pretty much every step of the way here over the last six weeks, but they're doing something in a very specific way. It doesn't feel like we have these juggernauts that we have had over the last few seasons. So I wanted to explore that with you a little bit. Yeah, and I've sketched in some thoughts on it. I mean, I always start with what are the most reliable things from

your years. It's usually is offense. And it's usually a lot. led by really good quarterbacks. I think we've had some change among quarterbacks. Certainly if you look at my quarterback tiers, I think we subtracted some guys out. We put some guys in. Deshaun Watson's disappeared. Wilson's been compromised in Seattle by his injury and other stuff. Some of those things that you could just take to the bank, I have felt like this year, okay, I can still take Aaron Rogers and Tom Brady pretty much to the bank. I feel like for the most part, I know they're good.

They may have a bad game here, there, but they're going to be good four to five weeks just like for the last 10 years. But the amount of those guys is starting to shrink, right? And maybe that's an era shifting. I mean, there's so many different considerations with why that might be the case. Yeah, but I think that's part of it. And we'll get into that as we explore. I've got a little bit more on that.

But I think there's also some, you know, some random distribution of teams and how it goes from year to year. We have this expectation, I think, based on what we know is happening in the league. Okay, we know that people are passing more, that offense, the rules have gone this way. We know that's where the trend line is. And if we, if we zoom out and look at it, that's where it's going. But we sort of assume within that that it's going to be every year on top of the previous year. Yeah, just keeps going up and up and up in the same direction.

And it's sort of like when you put money aside into your 401K, hopefully. That sounds nice. I wish I had one of those. Yeah. But you go crazy. I mean, I'm old enough to remember the day the 1987 stock market crashed. My dad was pacing. We didn't have a lot of money, but what we had was dad had some money in there.

I mean, he was frantically walking around back and forth in the kitchen. I'm like, are we going to have to move or what? You know, it wasn't that bad. I mean, but if you live in the day-to-day moment of this, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to die. And I think this year, we're assuming this trend line just going to keep going. and this is a little bit of a dip in the market. And over the five year and 10 year long-term outlook, it's the same. But within that, you're going to have a bare market.

You're going to have a year that feels down. And there could be reasons for that. And maybe that's what it is. So let's just start with the landscape. Because I want to first address, is this really happening? Do the numbers say that we do have a vacuum of elite teams, that things are tighter than they've been in years past? And the answer is yes.

Right? So if you look at just the results, ESPN.com had a story about this last week. I thought this number was fascinating. Heading into week 13, 25 games had been decided on the final play of the game, which is the most since the merger. So all those wild endings and all these close games

that you think you're watching, you're actually watching them. This year, 25 teams have at least five wins through 13 weeks. That's three more than last year. 22 teams right now. According to 538, have at least a 10% chance of making the playoffs. 13 weeks, it's December. It's the first week of December and 22 teams have 10% is not nothing.

10% is an icicles chance in hell. You absolutely can do that. And now you look at it even further beyond just how tight it is in the middle and how many teams are within striking distance, there are no elite teams in the NFL. That is real. Aaron Schatz gave me this number today, which I sincerely appreciate, from football outsiders. Tampa Bay is currently number one in DVOA.

Overall, 28.7% DVOA. That is the second lowest mark for a league leader 13 weeks into the season of the DVOA era, which goes back 35 years. Wow. 2016 Cowboys are the only team that led the league in DVOA this deep into the year and were lower. And think about that 2016 season.

That Falcons team that was 500, halfway through the year, rumbled through the playoffs. they ran through it without any sort of issue. That's how tight and up for grabs the NFC was that season. So the season that you're watching right now is diluted. It is watered down. So I did a little bit of a proxy for this.

And I took all the teams in the last 20 years through week 13. I just did a net EPA per game. So what that means is the 2007 Patriots were a plus 22 points a game in net EPA. Offense team and special teams, right? That means they're winning by 20%. 22 points a game, basically, okay? And so if you stack these 702 teams and, you know, going back to since, so whatever, 2000, the first time you see a 2021 team is in the 23rd slot.

And that's the Bills, who obviously last night wasn't great for them or two nights ago, if you're listening to this later. But on the whole for this season, they've been, I think, plus 12. net EPA per game. So there's 23 teams you have to get to before you get any teams from this season. And that's what we're talking about because if you have a huge net EPA differential, you're winning by a lot of points per game. And we're not having as many teams this year from this season that are up there. All right. So if we've established that, if we've established that the elite teams aren't here, that it is diluted at the top, that it is more wide open. I want to talk about

why. Like, what are the reasons this might be happening this year? And I want to start with something that you kind of alluded to earlier in the show. I want to start with offense because if you look at just football success over the last several years, it's mostly tied to offense. We know that offense is more consistent from year to year. We know that offense has the players you can rely on the most. You talked about the quarterbacks and that's it. When you look at the elite teams, you're typically looking at the teams that are scoring

the most. And right now, scoring is down. that trend line that we talked about has taken a slight dip. So a few stats that I think really kind of shine a light on that. Last year, there were six teams at this stage of the year that were above 0.1 EPA per play on offense. Six. This year, there are three. Over the course of last year, there were five teams that had a 15% or higher DVOA on offense.

This year, there's one. If you go to points, last year, nine teams averaged at least 28 points per. game. There are five teams at 30 points per game. This year, six have tops 28 and one is averaging 30 points per game. So it's real. Points per game, counting stats, traditional numbers, advanced numbers. Offense just is not at the same level in 2021 that it has been over the last couple years. And I'm curious why you think that might be. You know, one of the things that I always look at just to not get too complex is just who's playing quarterback. And I think we, we lost 16 starts of Philip Rivers. We lost 16 starts of Deshawn Watson, 12 starts of Drew Brees,

which weren't amazing, but certainly seemed amazing compared to what the Saints are putting on the field now. Their offensive production was extremely high. They were one of the most efficient offensive teams in the league last year. Yep, they could actually do that. Now, we did get Dak Prescott back, but remember to this point in the season, Dak played five or six games last year and was good. So we hadn't lost a whole season of DAC. So that's part of it. Now, look also at the equation of rookie quarterbacks. Yeah. Last year, Justin Herbert and Joe Burrow were the week one starters. Excellent players. I mean, we wanted to see more.

That's so true. I didn't even think about that. Elvated their teams. And then Tua got some run later in the year. So Tua came in, but it wasn't really, you know, it wasn't the whole run of the season. And Miami was pretty efficient with Fitzpatrick last year when he was in. I mean, they were much better on offense than you might have expected. Yes, absolutely. So this year we put in Mac Jones and that's been good, but not like in a featured way where they're where he's throwing the ball. all the time. He's just done a really nice job. But Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields, Davis Mills, whether because their situations are bad, which we know they are in some situations, whether because they're not as good as Herbert and Burrow, which could be the case, whatever, just bottom line results, stats, those guys are getting a lot of play this year and they

weren't last year. And instead, last year, we had those other guys like a Rivers, like a, like a Sean Watson in there really putting up some. some good numbers. So I think that hurts too and is maybe a little unique to this year that we just happen to have a bunch of quarterbacks come in that aren't doing great. I also feel like there are some situational factors that have shifted over the last year. The silent stadiums last year, that's real. That gives offenses an advantage. So you have offenses playing the entire season last year on the road in quiet stadiums. Communication, your ability to check into things. I feel like that really allowed a lot of offenses to settle in, be comfortable, no matter where they're

playing no matter who they were playing against. So that goes away. And last year, 23.7 offensive points per game on the road. This year, it's 21.8. And that is still the second best since 2011. That's not terrible, but it's two points per game on offense down from last year. That's a big deal. That's a huge drop. That's a huge drop. So that, that's great. I love that. And then you look at it. I'm sure you'll love this. Games were officiated differently last year. That offensive explosion, last year coincides with a huge drop in things like holding penalties. There are 1.8 holding penalties per game on offense last year. This year it's back up to 2.54.

That may not seem like a lot, but that's one sabotage drive per game in a sport where maybe you're going to get eight, nine drives over the course of a game. That stuff starts to add up over time. So I think that that's one area. And there are a few schematic ones that I also want to look into. Is there anything on that side that you feel like, we should add. There's some kind of quieter factors that you think of an important.

Yeah. No, I think those are the main ones. The officiating one is a big deal. And that's something that's controllable for the league. That's something to watch for in the future because the league wants the scoring to keep going. And this so we could see that could be a variable that they figure out, oh, okay, we have a little control with a dial here. Maybe we need to get in between 1.8 and 2.5. And that's what I felt like they were doing last year, right?

Because there wasn't a preseason. There wasn't as much practice time. you didn't have an off season for everybody. It's like, all right, let's make sure these games aren't ugly and unwatchable early in the season and keep the flags in the pockets and let guys play on offense. Defense, we're not letting them do anything. But I do think that was a conscious choice last year. So the other part of this that I thought has a real impact is that defenses, in my opinion,

over the last two seasons, really. And last year it was harder to see because of the factors we're talking about that were slanted toward the offense. defenses have become more conservative in the NFL over the last couple years, considerably more conservative when you look at the three-year trends. Last year, teams played man coverage on 30.8% of their snaps. This year, it's 27.5. It's a 3% drop in man coverage. From two years ago, it's a 7% drop, 6.8 over a 2-year span.

If you look at blitzing, last season, teams blitzed on 28%. 0.4% of dropbacks. This year, it's 25.3% of dropbacks. So these little tiny tweaks of the dial where teams are toning down the aggressiveness a little bit, I feel like has led to a style of defense where coordinators around the league are saying, we're going to make you beat us. We are not going to give you these chunk plays down the field. The perfect example to me is how teams are playing the chiefs and the bills and the Rams to a certain extent, right? We talk about all the two high coverages, but it's really the too high coverages plus not sending extra bodies. We're going to make you bite this off in little chunks all the way down the field.

And I think that that approach has defanged some of these super explosive elite offenses that we've seen over the last few seasons. Those types of passing games are just harder to come by right now because of the way the league has drifted defensively over the last couple years. absolutely even like the second half of last season and someone of this year for a russell wilson he's been such a great big play quarterback but now hey you know what you know there's like a lag time it's kind of like oh yeah marshall lynch hasn't been there for a long time and now chris carson sir oh wait a minute we don't really care if you try to run the ball Pete talking about it all the time doesn't will it into existence. No, no. But I mean, it's just so that that's part of, I think that's a huge part of it.

We've written and talked about that a lot. You can see that happening that, there was, I mean, some of these games are being won with one or lost with few explosive plays in the past game. I mean, from these teams that you should just have it going all the time. We're waiting for the chief's offense. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Normally it would have bounced back.

Is it going to? In the explosiveness that it was before? I don't know that it is this year. And then you look at Buffalo. And Buffalo is a team that was in the top five in efficiency metrics last year. I want to say they're 13th or 14th on offensive DVOA this year.

It's not a disaster, but it's not what we expect from them. It's not this high-flying firework show that we thought they might be. And there just aren't many of those teams this year. And you look at it along with the man coverage and just lack of, pressure and blitzing this year.

Two high coverages on early downs. That's what it is to me. If the lack of early down explosiveness from some of these offenses who were feasting on it over the last few seasons, over the last two years, 2019 through 13 weeks, the average NFL team had seen 105 dropbacks of two high zones on early downs. This year, it's 128. That may not seem like a lot, but that's a 22% increase over the last two years. And those are just too high coverages.

That's not too high shells rotating down. So you have those cutting crossers. You have bodies back there. So I think that all of that has lent to just a lack of efficiency and explosiveness on early downs. Last season, six teams had a drop-back EPA a point two or higher on early downs in the NFL. This year, there are zero. There are none. Those types of teams just don't exist in 2021.

And I think that's why you don't see these Uber elite offenses right now. And I remember when we were doing stories about the record offenses in the past couple years. If you looked at it, all of the gains that were being made were on early downs. There was a huge inefficiency there because forever, everyone has been taught in football, stop the run. Devenile coordinators have nightmares about being run on all game. Like last night, that's why Sean, like Monday night, that's why Sean McDurn is so chippy. it like it eats at your soul.

It's the worst. It's the absolute worst if you're like a tough guy defensive coordinator. To just have some, it is, it is your big brother holding you down in the couch and just giving you a continuous nougy. It's not going to kill you. You know,

it's not, it shouldn't even be, but it's humiliating. And you just want to get out of there so bad. And so I think there's been huge, offenses have exploited that inefficiency better in recent years. And it's taken a while. And I think talking about the too high and all this different stuff,

I think defenses are now going, okay, all right, wait a minute. We're not going to fall for that to the same degree. Those margins are going to be closed and cleaned up a little bit. You look at some of the things, and I haven't done the research on this, but I know this is from talking to coaches. Some of them feel like, you know, defenses, whether it's just through having more experience or just being wiser, are probably a little bit better about playing RPO's,

or probably a little bit better about some of the motion wrinkles and things that help to create advantages. You're a little bit better on those. And I think when you, if a defense can account for some of that window dress, some of those things that help an offense get more bang for their buck, football can be reduced more to blocking and tackling. And I don't think offensive lines have suddenly gotten good in the last two, gotten better in the last two or three years. three, four years ago, every story going into the season, a lot of them were the decline of offensive line play.

I wrote one. I remember spending a lot of time on it. I remember too. I can remember the same thing, researching. I did a bunch of research on it, and by the time I was going to write it, I didn't write it because the offenses started perking up. I still have all the research, but it was like they didn't just suddenly start practicing offensive line play and got good at it.

These other things were helping to minimize the importance of it, whether it's an RPO or or play action on early downs. Maybe we're back to offensive lines. I was going to do this. This would be fun to look at. Are PFF grades for offensive lines down this year from the past? Or just anything that's an independent, you know, Brian Berks win rates and all of that.

I would love to know year over year if those have come down. It could be a good thing to look at. I'm curious if the aggregate is true because I think that the quarterback play there matters, right? I saw a stat today that Tristan Worf's hasn't given up a pressure in like six games or something stupid like that. And we were talking with Mitchell on Tuesday's podcast just about how easy it is relatively to play offensive line for Tom Brady. But those guys no longer exist.

Like the Philip Rivers is and Drew Breezes and the guys that are retiring, it's harder to play for some of these more athletic play extending quarterbacks who aren't going to be getting rid of the ball in two and a half seconds, who aren't going to be dropping to the same point on every single play and getting rid of the ball in a predictable manner. So I think that totally makes sense. And now if we're playing more zone, then we have eyes on the quarterback for when he's going to beat you on the scramble, right? Yes. That's another advantage for some of these, you know, on defense, if you're facing Lamar Jackson or somebody who's going to run, not even has to be like him.

It could be anybody. It could be Josh Houn. It could be Russell Wilson. Heck, probably half the quarterbacks can run for a first down or maybe more. It's a lot. I mean, Mahomes is not athletic. And he led the NFL in Scramble Yardage last year because of every time a team play, man coverage against them on third down, he made them pay. Yeah. So I don't know if scramble, I haven't looked if scramble yards is way down or something, but it just makes sense that you've got your eye on that guy a little bit more now if you're playing more zone.

I totally agree. And just zone makes quarterbacks work. Like that is, the long and the short of it is that it's harder for quarterbacks. It's at a certain point, there's going to be guys open, but you need to be patient and you need to be considered. And there just aren't as many easy buttons right now, in my opinion, with offensive of football as there was in 2017, 2018, 2019.

When you think about that game, the Monday night game between the Rams and the Chiefs. I already knew the game you're talking. You said that game I already knew. It felt like a sea change, right? It felt like this was when everything was going to shift and this is what football was going to be like. And the Rams were the perfect example to me of a team that was

just smashing the easy buttons. They had the motions. They had the play action. They had all these different ways to give the game to their quarterback and clear up the picture and make and take the load off of him. Well, if you look at the way the defenses are structured now, even like a simple jet motion, when you would rock your safeties down because you're playing single high, you were

showing what coverage you were in and showing how you were going to do it. Now, if you're static against those motions, you're not giving information away. It's just something little like that. And also those coverages are better against play action because you're dropping down into crossing routes. So motion, play action, all of those things that were lifting offenses are less effective if you're going to start playing like this. And such the wheel goes around.

Like that's how the world turns in football. But we're in this interesting point in the cycle, I think, where offenses have dipped down a little bit because of the reaction the defenses have had. It can be very interesting. Just think, well, maybe Tom Brady and Rogers are going to play forever. But as we subtract these things that are the sure things that are the known things. And like we said, rivers went out, breezed out. They were known things, especially breeze.

It was really known things. So it could become even more volatile down the road. Another one that a factor that is not as fun to talk about, not nearly as fun to talk about, is injuries. And obviously there are injuries every single year, right? I mean, that's just a going concern when you're thinking about the NFL. But often when you're looking at injuries over the course of an entire season, teams that get absolutely decimated are teams that are usually at the bottom of the standings

when it's all said and done. Like if you lose a lot, think of the Niners. over the last couple of years, right? A team that went healthy is competitive and is dangerous. But they've gotten so torn up by injuries that they're picking in the top 10, top 12. But now you look at the teams that have been the most injured teams in football this year. And the two examples that jump out to me are Baltimore and Tennessee, right? These are division leaders who are the two most injured teams in the entire NFL.

So if we're talking about why there's a vacuum at the top, I don't know if Marcus Peters, Derek Henry, A.J. Brown, Julio Jones, Gus Edwards, J.K. Dobbins, Ronnie Stanley. If all these guys stay healthy, I don't know if the Ravens and Titans are 13 or 14 win teams. But I do know without those guys, they absolutely take a step down in the pecking order. And that's why you see this kind of cloudy picture now in the AFC, in part because their legs have been cut out from under them. And also think of it, those teams are unique in another way and that they're heavily schemed up over producers offensively. Yes.

If you look at Tennessee, the last few years, you're like, God, how are they doing this? They're like, their numbers on early down passes, by the way, when I was looking at it was absolutely insane. Yeah, we were wondering how it can continue and wondering, okay, is this the year that it falls off? Oh, we didn't feel like forever sustainable. With Baltimore, a little bit of the same.

I mean, they've been excellent, but there was already a little bit of a coming down from the absolute peak. when they really had it going. And so I don't know that those two teams were going to last forever at peak efficiency, indistinguishable on a stat sheet from Kansas City, Green Bay, right? If those Kansas City and some of these other ones are coming down, certainly these were going to, and they might have anyway. Then you throw in the injuries and it's completely different.

Even Green Bay. You know, Green Bay's offense has still been very, very good this season, but they've dealt with offensive line injuries. They've had one game where Aaron Rogers didn't pull. way. So they've had to worry about some guys out of the lineup as well. And I think that that limits your ceiling. Even if we think they're going to be good moving forward, those numbers in the long term over the course of the first 13 weeks are not as high because they've had some little blips. Think about the Arizona game when they didn't have any receivers. I mean,

there are these little moments even for these elite teams this year. That was their, that was their New England Baltimore, or New England Buffalo game, you know, the outlier game where you're going. But I think Aaron Rogers is such is such an equalizer. The Packers have sub. in a lot of people on their offensive line and they've hit on a lot of those guys. They've done a good job in their scouting of them and development. But I think some of those players they plugged in could be fairly or not perceived as a weakness if they had a different quarterback in there. I think Rogers is that good and that important to what they do that it can cover for

some of that and smooth the transition and get it out and play to any game plan, any tempo. The Rams game plan was masterful. I mean, it was absolutely, it was a master class in how you always. overcome a talent deficiency against a really good front. Yeah, it was amazing. I was at that game. It was really incredible. And then I think you look at one other example that I feel like is worth mentioning here.

The Bucks injuries on defense. When you have injuries that are concentrated in one area of your roster, the Bucks are still a good defense or eighth in defensive BBA. But if Carlton-David-Bunting play for a good chunk of the season, are they third? Are the Bucks a one-loss team? I feel like that's another example of a team that's been sapped of its eliteness, for lack of a better term, overall, because of a very concentrated set of

injuries. It's not an excuse. Every team has injuries, but if we're trying to explain why there are fewer elite teams, these are some of the reasons. Yep, I agree. And I think it's a very unusual year. I mentioned Seattle, they're very unusual for them to be a four and eight team. Russell Wilson's finger injury. That's never happened before. They've had all their injuries at running back. I think their offense is much worse than we would have thought. I mentioned to Sean Watson earlier, too. I mean, that's just unprecedented. precedent thing in the league that you have a top five quarterback just leave in his prime. I mean, those two things, you know, are pushing the scale the other way, too.

Talk about the lack of elite teams and why the top is maybe a step down. I want to talk about a couple of the reasons that the bottom may be a couple steps up, because that's the other side of this, right, is that we have so many teams sitting in that five, six win range that still have a shot at this. And I think that that's worth exploring too. And one of the theories I have about that and why we have so many teams that just feel competitive. And you have really good perspective on this.

So I'm curious what you think. I truly believe after watching certain teams around the league and after talking to coaches that coaching right now in the NFL might be as good as it's ever been. Like the baseline level of coaching, especially on offense, just feels like it's at a ridiculously

high level where there are very few teams where you watch their offense outside of the rookie quarterbacks and you're like, that's a broken system. Like there's no way that's going to work. There's only a handful of that. How do you feel about that just like in general? I think I definitely agree that we're not having, it's less about what offensive system the guy wants to run. I think that was always that dominated the conversation of, oh, they're running the West

Coast offense. okay so here's what you need to run it and we know what we're running this offense we have our system it's our belief system we're doing and i think we're we're beyond that to where that would be the exception now and when you see someone try to just stick with their offense they better get really good players because otherwise they're not going to maximize their personnel so i agree on that that part of coaching which is what coaching should always be about i think it's getting back to that i think it got away from that probably in the through the idea of the system, the Bill Walsh had a system.

That's what you're going to have, you know. I feel like in a lot of ways, Bill Walsh and Peyton Manning ruined offensive football in the NFL. Right? I mean, if you look at just the shoddy knockoffs of what they wanted,

other teams wanted after watching the West Coast offense and after watching the way that Peyton Manning played quarterback, I think there were a lot of really bad imitations. And we had this idea in our heads of this is how you play the position. And now those ideas have shifted so much. And I think that the team in the landscape right now that really is a shining example of this idea is the Eagles, right? I think that there is a world where this

Eagles team has currently constructed with a rookie head coach with a second year quarterback is one of the worst offenses in football. If you try to construct this in a very specific way, if you're Nick Siriani, I think this could be a bottom five team. But their pivot at about the five or six week mark into what they are now. They're 12th in EPA per play because they've looked at what they have and said, all right, we're going to tailor around his strengths. We're going to lean into this very specific type of offense where we're running it. We have all these different kinds of runs leaning into that creativity.

Their willingness to do that has put them on the doorstep of making the playoffs. And I think that's a huge reason why is because there's a willingness to have that flexibility and to kind of share ideas. And there's a lot of different reasons. But I think they're the team that really speaks to that the most for me. I think the hard part about what makes it hard to do that is in your gut, you know that's not how you're going to build a championship team. Yeah.

And so you're really making a compromise to get to nine and eight. And I think most people do have correctly a vision for how we're going to play if we're going to be a championship team. And you're going to have to be reasonably proficient in a drop back past game. and it's probably not going to look like Philly looks. You're doing what you do if you're Philly because you can't do the other thing that you need to do to really, truly get over the top. But you're doing the best thing for you right now.

So the question is for how long do you sign up for that? And I think the other team that's a really good example of that is the dolphins. Right? Like this Mickey Mouse offense that the dolphins are running, I don't know what it looks like in the long term. I have no idea if it is. best for who they want to be 18 months from now. But over the last six weeks,

Tua is 11th in dropback EPA play because of the way he runs that offense. I just think that overall, in the entire league, there are fewer square pegs in round holes. There are fewer coaches who are trying to just slam their heads against the wall and saying, this is who we're going to be our personnel and what's best for us in the moment be damned. Like you said, I don't know what that means for their long. term trajectory, a long-term outlook.

But I do think in the short term, that has made every offense, with some exceptions, dangerous in their own right, dangerous in specific moments. And that's why you have so many teams that are five and seven. And the key for it for a team like Philadelphia is, okay, now let's try to grow in those areas so that we don't have to be this way all the time. So that you know, you can now maybe on your terms grow the drop back game a little bit. But not all at once, not just all trying. You can't try to be this week one through 12 Stafford Rams.

That's just not going to work. You're all going to be fired after one year. So there has to be a balance in there where you do what's best for you right now to be competitive and try to grow into something that you think can actually get you over the top. I also think that, and this is one thing that coaches bring up all the time, when you talk to coaches on both sides of the ball. the way that ideas travel in the coaching world right now is unlike it's ever been, which makes a lot of sense, right?

Just think about technology. If you want to cue up anything in the world, any football play in the NFL that happened on a Sunday, you can do it in two seconds. So the world has become flat. Like the world of football ideas, there are no barriers to taking something that works. So I just feel like that has led to an adaptability and creativity throughout the league that has given more teams, more options. It's also led to a certain uniformity, right?

Oh, yeah. Because of that. But I also think that it just allows you to find stuff that works for you. Again, just fewer coaches that are stubborn in that way. It annoys the hell out of the coaches who come up with something, didn't see it on seven other teams the next week. But I remember years ago doing a story on a guy when I was a Seahawks beat reporter on a guy who was, he was their kind of film guy, right?

and they were just bringing in the systems with all this video. And I was talking to him stories about what it was like because they used to get film actually developed on reels. He said, Al Davis would take out, there'd be missing plays when they did the film exchange. You would get the Raiders film and there'd be two trick plays and a two-minute drive missing. You never got to see them.

You couldn't go in. I mean, people are complaining about what game pass looks like now. That would have been an absolute dream back in the day when Al Davis was taking plays out of the 16-month. millimeter film and you never saw them. I was talking to Vance Joseph about this a couple weeks going out. I was in Arizona. If you have not read the story, I wrote about the Cardinals.

I would encourage you to go check it out. I think it's kind of interesting. I enjoyed writing it. So I was talking to him about this and he was just saying that, you know, there was a time 10, 15 years ago maybe, where coaches around the NFL, offensive coaches, they would just call plays. Like, that's what they did. You'd call plays from a sheet that had a certain homogeneity to it and it wasn't

that interesting and he's like all right this is the play we're going to call here and now because of how these ideas are shared and because of i think sort of youthful energy that's been injected into the n-fo coaching world look at what this eagle's coaching staff looks like for example just in terms of age and background and all that you have offensive coaches that know the defensive rules in and out it's not just throwing plays against the wall and saying this feels like it'll work here it's plays constructed and called to specifically snap the rules that make up NFL defenses. And that's possible because of how these ideas are shared now. So I think that that's just how the landscape and the feeling and the temperature of football

coaching is in this moment. And that's why you have so many offenses that reach a baseline level of competency, even if you have all these other factors that are depressing what the best offenses look like this season. Yep. And I think those things were true, X-this information-wise, two years ago or a year ago when the offenses were doing better. But we might have gotten to a point where defenses have realized they had to do something. I mean, they actually had to change because it was getting out of hand.

I think the worst offenses are better right now than they were five years ago. I think the best offenses are worse than they were two years ago. And I think that's what's kind of created this crowded middle in a certain way. And for the exact reasons we said, it's like, teams are not going to sit there and blitz the Rams. They're just not going to do it. They are going to make them bite off those little chunks. So I feel like if you're pushing it down at the top and pushing it up at the bottom, that's where you have this sandwich of NFL teams where you have 22 teams with a 10% chance of making the playoffs.

Yeah. Yep. It's fascinating. Is there anything else that you feel like is worth mentioning? I feel like you've got some thought about just the pure randomness that could lead to this and how none of it actually means anything. Yeah, but it feels like I feel like we know what this season is going to be like. I would be surprised if suddenly the offenses just had a huge uptick.

Don't you think we've seen enough this year to say, like, what would they do? What are they going to come up with? What are the chiefs going to, do you think the chiefs are going to hit stride this year and score 30 points a game down the stretch at some point? No. Like a month ago, I would say, yeah, maybe. It feels like if things are happening too many times week after week, that I'm not sure there's a correction snapping out of it consistently for some of these teams.

And that's a little different than I would have thought at one point earlier in the air. So we'll see. Just think about time, right? Think about how many Chiefs drives we watched from 2018 to last season that were four plays and lasted 48 seconds. those drives have vanished for a lot of these teams. You just don't see those sorts of monster chunk plays that lead to quick scoring drives. I think if you're looking at it in the big picture, and this may be an oversimplification, but if the running game is going to come back, if that is going to be a huge part of what makes great offense is great,

if defenses are going to play this style, then even if offenses are efficient and good, they're still not scoring 35. points a game just because it takes longer to score. So I think that may be the world we're walking into here. If that is how offenses are going to correct, then first we have some teams that built the wrong way that are going to have a hard time shifting. But also, it's still going to make these games a little uglier and a little bit closer just because scoring is still going to be down a little bit. I was looking at this earlier in the context of something with Cleveland, a team that's not

scoring. And so I, for some reason, I'd pulled up, like, offensive points per game since week six. I don't know why I was doing that. But like, the Colts are at 32. Tampa's at 30. And I was like, huh. The two most efficient rushing offenses in the league over that. I was thinking, I'm sure some of its opponent, you know, they played whatever this team. Cincinnati is actually third than New England. Cincinnati's a little bit of a surprise. But they're all at 29. But when you when you start talking about those teams, you're talking about. about some balance to them. You know, like, is that what I was talking about earlier?

When you strip away the wind addressing and the bells and whistles, you strip away the, you take off the lift shoes that make you two inches taller. And now we're just all standing there barefoot. And we don't have any weapons in our hands. You find out who can do the basics, right? Just blocking, man. It's just who's blocking better.

I no longer have a bottle I can hit you over the head with. I have to actually overpower you. And now I can't. And Indy maybe can. That's why Indy's very interesting to me. I totally agree. We put the clip out today on Twitter just about how I think that they're right there in the AFC because of that exact reason.

I was talking to a defensive coordinator last week. And we were having this discussion just about the running game and its place and playing against teams and how there are certain teams or it's like, I just don't believe they're going to run it. If I give them the boxes, I just don't believe over the course of an entire game, they have the commitment to it or the ability to do it. But when you play it, and he mentioned the bucks, like when you play a team like the bucks, there's just no good answer. Like you ultimately do want to make them run the ball because you don't want to let Tom Brady beat you, but they can also do that. So those are the teams right now that you fear the most based on how the league looks, is the teams that have an answer no matter what you're throwing at them.

And I think that there aren't that many teams that fall into that category because there aren't enough teams that have caught up to that idea. We're still kind of coming out of this phase. We're passing as all that matters. And so you have teams that we expected to be incredibly elite offenses that can't get there because they're not built to be balanced. Yes. And everyone knows that the knock on Andy Reid is that he won't do it.

He won't do it enough. And how could you blame him when you have the weapons that they have? when you look at those teams that will, I put Indian there, I put New England in there, I put Green Bay in there. Yes. To an extent.

Their run game has not been as efficient this year, but they will do it. They will do it. Tampa will do it. I don't know how far Philly's going to go, but they'll obviously do it. I don't know if the Rams will do it or can do it or want to do it. I thought that last week was a good indication

that they are willing to lean on it if they need to. Like Sony and Michelle getting 25 carries in that game, and I'm just saying, fuck it, we're going to come out in 12 person, and we're going to hammer you. I think that that is a good club to have in your bag if you're Sean McVeigh. Will Arizona?

Yes. I agree. Arizona is just the perception of Kingsbury and all of this. And you wrote about Vince Joseph. They're a very interesting team to me. It takes a long time for the perception to change in people's minds. But that's a very interesting team. We know Tennessee will if they, if they're able to, if they have enough people on the field.

So I agree. I'm with everybody else. the passing games where it's at and you have to be most efficient there. But I also believe that the raw stats, I love EPA. I use it all the time. I never use EPA to like tell how good we are in the run. I just feel like it doesn't capture fully what I want to say about the role of the run. God, just speak of my language there.

I'm just not sure. Like it doesn't pass the smell test for me. Like I know the importance is in between what the numbers say and what it actually is. And what history says, what 1975 football says it is, there's something there that we haven't been able to quantify properly that is going to help some of these teams and is helping some of these teams. And like the discussion that was had and Mitchell Schwartz was in the middle of it, passing the football is stressful. It is stressful for the quarterback. There's decisions that have to be made. It's stressful for the offensive line. You have to do it. You have to do it well. But there is this balance in there. There is this relief when you can run the ball and have it not kill your drives.

Yeah. It is really, really valuable. When Carson Wentz finishes a game with 22 passes and no one's talking about him that week. And they just won by 14 points. How good is that? I was talking to a play calling head coach about this recently, and he said it's about running it when you have to run it. It's about that. That's it. You don't have to be a team that lines up and runs it 45 times and throws it three times like the Patriots did yesterday.

We know that running is less efficient than passing, but when you have to run it, can you do it? I think that that's such a huge part of this. I don't want to get too far down this road because I actually do think I want to have a larger conversation about that idea on one of these shows here very soon. Yep. I've been thinking through that, like what's the best way to engage that subject?

It's sort of like it just takes a while to be able to express exactly what you're saying. But I think we're on the same path there that I would much rather be one of these teams that can. If the chiefs had the Colts running game right now, they'd be averaging 30 points a game every week and they'd win the Super Bowl, period. All right. Well, over the last 45 minutes, we just solved why the NFL is the way that it is this year and it's a very strange season that we're dealing with. Mike Sandow very much appreciate the time, sir. Please tell everyone where they can listen to you on this feed.

Absolutely on Saturday, Randy Mueller, the former GM and NFL executive of the year and I, you know, try to hold, uphold the high standard that you said on the show. And if you, if you catch us on a Saturday, you'll get our picks and the reflection on the Thursday game and, and a lot of fun from especially Randy, someone who's been in the league and can at least tell you how they think. So please go check out the football GM. Please go check out all the work that Mike does. What did you write this week?

Well, I wrote my pick six column. It's trying to stack the AFC. I actually did two versions. One was if the Patriots won and one was if the bills won because I knew that this could be a wild game. There's a huge swing on that. And then I think for Friday, I'm going to revisit my preseason

execs worries for every team. It's a little bit of an accountability. Hey, were these worries really the thing to worry about? It's kind of fun to look back and see what they were. In a lot of cases, they really were the worries. And in some, they were not the worries. Guys, please go check that out. I also wrote this week.

So if you want to subscribe to The Athletic and that was a good time to do it, Theathetic.com slash football show. If you could do me a favor, go leave a review of the show on Apple Podcasts, if that's where you listen. I would really appreciate that as well. It's that time of year. you know, people are feeling all warm and fuzzy. If you like the show, let us know.

That would mean a lot to me. We will be back tomorrow with Lindsay Jones and with our weekly team visit with one of our athletic writers. Until then, appreciate you guys listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow. This was the Athletic Football Show.