The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - How the Rams & Bengals have evolved with Ollie Connolly, Seth Galina & Diante Lee

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

What is different about the 2021-22 Rams than the Rams who made a Super Bowl run in 2018-19? What about Matthew Stafford makes such a difference? What role does the Bengals defense and their defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo play in their success? Robert Mays broadcasts LIVE from Radio Row at Super Bowl LVI and welcomes The Guardian's Ollie Connolly to dig into the Bengals' D + PFF's Seth Galina and Diante Lee to dissect the Los Angeles Rams of the recent past and present and how each team playing in the Super Bowl has evolved over time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the Athletic Football Show. Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. Today's Tuesday, February 8th. I'm Robert Mays. Coming to you live from Radio Row at the Los Angeles Convention Center. We are at the Super Bowl or at the Super Bowl host city at the very least. We're going to be coming to you guys from here all week. Super excited about everything we have coming your way.

We're going to have my normal co-hosts, the normal people that you love listening to on the show, combined with some outside guests that we're thrilled to be chatting with. Cannot believe we're here, but very excited to dig into everything that the week has to offer. Before we do that, though, someone who I really, really love reading on football, and especially this year has done so much great work, is Ali Connolly from the Guardian and from the read-optional newsletter. And he happens to be the world's foremost Lou Anerumo stand, which those people exist. And he is the leader in the clubhouse.

he is the president of the fan club. Ali, thank you for digging into this very specific band of knowledge that I can tap into with you here. Thank you. Yes, it's me. It's Mrs. Aniromo.

There's probably A-Bar in Staten Island somewhere where his buddies get together on Sundays, hope for the best. So the first thing I wanted to ask you, how did you start getting interested and really digging into the Bengals defense? Like, why did he and his work

and this unit start to peak your interest? There was nothing specific. the jump out where I was like I must focus on them. I've written this all year as it relates to him. You know, he has been the architect of some truly terrible defenses. They were brutal last year. Specifically in terms of just like what you would see

is obvious coaching outside of schematic sex. And it was blown coverages. If you could just go in sharp, blown coverages as teams would in the off season. I mean, his groups have been just brutal in that department. So I didn't go in from that standpoint. I mean,

the Ravens game first set me off. They did some really interesting stuff in terms of rotating and moving coverages. So I went back through the previous five weeks. And I saw how he'd steadily built the thing almost towards that point where they had been really bland and vanilla for the first month of the season. Yet every single week he was adding some kind of new wrinkle that was specifically in vogue where the kind of evolutionary cycle of the league was going, that he was pinching stuff from what everyone else was doing from college on up through the NFL. and that kind of all fit together in that Ravens game in a really interesting way. And so from then I just kind of was tracking them every week to see what he was doing.

And that kind of style just evolved them more throughout the air where every week there would be something that was brand new, not something that was a tweak on a package that we're doing a new formation blitz. It was as if he said, I have 14 things I know we do great. And every week we now have time to really focus on one new tweak that we'll do. So if you had, let's take a step back and kind of go back. to when it was a little bit more vanilla and even last year. What would you say were the overarching kind of dominating themes or principles of the Bengals defense through week four of this season?

Vanilla coverages. I mean, what they had installed in those first four weeks was kind of the, I'd say the bedrock for what they became, which they just became more movement-oriented. And a lot of what they did was we run the most bland stuff that everyone in the league runs, everyone running football runs, but we have great athletes and we have this Von Bell guy and we'll move him. The disguise will be where Bell aligns. So we can just move him to where we want. So it looks different, even though everyone else's responsibility, say we're just running country cover three and we're hitting our landmarks in the field. Everything for everyone else is the same except for Von Bell and maybe one of the guy in the field will maybe change that week or in that specific call.

Because for the most part, I mean, obviously we've come to a league where some of the defining defenses the last two years have played in a special. specific way where you're lining up in a too high shell and the variety is based in that. You can get to anything from that. The post snap coverages and rotations are a way to put yourself in a good position while also being hard to define. The Bengals, for the most part, weren't doing a lot of that. They would line up in whatever they were going to run. And then over the course of this season, it feels like they've done a much more intentional

job of saying, this is what our rotations are going to look like. This is how we're going to make it harder on you. how have they kind of changed the way that they've played with the post snap picture in your mind over the back half of this season? Yeah, they rotate a decent amount. I mean, they play really deep and they've got increasingly deeper as a season has gone along. One thing that's been interesting is how Bell was a guy who they played close to the line of scrimmage for most of the year. Then you look at the postseason, a 52% of his snaps were as a deep safety, but they're still moving a ton. He might be playing in the lurk role in the middle of the field, so he's moving and rotating and rotating.

a ton still and they run a lot of inverted coverage, which they didn't used to do. But they've just decided to completely redefine Bell's role in the system at the very, very end of the season when it matters most. So that's interesting. They move a lot up front in interesting ways where, as you said, they were kind of standoffish, spend, not break, all that classic stuff. But in the front, they were constantly trying to get to still the safe five. They were going bare and too high the same way Staley, Van Joe, and everyone would.

but they want the five post snap. So it would be slanting and then sending Pratt. It would be doing some kind of stemming the front. And they had this really cool bear package where they would just walk into it. So they would get, you know, aligned. And then as the kind of the quarterback was rolling through his cadence, going through his pretty snap check, the safety would walk down, Pratt would walk down.

There would be this domino effect where they were just kind of walking, strolling into a bear front as the ball was snapped. So they do really interesting things with their movements where if you just freeze frame it at the top of the quarterbacks drop, It's still really basic, generic. All the classic coverage is two, four, six. You roll through him all. But how he gets there, there is a different presentation all the time.

Maybe not quite as dramatic as, you know, the Spag safety moments. It's nowhere near that kind of level of funkiness and coolness. But it's just enough difference on a week-to-week basis to kind of cloud the picture for quarterbacks. And you brought a Von Bell in what you've written and then just now. And I think that that's somebody we haven't talked about enough as it relates to this defense. You know, for the most part, the way that Trey Hendrickson has played all year and the fact that he's continued what he did in 2020 has been surprising to us on this show. So we've talked about him a lot. Jesse Bates is their homegrown guy, right?

He was one of the few players on this defense. They drafted. They developed. And what he's done in the playoffs has been easy to notice. We've talked about him a lot. Von Bell has not gotten a lot of oxygen on this show, but you love him. What allows, you mentioned a little bit, but why are they able to do some of this stuff by virtue of his skill set? as somebody we probably don't talk or think about enough.

Yeah, he's just a force multiplier, depending on where you put him on the field. I mean, he's such an unbelievable player coming downhill. And what they do is they just give him as much depth as possible. And they trust him to play the backside and run plays. That's normally his typical responsibility, but then he can drive hard on the ball from depth. Everything they do is built around him as the focal point and the orbit, kind of the coverage, the blitz is all based around his alignment. linement essentially. The only thing they're worried about ever is him getting caught one-on-one

be a big tight end body door. They cut the split for the receiver and then he's matched up in the slot. That's kind of where things can get a bit sticky. He's just not a great turn of a man coverage guy. But everything else is, you know, off the scale good. And he's kind of able to hide some of his weaknesses because of all of the strengths and where they're able to position him on the field, that there's such an intimidation and fear about where he is. And what that kind of means is a domino effect for the rest of the defense that it eliminates a lot of get us just bound up in months man coverage running down the field. So you look at the man-to-man coverage numbers, and if you look at what the Bengals have

been over the last couple of years, I mean, last year, they were one of the heaviest man coverage teams in the league on third down. I think it was a top five rate. They played man on 55% of their third downs in 2020, which was the fourth highest rate in the league. And they still play a decent amount of it. But you pointed out that even in the back half of the season, they were a top five team in EPA per drive-back allowed, but they were 18th on third down, in part because, like you said, it's harder to hide. It's harder to hide where your athletic deficiencies are in those defined passing situations when you're playing a lot of man coverage.

How have they tried to mitigate those weaknesses, in your mind, over the second half of the season as they've kind of figured out who they've wanted to be defensively? Well, I think, first of all, they've played better. You know, so much attention was played to the drop eight coverage against Mahomes and chiefs and the second half of that game, basically from the second quarter onwards. And kind of what was lost in the shuffle there with all the time that my homes had

was guys just made tons of players in the ball. It was crazy. Yeah, like the other team has good players too. And I think sometimes that gets forgotten. I mean, the corners have really stepped up and played really well in third down situations. They've also, as I mentioned before, they are consistently adding different packages every week.

And I think some of their simulated pressure stuff has really started to add juice to the front. you know, they didn't run an awful lot of that stuff early in the season, and it was very, very generic and bland. It was a double mugged A-gap stuff, some of the Zimmer stuff because of how they're able to use Bell and kind of that Harrison Smith style. As their season has run along,

they've done the exact same thing where it's the exact same blitzpath on the majority of plays. You know where it's going to hit. It is just figuring out who is coming in from where, I'm sure you guys are going through a ton of stuff on. It seems like the pressure pressures and how that changes the throne window, depending on who is dropping and who is coming and all that good stuff.

And I just think they've done a great job of scheming one-on-one for Hendricks and two. I mean, to get that ball rush in someone's face from the backside like that, and they do move from around a little bit too, that that's mostly the key. They haven't done anything dramatically different. I mean, the third down numbers are insanely good given how terrible their first down numbers are. I think that 26th in EPA play on first down this season. I don't know if the teams ever made the Super Bowl with that kind of outpost on first down. I mean, first down is the down in the NFL.

We get caught up in third down conversion percentages and it being the money down and that's where the guys get famous. But the only good third down defense comes from a great first down defense, right? That's the old coaching. Yeah, just avoiding it all together is the best way to be good at it. It's funny because you mentioned, you know, the Bell does so many different things for them. But I think that Hendrickson is also emblematic of the way they play defense because he only really does one thing, but he does it well and it's all they ask him to do. So it really is just this construction of 11 guys that their coaching staff has a really solid understanding of what they do well and what they do poorly. And that understanding has only grown over the last two years.

And it's allowed them to even understand better. All right, this is the role we're going to drop you into. This is the role we're going to drop you into. It's almost like an evolution of knowledge and self-awareness as you watch what they are now compared to what they were halfway through the 2020 season. Yeah. And it goes to my overall point with that group throughout this whole season, which is ditching dogma and just going with what works. Yeah.

Like, okay, we'd love to run this. We'd love to have the deepest playbook in the league. It don't work with our guys. How about we just have Trey run through that guy's chest on every single play? And we'll build out around that. And that's fascinating because what they've done is very similar to what happened with Clowny. If you go back to the Houston days where people got very excited about Clownie and JJ

what being aligned through the kind of the numbers game of, oh, who do you double, right? And it's really, well, if you put two bodies there anyway, clowny or what, you can't double two guys irrespective, right? So it's going to be one-on-one, no matter what if you just play the numbers game. Schematically, what they did with Clowny there was get head-on forward rushes.

Everything was about going straight. There was straight line drives, either as the masher in a stunt or twist, or elongating his stance and just widening it out so that everything was kind of a crunch rush through the guy rather than dipping and bending around the edge. And since he does this too with Hendrickson is, they will do stuff where a high school coach

listening to this right where they hit that they run there even from but they just the last second will widen Hendrickson out kind of a stride or two if you did that at the high school level you would get fired because someone would just smash the ball through the sea gap and they would run for 400 yards game and you would all be having to leave the building you can do that in the NFL when you have freaks

and great coach to say my guy is a freak and we can get away with stuff and so they will find ways as you said they ask him to do the same thing and he's so good at it, but it's just straight line through the chest of a guy, as I said, either as the mash run stunts or twist or just as the pass rush and getting that crunch rush from the side. The thing, Hendrickson just being, again, a huge part of what they've been able to do this year. The biggest change for me, if you look at the overall numbers, is that they were one of the blitz heaviest teams in the league last year on third down.

I think in part because they had to be, right? I mean, Lawson was hurt. They really didn't have anything else. Their entire defensive line was decimated. And this year, they've been one of the most conservative teams when it comes to Blitz on third down. And that's allowed them because they have so many bodies on the back end that they didn't have last year to do different things. It's just to deploy those guys in different ways. You did such a great job of writing about the drop eight coverages. And at a very simple level,

you just have more bodies back there. Like you have more chances to create layers on the defense. So I wanted to ask you, you said it kind of builds on one another, right? So they're one, you sequence it. Like we did this so we can do this. What is your favorite, instance of that bin, where they've had, they've done one thing and it's allowed them to build on it with a compliment that makes sense to you. Wow, that's a great question. Well, that was talking before about the bare front where they kind of will move and walk guys down into the barefront. So you'll take Jermann Pratt as the main guy and they walk him down to be the M. Man of the Line of the skirmish. They start with four down guys, two or four linebackers say, then they'll walk Jermann

in the line of scriments and they'll kick everyone down and everyone stems down the gap right as the quarterback's going through his cadence, right, to change the box count and to change the picture both from going from 4-2 to 5-1. Then building off that and putting that into some simulated packages on early downs, as you said, they do not blitz at all. I think that blitz rate since week after the buy is about 18%, which is just nothing. It's really low. Them and Tennessee and, you know, those other teams that you'd expect are right there in the

bottom five. And they had some weird wonky games, the last Cleveland game and the Baltimore game was a weird one where I think Josh Johnson started that game, right? And then they played Drew Locke in the second half against Denver. So they have some kind of things, you know, kind of adding some noise to the numbers there. But they don't blitz an awful lot. And what they've done is kind of taken their interesting movements and all that walking I was talking about before. And timed that up into their blitz pack is what was before became a run front for them is now a way for them to slide the bridge. protection if they want to blitz and maybe bring someone from the other side, right?

So this is what I was talking about before, as you said, where as offensive play goals, will sequence plays throughout the season and will sequence them throughout a game, they have added some kind of fresh package every single week that has built on top of whatever tendency they set off the last two or three weeks. So yeah, they've just been really excellent in one-off situations. And sometimes that's look, right, so it's a small sample size, but they've got so many good plays every player feels like a B, B plus. Yeah, which is, it's such a strange, and we've talked about that ad nauseum.

It's such a strange construction of a defensive roster because it never works. It never works to have a bunch of B or B pluses and pay them premium dollars like Bengals have had to. This is a top three team in defensive spending. And they don't have a true superstar. And that was a concern for us coming into the year. It's like, man, who are you worried about? And the answer is there's nobody the offense is worried about, but guess what?

There's no one that Lou Aniromo is worried about. There's nobody like, man, I'm losing sleep because they're going to pick on this guy all the time. The only real option for that on this defense would probably be Eli Apple if you were trying to pick somebody. And they've done a really good job of not putting him in vulnerable situations and really getting by with him as a stopgap corner starting for them making like a million bucks this year. Yeah, I think that where they're really vulnerable is their linebacks in space are pretty iffy. They're poor man coverage of linebackers. But because they're able to just, as we said before, flood so many guys, essentially into the middle of the field. They are congesting things so much inside daring the quarterback to make low percentage throws outside the numbers.

Okay, go on target Eli Apple. And so if you throw the ball in the middle of the field, we can just allocate resources in there and rally to the ball. So they're able to hide what would be the great weakness, which would be those linebackers turning or running. We've seen when they played the Niners, for instance, and they go with the heavy play action, the bootlegs and so those guys are just lost. And that's the rare times that you see them get coverage bust. Those guys just aren't good at that. But that's not how the defense is constructed. The defense is constructed for those guys to just mash people on first down.

They rumble it a ton. Their blitz rate is low because that's usually causeback dropbacks. But if you charted their own blitz rate, that's really high because they are intent on getting to a five-man front at the snap rather than lining up in it pre-snap. So they just have these, if they have a really strange lineback in core where all their skill sets are the same, even though the body types are very different. Those guys just want to hit people downhill and they want to do it at the line of streamers. They don't want to be sifting through bodies and trying to find a guy. It is fill and fall. One guy goes, the other guy falls behind him and cleans up any mess.

So like I said, it's like allow those guys to do that on first down and then just give them depth on third down and kind of hope for the best, right? We rally to the ball. We hope the quarter time makes a bad play. we hope he forces it into a window. We hope we can make players in the ball because our safeties are driving downhill. And our two best players are basically our safeties. Hendrickson is outstanding. But the thing that makes the whole jigsaw sing is those two safeties and their ability to move.

And so the other thing I want to talk about with Anam Ruma specifically is that he comes from the college side. Or he has obviously NFL experience, but he's coached in college as well. And you've mentioned that there are aspects of what they've done with talking about those one-off things that they can spring on somebody. that are derived from the way that some of these college defenses have played past savvy offenses. So how do you think that his just baseline understanding of college tactics has informed and influenced what they've been able to do? That's one way. That would be tough me to answer without him necessarily putting his voice to it.

I have to think that when you just come through that ecosystem, you're just so much more open to knowledge. I mean, I know there's guys like Andy Reid, who they have a guy who watches high school tape to just find the coolest plays and they'll put that in. Certainly great. NFL coaches do that. Bill Belich steals stuff from Alabama all the time. But just being open, I mean, there is just, there's a lesson there for anyone in any field, really, that the guy is in his mid-50s and throughout a lot of what he's done for a lot of his coaching career, which is

pressing trail, cover three man free, and said, I'm going to go of what works. They run a bunch of straight, four-man organic pass rush because they've got really good players up front, but then he's invested in the simulator pressure world. He's invested in safety rotations. He's invested in three safety packages. This is all stuff that that's just where they're going to. game is going. And if you want to get on the right side of the evolutionary trend of the league, you have to ditch that stuff to try and keep up. And there is, it's a great story to see someone just throw everything out, kind of rebuild it from the ground up around those principles and just build a system that is, it's kind of an interesting thing where the best players he has,

now I'm sure they'll say it was calculated, but as you said, to spend that much money on those guys, that that is a bit iffy. I'm not quite sure. They went 10 and 7. You know, it's not the It's not the way you would do it by scratch. It's not the way you draw it up if you had to do it. They've kind of worked themselves into having the essential pieces you would need to run all that stuff that just so happens to work naturally with where the game is going. They've kind of been looking in that sense. I was really interested in what you wrote talking about the drop-bait stuff, just about how it helps add layers to a defense and how important it is to have layers in a defense. On a baseline level, how would you explain the importance of having layers in coverage and the way that this team's

specifically has been able to do that over the course of the year. Yeah, layering is just about not getting the coverage drained out, right? If you only have three layers on the defense and you have four guys out on the route, you can just layer your routes and someone's going to be free. The more layers you add, the more kind of target points you kind of eradicate for the offense to hit. Most offensive designs are attacked to be the breakdown man coverage and spring someone open or do you have a sight line in there that should point just some kind of zone coverage. And so usually you've got four or five eligibles out there with the,

checkdown and you should be able to bust through what would traditionally be seven guys dropping into coverage, whether it's four deep three underneath, three deep four underneath. So that's what's so interesting about that drop eight. So if you chuck an extra body back there, suddenly you can kind of concertina the pieces down so that you have one at every single landmark or every single target zone you would have as an offense looking to attack. And it just changes the windows of all of that programming the quarterback has had since he was in high school that it's going to be four deep, three underneath or three deep, four

and deep. and all of a sudden you see the finest cloths back on the planet, brain breakdown essentially, looking around going, hang on a second, that's supposed to be open there. If those two guys are deep, that guy's supposed to be open if there's one guy deep. And yeah, it just completely frazzled the chiefs in that second half. Yeah, it was remarkable. And that's exactly what it felt like, right? I mean, you have a situation, it's like, all right, well, it's third and seven.

And they're playing single high. So it's probably going to be some form of like one robber, which they were running a decent amount in that game. And then the moment you think that one of those crossers is going to come open because that robbers in the middle of the field is dropped down a certain level. There's another one. And that crossover that's supposed to be open against that coverage is no longer open and just felt like that was happening over and over and over again. So you talking about-

They also, just quickly on that. They also did more combination coverage stuff than I've seen them do all season, playing man to one side of the field, playing zone. One thing they've not done this year, which teams have started to do more of this year, is the lock coverage where you just lock one receiver.

He's in man. Everyone else is in zone. You'll see teams do this more and more. more now because it's such a motion league and everyone has the motion check. The Rams did it a ton last year. Yeah, a ton where you just lock the motion man so the quarterback thinks it's man, then it's zone. That's the first time this season against Mahomes of the chiefs. Another reason why that drop eight works as well is you check one, two. Okay, I think it's man. You look to the side all of a sudden it's zone and you're not sure where to go with the ball. Now you're holding the ball three, four,

five seconds bouncing around, waiting for stuff to come open. And so if we were trying to boil it down, just kind of getting back to the big picture look at this, as why they've been able to do this, even if we have concerns about his background, about their defensive talent. It seems to me that your number one thing that you've honed in on is just open-mindedness and flexibility. Would you say that's it or would you say there are other aspects of, on a broad level, why is the Bengals defense good? Yeah, I think, look, sometimes it feels unfair to the coach too much credit for drawing stuff

on the chalkboard. But I think that is really impressive. In an organization that has been quite stilted, me, offensively, they're very stilted. You know, it's very dry. It's right cookie cutter. It's a lot of the stuff everyone runs in the league. So for this guy to bring in and to kind of just punt on all of his old stuff and say, I will rebuild this with what I think is the best, the best in the rest of the league,

similar to kind of how they built that offensive side is important. I mean, there's no height in the fact that you get pressure with four. That's how you win everything. I don't care how many analytical stuff we do. I love the analytics. I love looking through roster spend. I love all that stuff. If you pressure with four, you win everything.

that's just kind of the name of the game. So the fact they can pressure with thought opens up the ability to do everything else. What they have found a way to do, as they wrote in that piece, disruption and levels, that's the name of the game in modern defense. They do that as well as anyone at this point, adding levels on the back end, getting disruption up front and finding disruption to adding extra beats. So much of when we discuss pressure, when we analyze this game is, do you get home to the quarterback?

Whereas so much of it also is do you add extra beats to his decision making? Because those beats is how you get home, is how he throws, the ball where he shouldn't is how you get turnovers. And they are, I think, the best defense in the league at forcing extra beats in the pocket. And that's kind of interesting when you get into how Stafford plays when he starts having to go through a couple of extra beats is kind of where his game can fall down at times.

But that is the main thing about them is they have just thrown so much of people. They do some wonky stuff and they do some very traditional stuff where they just compress space. So the quarterback is thinking, even, oh, I could get more if I wait a second here or he's thrown off by the timing of the play. It's really interesting. Ali, really appreciate the time. Again, please go check out the work that Ali does on the read optional newsletter.

One of my favorite football reads over the course of the entire season. You will learn something every single time you click on something that he does. Really appreciate the time. Let's please do this again at some point in the off season. We'd love to have you back. Yes, maize. Anytime. Thank you. Awesome. All right.

It's time now to welcome two of my favorite people to talk about football with. You guys that have rightfully been on the show and will continue to be as long as they'll do it for me. Seth Galena, Deiate Lee from Pro Football Focus. Gentlemen, really appreciate you guys taking the time to do this. I want the people to know that right before we started taping, Robert said that he would, in another timeline, in a parallel universe, he is a Division 1 long snapper and probably plays in the NFL for 20 years. That is not what I said. I'm not going to leave my guy out to dry because I will also cop to saying that in another timeline, I am a Terrell Suggs level pass rusher at the Division 3 level for Colgate. University. So this is a true story. I'm going to tell one long snapping story before we start here.

Okay. So going into my senior year of high school, I did a camp in Indianapolis. It was like a regional special teams camp. And we went through the whole week and you know, you go through a variety of drills. And there were counselors at the camp. One was Brandon Fields, the punter, was actually a counselor at that camp. So there were some guys that were Division I lock stampers. There was one from Duke and one from Louisville, I think. And near the end of the week, Justin Snow, who was the long time, long snapper for the Colts, ended up coming and was a counselor for a couple days. And I was like the outstanding long snapper at the camp, whatever bullshit award they hand out at the end of these things. And my dad was talking to Justin Snow near the end of the week.

And I, in my long snapping motion, I had like a little tiny bit of a hitch. You know, you would, you just not as smooth as you'd really want it to be. So Justin So says to my dad, when he gets to the NFL, that's something that he would have tweak. Not, you know, whatever. When he gets to the NFL is the terms that he put it in. My dad was like, when he gets to the NFL, he's like, yeah, he's really good. So that was a real thing that happened. So that's the last glory days long sniper story I will tell on the show ever. Well, you did. You made it. You're at the Super Bowl. I am. I've been to several Super Bowls now. Who's really laughing now? All right, I want to talk with you guys about the Rams.

We talked with Ali Connolly earlier on the show about the Bengals defense is the foremost Lou Anerumo stand in America, or I guess not. in America in England. It was a great conversation. I wanted to talk about the Rams and just the way that they've kind of evolved and changed over the last couple of years because the Rams are back in the Super Bowl. After they got here in 2018, but this offense looks a lot different than it did back then. They've evolved in ways that have been really, really crucial to their success this season. And Seth, you wrote early in the year about just how different the offense looked with Matthew Stafford. Would it allowed them to do? And we've had that conversation, a little bit on this show, but I think it's important to revisit right now because it's important to remember that this wasn't always the Rams offense. This is still new when you consider the lifespan of what we call the McVeigh offense. So if you were trying to drill down into what the most important differences have been between this version of the Rams offense and the Rams offense that was very successful for a couple of years in the early McVeigh era, what would you hone in on? You know what I'm

going to say? Back, side, dig. That is what it is. That changes their whole often. So what I'm talking about is a route, like I said, backside. So a route on the backside of a concept. An in-breaking route, it could be between 12 and 22 yards. And the idea is here like, hey, if our quarterback doesn't like what he's seeing on what we call our front side combination, he can work his eyes all the way back to backside and find a receiver late.

and Matt Stafford's ability to do that, to find that receiver, and it's not easy. I mean, we're talking about a couple things. A, we're talking about the quarterback's ability to say, hey, something is not open on the front side, which I'll tell you what, I've coached quarterbacks for a long time. That's really hard. Quarterbacks want to throw it to their first read, and they believe their first read is open more times than it is. So the quarterback's ability to say, hey, it's not open, and it's okay that it's not open, because I have the ability now to, while the pass run,

rush gets closer and closer to me to reset my feet to the back side and throw this in-breaking route at whatever depth that the specific team likes an arm. And throw it accurately, right, with people, bodies around them. And that has changed their entire offense. And you see it with their formation use. You see more three receivers by one receiver rather than last year where it was more two receiver by two receiver. And you see it with, you know, what they've done.

since signing Odell Beckham as a free agent in the middle of the season, his ability to run that specific route has changed their entire offense. And they were doing with Robert Woods before the injury, but to me that has changed offense. And it has allowed Sean McVeigh to say,

okay, I don't have to call the perfect, perfect player right now. Yeah. I can go into shotgun, first of all. I can call a drop-back pass. I don't have to rely on a bootleg, a naked, a play action, something like that, to get my quarterback an explosive play in the intermediate part of the field, I can say, I'm going to put Cooper Cup, one of the best receivers in the league, part of this kind of front-side concept, and let him be the key figure in this two- or three-man receiver configuration, and let my quarterback find him.

And if it's not there, I have, and now I have, and they were, like I said, they were doing this with Robert Woods, but now I have one of the best backside one-on-one, you know, receiver versus cornerback players in the league that we hadn't seen for a few years in Olda-Beck. And honestly, that has changed their, to me, that's changed their entire offense. Deonti, this may seem like a simple question, but if you're thinking about this as someone who sees this through a defensive lens, what's harder about this now? What is keeping you up at night about playing this Rams offense that you just weren't skis? it about before in a previous iteration. To kind of piggyback off of what Seth was saying, I want to say it was the third down

in the conference title game. I don't remember which or what quarter it was, but they came out in the three-by-one set and they ran a smash concept, so a high-low, right, where you get one of the inside receivers on a corner route and the two guys underneath are running like hitches or five-yard-ins, and you have that backside dig from O'Dell. And the first thing I thought about when I saw from All-22 was like, this looks really familiar. And I started racking my brain. And then I remembered that this was a money play for golf between 2018 and 2020. The difference is it was in empty and everybody was stacked or bunched or there

was some kind of window dressing involved. There's a motion, et cetera, et cetera. And really what you take away from that as a defensive coach is a couple of things. A, they're an empty. They want the ball out quickly, right? B, they're trying to space you out laterally. Right. So they're trying to manufacture space. So if you're in man, and they're bunched, you're probably going to get some kind of space off of like these rub routes, et cetera, et cetera. If you're in zone, then obviously you have a kind of guaranteed amount of manufactured space as well. So for them to take some of the things that they like to do out of empty, get back into like regular gun where you can keep the back end to protect.

And now, instead of doing something on the backside of the concept like Seth was saying, where it's a slant, you know, maybe a hitch, a drag, something like that, some kind of checkdown-esque route, now you're at. asking your backside receiver to run something in that 12 to 16 yard depth. And what that's doing now is adding the vertical stress, right? So now you're trading off maybe some of the efficiency and getting these layup completions to threaten me more down the field. So as a defensive coach, now you've got to start making these difficult decisions. And how do you affect an offense that's confident enough to take those shots, right? Do you send pressure?

Well, the issue with that this year is that Matthew Stafford has absolutely melted your face off every time you blitz them, right? And then if you're blitzing, that's also creating more guaranteed one-on-ones with your Cooper Cups and your Odell Beckham's. That's also not a winning business model right now. So they've just been able to open up the field so much more in these key situations. You see it in the red zone. You see it in the open field area, right? You're going to see a lot of disguises and bringing guys from different depths.

So you get these guys mugged up in these A-gaps where the linebackers are showing like they might be pressuring. when you have an offense that can stress you vertically like this, now as a defense, you don't want to know what you start doing, you start backing guys up. We're not going to crowd the line of scrimmage as much. We can't be as multiple in our pressure packages. We have to be very mindful of who's matched up where, right, in what scenario. So just as almost in a different kind of way,

just as getting in those bunches, those empty sets, et cetera, et cetera, forces you to be a certain level of vanilla defensively. Having an offense that can play spread and push you down the field still has a similar type of effect, but now you're getting even more in terms of results because you can push the ball further down the field and you're not asking all your receivers and your offensive play caller, to be honest with you, to do all the work for you on the front end. You can put more on your quarterback's plate. And when you're a defense and you're playing against a quarterback that can handle the whole menu, that puts a lot of stress on you as a defense to try to take away some of the things that they do well. And you see obviously have the disresults in a Super Bowl run for the Rams. It's funny, Seth, when I think about what Matthew Stafford does well, obviously, even talking to former coaches of his over the last week or so, the ability to get the ball out from awkward arm angles and just the creativity he has as a pastor is definitely one of them.

The other one is he can reset his eyes in a way that I think is underrated. Like his ability to kind of, all right, I'm looking right, I'm looking right, I'm coming backside to the left. Sometimes by design, sometimes in order to manipulate a safety to get that ball off, but just how much arm strength he has to do. that late, it kind of feels like this ability to hit those backside digs is not just a version of this offense that we want to see. It's a version of the offense that's been unlocked specifically by what he does well. There aren't many quarterbacks that would be able to add this element

in the exact way that he's been able to do it. It's like the perfect way to use him as a skeleton key specifically. Well, the first thing I'll say, just kind of as an aside, when we talk about Odell Beckham in these routes is, you know, he was there in Cleveland running similar routes. Now, I do think the Rams run this specific route differently. It's a little shorter for the RAM, so it comes open, let's say, quicker, than the Browns running it a little deeper. But he was running those routes. He wasn't getting targeted, even though, and this is the crazy thing, Baker-Ma-Field as a

rookie was so good at finding that route. And then all of a sudden it just dried up, and he couldn't find it anymore, you know, the last three seasons or last two seasons. And that's kind of why. The middle of the field is off limits. Exactly. It's a no-fly zone for the Browns. So like it's crazy to me that you had this guy who,

who you would think after, after Baker Mayfield's rookie year, that this, the Odo Beckham would work perfectly. And we're seeing it work perfectly now with, Matt Stapper. And like, you talk about him being able to reset the eyes.

I mean, that's the hardest thing, you know, playing quarterback. There's a lot of seeing colors. and just kind of assuming things are going to be there where you think they're going to be as you move your eyes back. You know, if you're starting on a front side concept, then you're okay because you have vision on two, three defenders in a certain color jersey. And as you're doing your drop bag, but now when we start talking about getting to the backside route, now your eyes have to scan across the field. And you don't know where other bodies are going to be. You make assumptions based on where the front side bodies were because defenses have to work on a string.

But at the same time, like, it's hard. I don't throw a lot of backside digs in my flag football league because it's fucking hard. Like, I throw the front side concept all the time, no matter whether it's open or open or not. And I think that, like you said, like that ability for him to like see it quickly and confirm it. And then do the other thing you talked about, which is get the ball out from weird arm angles as defenses are getting after him. I think that's- Because you're inevitably being playing more traffic as you wait that long. As you wait that long into the play, you're inevitably going to have to be negotiating and navigating bodies as things crunching around you.

And he just has a very specific ability to mitigate that because the arm's strength and the creativity. There's such a difference between having a really strong arm and being a creative thrower. And I just think that he does such a great job of splitting the difference between those two things. So you look at the play action numbers, that to me is the biggest, just obvious difference between there's a bunch of them. But if you look at the play action numbers, right? They use play action on 27.3% of Stafford's dropbacks this year. It was the 22nd highest rate in the NFL. 2022, 5th.

2019, second. 2018, first. 35.8% of golf's dropbacks in 2018 were play action compared to 27% for Stafford this year. It's a huge chasm of a difference. The other thing is they're running out of the shotgun more because the shotgun is a baseline of their offense. Last year they ran the ball out of the gun 45 times, all season, 45 times.

This year it's 104 times. So Deonti is somebody who's thinking about this in silos, right? When you're game planning for an offense, thinking, all right, well, when they're under center, they're running or using play action. When they're in the gun, they're throwing mostly short routes. They're throwing stick. They're throwing all this bullshit.

Golf last year averaged 6.9 air yards per attempt out of the gun. Stafford average 8.5. That's third in the NFL compared to 28th. So when you're watching this, I have to assume, as you're trying to game plan for this team, beyond the throws that are available, the things you have to worry about from every set, every down in distance, every formation are just so much more varied and deeper and layered with this version of who they are than they've been in years past. And that's how you end up in situations.

And I heard you and Nate talk about this right after the conference championship game, 2017, 2018, 2018, 2019, that third down near the red zone where they just throw that screen at the end of the play clock, right? Because they can't really get the call together. When that's Jared Gough, I guarantee you nobody's talking about it because that's the expectation, right? You're not sweating it. It's a tough third down. You're just going to dump it off. Get the ball out of his hands.

Whatever. It didn't work. But at least it wasn't a catastrophe, right? But now you can be disappointed in that because you see the potential of what they can do out of the spread. Right. that to me is the biggest thing and the biggest takeaway that I have. And I've been harping on this all year long and, you know, to kind of circle back to something that Seth has been talking about, right? Like the progression.

You can see just things like your technical proficiency with your eyes, your feet, how you deliver the football as you work through progressions when you have a certain degree of arm talent, when you have a certain degree of comfort with pushing the ball further down the field. So when you start talking about, like, creating these silos within the offense. It's funny. Like, I don't think the Sean McVeigh had ever, could have ever conceived a time where play calling would be as, quote, unquote, easy for him now as it is compared to what it was between 2017 to 2020, right? Like, a lot of that is I have to make sure that all of this is packaged up perfectly. So that way my poor quarterback doesn't get to the line of scrimmage and have a heart

attack with all the information that he has to consume and filter through and make decisions off of. With Stafford, you can see it. I mean, these dagger concepts are your, getting one route underneath to serve as your checkdown and everything else is happening in that 12 to 15 or deeper range. You are asking your quarterback to take in a lot of information late in the down, right? Whatever decision you're going to make isn't necessarily going to happen onto these passing concepts right at the snap of the ball. Maybe your one-on-one is there, but this concept

is still built to be effective even if it's not. And that means that your quarterback has to be trusted with, okay, you can make your mic point properly. You can tell where the may be coming from. You know what matchups you like, right? You can tell, okay, this guy's playing with X amount of leverage. I can get to this look off of that, right? Versus press, I want to do this. Once off, I want to do that. If I see single high, I'm going to work one, two, three. Too high, it's one, two, in a different way. Right. So now you're just taking some off your plate as an offensive play caller, putting it on your quarterback. And now on the flip side for me, if I'm prepping and I'm a defensive coach to your point about running the ball out of the gun.

Well, what does that mean? That means that I have to have 30 to 40 calls, right? If they come out when they're out in 11 personnel on second and five, I actually really have to have my entire playbook open the same way an offensive coordinator does in that situation because I can't guarantee what I'm going to see, right? And you can't just feel comfortable saying, hey, we'll play, you know, some sort of soft cover two, we'll play some sort of soft cover four and we'll be okay. You can't do what the Bengals did to the chiefs in the second half.

have to say, hey, we're just going to get the maximum amount of depth in our zone drops that we possibly can. And we'll drop, you know, Hubbard or Hendrickson off and just make him like a quasi spy slash extra zone dropper. And we'll just let this quarterback sit on the ball. And basically, it'll be a grenade in his hand. You can't really do this to this offense. Because I still think in Sean McVease mind, he's comfortable if you give him that look, just handing the ball off 10 to 15 times and punishing you for it. No issue. That's the biggest difference between those two teams. Absolutely. And as you get closer to the line of scrimmage, that's where you see those band Jefferson double moves. That's where you see the Odell Beckham one-on-one on these skinny posts. That's where you see these slot choice routes with Cooper Cup and these corner routes and things like that. And it's just, it's been such a joy to see the layering of this offense, right, where you can say, hey, all of our elementary school stuff that we've been doing before, we can still keep that and get to that whenever we want. But now we can start adding. We can add, we can add, we can add, we can add. knowing that at any point, any one of these concepts can be good for us and you don't

never have to be fearful of, can our quarterback actually do this? Will he actually see the receiver break open at 2.9 seconds instead of 2.2? Right. Like those are the types of things that you have to be mindful of defensively. And with that, you see just how efficient you can be when you have a quarterback that can operate at that kind of level. Seth, what would you say is the most important thing you've learned about Sean McVeigh this season specifically? Yeah, I think like one of the things that's really interesting and it's piggyback on what we've both said what the three of us have said really is just like he's okay with just calling these plays and letting it play out like he's not because they'll still run and it's not like they've taken

away certain things like they're running all the same stuff to a certain degree they're running their arches concept which has been really good for them explain that really quickly because that's something that's something you've talked about a lot it is something they run a ton so how would you describe arches on a very basic level? Yeah, arches is just, you got two guys in the slot. Could be from bunch with three, but generally there's two guys in the slot. One of them is designed to kind of pick for the first guy to come underneath. I mean, that's, I didn't the day, that's really what it is.

You can run, you don't have to run it with a pick, but it's really just two slants. You know what that's what I'll say. It's two slants. I was going to say, so you brought up stick, Robert, right? And I know you guys have talked about this with Nate on the show, and I've heard Nate describe it, right? you have your clear-out route on the outside and two outbreaking routes. Just take those two, just take that concept and flip it inside out.

Yes. Yeah. And you're looking at arches. You get your clear-out route, and then the route you actually want to hit is the one that's coming behind it. So they kill teams with Woods and Cup on the inside running this ride. You didn't know who was going to pick, who was going to reverse slam, like whatever, and it was so good. One of the things that I wanted to bring up was how Tyler Higby is getting a lot of run as the primary receiver in some of these concepts. Not just arches, but yes, arches and stick and stuff like that.

That's been something that they've needed to find because that's not the role that you put Odell Beckham in. Like, Odell Beckham is not the Robert Woods replacement. Yes. Right. So they've had to find ways to get Tyler Higby involved as like a, as like, we are running this concept and we think most likely it will get Tyler Higby open. Another thing I want to say, and I this, maybe I'm just doing this so I can sound smart on here. But like, it's kind of a galaxy brain thing. So one thing is that one of the things I looked up was there the amount of trips open formations.

And when I say open, I mean there's no tight end attached to the line of scrimmage. The tight end could be in the game wherever, lined up wherever, but he's not attached where we think about a tight end. And I said it before, the percentage of three by one has gone up just in general. And I think it's super important when we talk about how they're structuring their concepts. When you have a two-man concept as a front side concept, really that. That's a one-man concept. Because there's always going to be, there's generally in a concept, a route that is the, we don't need you. Your job is to just run the defense.

Yeah, clear-out. And like there's creating space. The clear-out route. I had a more, yeah, I had a more good way of saying it, but the clear-out route. Get the F out of the way route. Yeah, exactly. So when you have two receivers and one of them is a clear-out route, well, that leaves you with one player to run the rub that you're trying to get open. And obviously that was Cooper Cup for so many.

years when they would go with two two two by two so on the backside and the reason i think the reason they did that was so that they were so afraid of just having this isolated backside dig where they would run two receivers one lower and one in the intermediate area uh area coming back into gop's vision and it gave goff a little outlet because if you have a short route he moves his eyes back he could just dump it off really easily rather than find this receiver like we're talking about matt stafford does in the 15 to yard, you know, like 12 to 15 yard range. So now if you're allocating your resources in a different way and you're putting a third receiver to the front side, now you have one clear-out receiver, now you can run a real game between the two other receivers and it allows you to

find whoever you want a little easier than just saying, hey, if this one receiver, Cooper Cup is not open, you've got to work the backside. Now it's like, oh, we have three receivers. That means one's a clear-out route. One, we can work the game. And if not, we can still hit the backside rut, even if it's just one receiver. De Yante, when you've watched Cooper Cup this year, is there anything specifically that's been different about just the way they've used him, his presence and kind of prominence within the offense, or do you just think that this is this historic season he's truly had, is more a product of their overall offensive ability and ceiling more than any specific difference in the way

they've deployed him? I think I'm leaning more towards the latter, right? Like all the things that make that make Cooper Cup special in 2022 has been there for his entire NFL career, basically. But because they have all of these other ingredients involved, now you can lean 20%, 15% more heavily into his greatest strengths, right? So now on every third down, he can run these option routes. He can run something that's going to be breaking into Stafford's vision because you have and do other things.

And that to me is, again, and this is the point of trying to build out a roster or going out and taking any shots to go get these star player guys. So that way, your guy that you know can do basically anything within your offense can be asked to do the things that he's best at instead of trying to patch up all these polls, right? You have conversations with this about quarterbacks, right? What a quarterback does to erase some of the issues that you have within your offense or to allow you to get to things that you would like to do offensively. And the same thing is happening for Cooper Cup.

So just that that idea that, hey, any given third down, he can be in the slot. and if we get pressure, we know he's going to be open, right? And he's going to have space for yards after the catch. If you're not bringing pressure, you can do what they did to the 49ers and make them the outside receiver but motion him into a bunch. And now he's running this like bench out route, right, where he gets to step on the corner's toes in a one-on-one scenario and break out and be wide open.

They do such a good job of scheming up these one-on-one opportunities that if you don't have ass double-teens schemed up, that's not being broken off based on the formation or emotional. or certain matchups or the personnel, you're going to have a really hard time containing this guy. These are the types of binds that it puts you in. And now that you've got a guy like Odell on the outside, it's like this, you know, almost look at it like exponential effects, right?

Or multiplications, right? These like combo multipliers. Just having a guy like Odell is an ex who can win one-on-one. Well, shoot, if you're telling me that the backside safety has got to be worried about this guy, right? Or if it's single high and now you're underneath droppers have to get extra depth an extra width to get underneath Odell. You're opening up other space to Seth's point about everybody having to work on a string.

It's just that much more space that you get to work with with Cup. And now you're seeing all these great yards after catch opportunities. And that's just on top of all the value that he adds in general as a football player. It's so funny because when you watch them, you can feel everything expand. You can feel it physically expand by the depths of the routes and how vertical they can get with some of this stuff. and you see that. You see the space that needs to exist

in the coverage. But you can also feel just the grip expand, right? When you watch them over the last couple of years, you could just see McVeigh trying to squeeze blood from this thing

when it was so, so hard to do. And when that grip kind of loosens a little bit, that's what this feels like. It's just, it's amazing that when you watch them, you can just feel the tension leave watching this version of the offense

compared to last year. The funny thing about, you know, we talk about all the bunch formations that the Rams use. If you think about the Rams, you picture them in your mind. Those condensed bunch formations are really one of the things that sets them apart. It's what makes them unique. The way that the Rams play with this 80, and again, I think they led the league in three

wide receiver sets this year again, the way that they play, they came to it accidentally. Because if you think about McVeigh's background, especially Shanahan's background, it's not a three-wide receiver offense. This isn't the way it would look in previous iterations. But the Rams got there. 2017 and that spring i've talked about with these guys multiple times they had sammy walkins cooper cup and robert woods and they said well these are our three best receivers so we should

have them all on the field at the same time so they kind of stumble into this 11 personnel based offense and then through there because they were using so much play action and because there was so much motion they the formations get condensed and they start to play this very specific brand of offensive football that really no one in the league was doing. And so you watch those ideas and then you think about how Zach Taylor comes from, on its face, a similar offensive place as Sean McVeigh does. He was on that staff in 2018 when they went to the Super Bowl. So he brings the bones of the same offense to Cincinnati.

So Seth, when you watch this Bengals offense, where do you see some of that shared DNA? And then where do you think they diverge in some of the things that they do? do. You know, I wrote an article early in the season being like, hey, they went, I don't know if they had gone like a three game losing streak or a four game losing streak and I don't remember, but they had played well on offense basically for a few games in a row, I think around September October. And I wrote like, hey, Zach Taylor, how about you figure out this Sean McVeigh thing and put it in the playbook? And you know, it's me and Deonti talked about it on our podcast, the Too High podcast, last week where we,

We were kind of looking up Zach Taylor's coaching history. And Zach Taylor is married to Mike Sherman's daughter. Yes. And when that hit me and clicked for us, we're like, oh, Zach Taylor is not really running the Sean McVeigh offense. Did he coach there in 2017 and 2018? Yes. Does this Bengals offense look anything like the Sean McVe offense?

I don't think so. I mean, certainly some concepts, they run, both teams run dagger, both teams run stick. Like, you know, but those are the kind of the things. Three receivers. They run it. I think they run three receiver sets. I think the second highest rate in the league or top three. So they're right there with just the three receivers being on the field at the same time.

They run, both of those teams were up near the top of the league and the amount of empty that they use this year. But it's funny because that's kind of an accident. Like the reasons they come to that place and using a lot of empty is for very, different motivations. With the Bengals, it's a way to, I think, make their quarterback comfortable. They did a ton of it last year because he did a ton of it at LSU. With the Rams, it's like this very strange version of it where they can be super aggressive and just run empty in a way that different people do. So even the ways they overlap, it almost feels a more like happenstance than anything purposeful. De Ante, I don't know if you feel the same way when you watch them.

Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, and this is actually going to kind of deptail really well moving to the other side of the ball too. So like it's it's just funny to see these small divergences, right? And that that makes up what we consider to be the differences in scheme. So like you were detailing, you know, when you kind of presented this topic, when I think about the Rams and their three wide receiver usage, Sean McVeigh's response was to say, hey, somebody's got to go do this shit job that our fullbacks did, right? With Shanahan Tree. So hey, Robert Woods, you seem like a pretty willing blocker. You're going to go take the shit job for us. And, you know, as an incentive we'll throw you some jet sweeps every once in a while.

But you've got to be the guy that we use. Kick out ends. You've got to be the guy that we use to root these guys out on these duo runs, et cetera, et cetera. And then when you draw that comparison to the Bengals, I think that the divergence there is, and you can kind of credit his act. I do think that he made an attempt to try to take some of that McVeigh-Shannahan-esque stuff early in his head coaching tenure in Cincinnati. And then maybe realized he just didn't have the bodies for it in terms of skill sets,

not that they couldn't be 11 personnel, which we obviously know that be now. I think that what he did was he saw what they had versus what they don't have, you know, in comparison to the Shanahan tree. And that's where you see him leaning back into that, hey, Joe Philbin, Mike Sherman, old school West Coast style of offense. Or it's like, okay, well, then we're going to be more drop back. We'll just be more spread out. We'll get into the empty stuff like you were saying, where we can get to some maybe truer West Coast concepts, you know, at least as far as that variation of the West Coast offense. And I see that in this offense.

And you get to see the ways that it kind of disjoints some of the other things. And I know you guys are spoken about it on your show with Nate and some other people who are tied in with the Bengals. But you see like these tendency differences where it's like two thirds of their runs happened under center. And like 70% of the time the under center run is outside zone. Well, what does that tell you, right? that they don't really have a natural fit within this offense for something that they know is really effective and valuable in the NFL, the ability to get bigger bodies on the field and to test the edges of a defense, right? So they have to find a way to squeeze that in. It just doesn't

fit within the ecosystem of the offense that they run best. So those are the kind of things that I think have drawn a lot of interest from me talking about Zach Taylor offensively. And now for them, I think the one thing that's unlocked it, and this is obvious, but it's Jamar Chase. It's having that ball-winning X-receiver. Same way we were talking about with O'Dell Beckham, right? And what that adds to your offense. Now, when you're getting more vertical, it's easier on your quarterback. Hey, we want to be vertical anyways. Quarterback check. You got the one-on-one you like? Yes. Is the impressed coverage? Yes. Well, there's nothing else to look at in this offense. Don't take your shot. Don't take your shot. Even if we lose, we win because there's a certain value and just being able to test the defense that way. All right, we've tested them enough. Now they're playing off. case on a screen. Now we'll get you a glorified punt return for our best playmaker, basically. So like those little divergences for offenses that use

similar personnel packages is really where you can see what we consider scheme quote unquote, right? What makes one offense what it is versus the other? Well, it's funny because you watch them and the Rams obviously dabbled more in it this year with Stafford, just the idea being more spread out. Like our 11 personnel,

we're going to be in just wider formations. If you look at the numbers based in the last three years. The early parts of the McVeigh era, they played in the most condensed formations in the lead by far. This year, I think they're fifth. So obviously, it's been spread out a little bit more. The Bengals want to play that way. The Bengals want to be as spread out as possible. I mean, that's where they want to live. And that's the biggest divergence. Just again, when you think about it in your mind, think about how spread out the Bengals offense is. Like, Jamar Chaves is standing on the sideline. That is where they want him to be to create as much space out there for him as possible.

The Rams aren't built like that. So even if there are the same types of person, snow on the field. Even if there are some shared lineage between these two things, this is where we see those paths kind of diverge. And it's always interesting when you talk about coaches from a specific tree and how these things change over time and why. This to me, Seth, is just a really good example of how we think about that idea. Another coaching tree point here is that Zach Taylor played for Nebraska in 0506, something like that, when Nebraska did their transition from their classic triple option that we all know and love to the West Coast offense under Bill Calhoun. And who is Zach Taylor's offensive coordinator this year, Brian Callahan, Bill Callahan's son.

So there's, you know, he's more, I think he's more in tune with that offense. And like, you talk about the amount of receivers on the field. They want to play with three receivers on the field. They want to play with three receivers on the field. And one of the differences, you know, like Deonti was saying, Robert Woods, you're going to be our pseudo fullback. And Cup will do some of that stuff too. The Bengals don't do that.

Like it is like you said Robert like it is spread like so there's no guy saying like oh we're we're going to use our receiver kind of doing fullback stuff and he's going to block and do all that stuff like that's not Tyler Boyd that's not T. Higgins and that's not your Marchease. So it forces you to say okay when we want to run the football here comes some more tight ends on the field because we don't have that hybrid versatility that the Rams kind of kind of like you said lucked into I mean that's really what it comes down to like if Robert Woods couldn't handle it three years ago we we could be talking about a complete different offense and maybe an offense that doesn't get to two Super Bowl. don't know. So, so yeah, that's been really good for them. The jet sweep thing, I just looked it up. Last year in how many games they played, 18 games, I believe. They had 311 plays with a jet motion on it, whether they gave them the ball or didn't. This year in 20 games, I believe, only 209. So they're not in that offense anymore, right? They are, they're going to be more static. They don't have to be. They don't have to play. They don't have to do the Mickey Mouse bullshit anymore. And I love the Mickey Mouse bullshit.

Like when this was going to say, I liked that offense. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And when you watched it, Rowan, I was at the game that they played against the Vikings on that Thursday night in 2018 when golf through four or five touchdowns, I want to say. And it was wild. I mean, watching them just burn that Vikings defense to the ground with this offense. It was like, this is it.

Like, I've seen God. This is the future. And eventually, this is what happens. you run into walls. You were going to have to keep evolving and keep changing, even if the version of it when it was really clicking was to me one of the most beautiful versions of offensive football I've ever seen. When you don't have some aspect of your personnel that can expand it,

like we were talking about before, defenses are going to figure out within that condensed space what they have to worry about. And that's what happened. They ran into a wall. And just putting a bow on this, I think this is kind of one of the overarching topics. we've talked about all season. We'll talk about throughout the week.

The fact that McVeigh looked at the landscape of everything and said, I need someone who can do more than this. I think it is such a telling thing for the other coaches around the league. You can tell yourself as much as you want. I can make it work with this guy. We can get where we want to go with this guy. Eventually, you're going to hit a wall. For McVeigh, it was three years.

That 2020 team was just a different sort of offense. and the back half of certain other seasons, I think it looked like that. But them coming to that realization and saying, we need more than this, it was huge because that's what you've seen from them. You've seen that expansion, you've seen that evolution,

and it's brought them to a place offensively that they needed to be in order to win a championship like they might be about to do. I think that, you know, when we think about that 2018 that did go to the Super Bowl, one of the things that was never going to be the same from a 2018 is the run game. in terms of how efficient it was.

And we're talking about like the best or second best most efficient run game of the last 10 years. Like that was never going to happen again. They could fluke their way into it, but just like the things we know about run games was whether you have good players or not, like defenses can just sell out and stop them.

And once they do that, where's your run game now? So they were saying, hey, we need to stay, like you said, just stay one step ahead. And honestly, you saw it with the 40, Niners this last offseason. I don't know what the story is.

Shanahan fell asleep right before they made the deal with Stafford or whatever for the Rams and they couldn't get a deal done. And then they say, okay, well, we got to go out and find a quarterback somewhere and they go and take Trey Lansson in the draft. So yeah, every team is going to have to deal with that. And you kind of see also the other side, which is, hey, here's Matt LeFleckx coming over from this offense and he gets put in with, you know, with Aaron Rogers. and that offense is absolutely sickening for three straight years.

100%. I mean, it's all about widening the margin of error, right? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's what you've seen. At the very baseline level, that's what you've seen, is that they have widened the margin of error, and it's allowed their best players to shine in ways they couldn't even before.

And it's a truly, like, season-defining type thing. That expansion, that evolution, the way that they've changed, could be ultimately the story of the NFL this year because they could be winning a Super Bowl here in about six days. Gentlemen, sincerely appreciate the time. It is always so good to chat with you. Please tell the people where they can read and listen to you. PFF.com and the Too High Podcast.

I was giving you a chance to pump up the Too High Podcast. That's what I was trying to do. Yeah, the Too High Podcasts. We record twice a week. I'm sure that there's probably a decent amount of overlap between our audiences. But if you haven't, checked us out before. It's a lot of conversations like this, right, trying to take a 10,000 foot view of what's happening right now, right?

Expanding these narratives, trying to advance these conversations so everybody understands where the league is at, where it's been, and where it's going. And I think that that's the best, the best work that we do. I totally agree. And listening to you guys talk about football is one of my favorite things to do. You make me smarter. You make me appreciate things in a way I did before. And if you guys are not listening to the too high show and what these guys do, you're missing out.

You will be a much more well-rounded and satisfied, football fan if you choose to spend your time that way. Boys, I really appreciate taking time to do this. It's always good to chat with you. Let's catch up down the road for sure. Sounds good. See, yeah. All right, guys, that's all we got today. Thank you so much to Ali Connolly for stopping by. I really enjoyed that conversation. As always, thank you to Seth and Deontz. I love chatting with those guys. We will be back all week. We have so much fun stuff coming your way. Tomorrow, we've got Lindsay Jones, and a Hall of Fame wide receiver that may have played with Matthew Stefford

at one point or another. Later in the week, we're going to talk to our team writers that cover the Rams and the Bengals dig into just kind of how these teams got here. Always enjoy chatting with Jordan Rodrigue and Paul Deiner Jr. So please come back, continue to check all this stuff out. In the meantime, please rate and review the podcast

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