The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Jayden Daniels coming-out party, another big night for Josh Allen, concerns for the Bengals defense, and the reasons why offenses have fallen behind with Mitch Schwartz

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Look, NFL, you can give us as many two-game Monday nights as you want, so long as we get to watch quarterback performances like we saw from Jayden Daniels, Josh Allen and Joe Burrow in Week 3. Mitch Schwartz joins Robert Mays to break down Commanders-Bengals and Jaguars-Bills on this episode of The Athletic Football Show. The guys also add their answers to the question about leaguewide offensive struggles and play a round of The Ball Knower.RundownCommanders-Bengals recapJaguars-Bills recapWhy are offenses struggling?The Ball KnowerWhat Mitch Knows He Knows: Josh Allen is the league's second-best quarterbackWhat Mitch Thinks He Knows: The Vikings are for realWhat Mitch Wants to Know: If the run game is back, where are the superstar running backs?Host: Robert MaysWith: Mitch SchwartzExecutive Producer: Michael BellerProducer: Michael BellerSubscribe to The Athletic Football Show...AppleSpotifyYouTubeFollow Robert on X: @robertmaysFollow Mitch on X: @MitchSchwartz71Theme song: HauntedWritten by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love SongsCourtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Athletic Football Show, brought to you by Thursday Night Football only on Prime Video. I'm Robert Mays. Another midweek show for you guys, and a midweek show coming off of a very notable collection of Monday Night Games. Obviously, we had two Monday Night games. We're going to talk about both of those with our guest Mitchell Schwartz today. We chat about what Jane Daniels look like, what that means for Washington after a phenomenal performance. What it means for the Bengals defense, which I also think is an important thing to mention after the way they've played over the first few weeks. We dug into the Bill's big win over the Jags.

Josh Allen just looking like he's reached a different level. He's playing some exceptional football right now. Really enjoyed our discussion about that. And then really, what's going on with the Jags? Obviously, the defense was a disaster last night. But a lot of questions about Trevor Lawrence, that offense, where they take things from here. After wrapping up the Monday Night games, we spent a good chunk of this show chatting about why we think offenses are struggling right now. This has been something that we've danced around a little bit on this show and a bunch of

different ways. You know, Derek and I have kind of poked at it as we've talked about certain offenses and defenses. But I wanted after the way that this was talked about over the last week or so in a bunch of different forums to really dig into this with Mitch. What are the actual root causes for why offense feels so hard and why quarterbacks are having as much of an uphill battle as they are right now? And then we rounded things out with something we're doing on all these midweek shows,

just a series of questions about what we think we know, what we know, we know, and what we want to know. So excited to dig into all that with Mitch. Let's get to it. Joining us now, tomorrow of our old friends here on the athletic football show. It's Mitchell Schwartz. Mitch, how you doing, man? I'm doing good. You know, two Monday night football games twice as much as we need, but Bill's did a good job of making sure that we got the correct amount. I don't mind the two Monday night games only for this reason. It means there's one fewer game on Sunday. And the fact that we got seven early games and five late games on Sunday and you actually got to watch most of what was going on and there weren't three. And there weren't

three games happening under the shroud of darkness at noon. That I actually enjoyed. So if that's one of the downstream effects from having two Monday night games, I think I'm okay with it. I just don't want games on a night of the week where there isn't already a game. If there are two money night games and I'm already sitting on my couch, that's acceptable to me. Do you like the 45 minute start discrepancy or would you rather they be like an hour

and a half apart? It's a good question. I think probably yes. I think I like the way that they're staggered now rather than having them be an hour and a half apart. Because what would you do? Would you start the second game really, really late? I'm not into that. I got to be in bed by 11 on a weeknight.

That's kind of how things are going right now. I'm not a dark fan. Yeah, I don't do it. Football after dark is not something I'm doing as I cruise toward 40 here. I'm sure your sleep schedule is messed up right now just because you're taking care of an infant. But I can't imagine you want to be watching football until 1 a.m. at this point. No, definitely not. We do have some night help, but still the sleep schedule gets messed up.

Got to be early to wake up when she wakes up. And yeah, the Monday-day football thing, I don't know. It's just, it's kind of weird. I feel like we're not used to having two games start that close together when those are the only two games on at the same time. So it's both like good that you're already committed to three hours of football. And now it's like four hours, not too much. You know, if you start staggering it, then it's like, okay, now Monday night I have

to watch six hours of football, which feels a little daunting after all of Sunday. but I think Sundays, it's more just, like you said, the windows of how many afternoon games. If they could just make it like half in the morning, half at, you know, 325 local for central time, I think that would be the easy solution for all parties. My only gripe yesterday with the way that the games were broadcast, I don't need the picture and picture. If you either don't have a multi-view option or you don't have multiple televisions, I can't help you. I understand that that is a, it's a lot of, strong words. It's a lot of privilege talking, but like, I don't need the split.

screen. I got both things going at once. I don't need you. And the split screen when I was watching, I guess it was the Jags Bills game and then they were showing the Washington Bangle's game, it was like 15 seconds ahead of my actual stream of the game. So I was getting very annoyed. That was the only thing yesterday that was actually upsetting me. So if you want to be a person that sees both games, you need to put yourself in a position to see both games. This isn't even a financial thing. Like YouTube TV costs like $70 a month. It's cheaper than your cable. I promise you. And you can watch both games at the same time. This is not a YouTube TV ad, but I do enjoy what YouTube TV offers me. No, that was a qualifying hit, so you didn't sound so elitist with the dual screen comment from earlier. But that's what I'm saying. It's not even just like, well, let's just throw money at the problem. It's actually a less expensive option for you to be able to watch both games at the same time. Oh, I know. But Disney has to tell us that they own both ABC and ESPN, and you have to know that the camera works.

Let's talk about this game from last night. Let's talk about the later game that kicked off that 45 minutes afterwards, like you mentioned. Washington beats the Bengals, 38 to 33, and Jane Daniels has a monster night. 21 of 23, 254 yards, 11 yards per attempt, two touchdowns and a rushing touchdown in this game. The rookie record for single game completion percentage, 91.3%. Let's just chat about this performance and what you saw from Jane Daniels last night. What were your main takeaways after taking all that in? Well, incredible performance.

I mean, the thing that's going to stick with you is that last throw, the touch. as he's getting destroyed on cover zero. And this is where the broadcasts, I wish they showed another angle. They didn't really show him getting hit. They just kept replaying the catch because the catch was so great. But I was like worried that his arm got destroyed because he got hit right kind of as that right arm's coming down. I saw you mentioned that in real time where you were just like, he just got wiped out while

making that play. This is impressive on more levels than you guys are talking about. Well, that photo where he's got the funky elbow. I was worried that he was going to legitimately have a funky elbow after like hitting that on a human missile coming forward. him. But no, I mean, that's everything you want to see in a quarterback. You know, understanding what's happening on the field, the blitz, he's staying in there, he's taking a huge shot, he's delivering it with accuracy in a huge moment. It's kind of all those cliches you want

to throw out of what you want to see in the quarterback. I think another takeaway, I wish he turned down like the Josh Allen slam into people meter by like 80%, just like dial that that thing way down. You're not 65, 255. You know, it's going to catch up to him at some point. He's so dynamic running. You don't want to take that away from him. You just want him to be smarter when contact does come into the situation. And then, I mean, we're going to talk about the Bengals pass rush and lack thereof. But when you talk about quarterbacks and, you know, some people like to use how they perform in a clean pocket as a more, you know, standardized method of evaluating a quarterback.

Well, I mean, that was last night. It was a clean pocket every time. And we saw the best version of him. You know, he can throw 90 plus percent. And again, it's that last play. It's, I believe there was another fourth down on that last drive, having to extend it and makes a nice read and a nice pass to continue the drive. So, yeah, you're seeing the best version of that quarterback. Now, with the immediacy of the way things work, I hope we don't think this is the norm going forward because it was a bit of an aberration in terms of a pass rush perspective from the defensive side.

But it's hard not to get excited about what you saw from him last night. Yeah, I mean, he checked so many boxes. And we can talk about some of the things that stood out, just mentioning at the beginning now, just the caveat for. all of this. That is the worst NFL pass rush I think we will see on an NFL field this year. And there's a reason for that, right? The Bengals are missing two interior starting defensive linemen. Even with that in mind, though, it's BJ Hill and Sheldon Rankins are not saving whatever we watched last night. The Bengals pass rush and the Bengals defense overall is in a bad spot. I think we should talk about what that means for Cincinnati moving forward after we

get to the Jaden Daniel stuff. But just couch this entire conversation in, he was operating in the best possible circumstances for most of this game. That being said, the way that he played was extremely impressive. And obviously the two deep balls stand out as the highlight moments. The conviction in throwing both of those, I think, is what stands out outside of like the deep accuracy and the deep touch. We knew that coming in. That was one of the best things he did when he was at LSU last year. His touch and accuracy down the field on vertical throws was phenomenal. And so you knew that was going to be part of his game in the NFL. He was going to be able to place the ball down the field. But how early he's letting those things rip, that's what's impressive to me. On the last one,

obviously, he's identifying the pressure and that answer to cover zero in one of the biggest moments of the game, that takes a lot of courage as a young quarterback. But even the first one to McCorm, if you watch where he lets that thing go against quarters, it's two steps before McCoran gets by the corner. He knows that's a safe throw in that moment and his guy is potentially going to win. So that was one of the things that said out about those throws, not just where he put them, but when he decided to make those throws and the conviction that goes along with that. Okay. Do you think, you know, after the first couple weeks, there was talk of Cliff and how stagnant McLauran was and his usage rate and guys getting in motion and all that, do you think there's

an element that the simplicity, you know, quote unquote, of Cliff's offense is paying dividends already that maybe Jaden doesn't have the volume of other quarterback so he can get more confident with like a slightly lesser package? Or do you think that was a better showing from Cliff last night as well? I think it's probably more the latter, if I had to guess. It seems like they're bringing him along at a very deliberate pace. And they were doing that in the preseason. They did that over the first couple weeks of the season. Obviously, you can open things up a little bit more when you're not worried about protection issues against the team like Cincinnati in the way that they're composed right now.

But we saw some more dynamic stuff from them last year. last night. There was more motion. McClorn was lining up a little bit all over the place. I mean, obviously the last touchdown, he's on the right side compared to the left. And I actually liked some of the stuff that they did yesterday. You saw a lot of the 21 personnel when Eckler and Robinson were on the field together. I think that the ways that they were getting guys into the flat and some of how that was pulling coverage and he was working back over to the middle of the field.

I thought the overall offering and formula from the offense and what they were doing is a potentially encouraging sign for what it can look like moving forward. Yeah, and obviously, I mean, we'll see what the offensive line does holding up, you know, coming into the year that wasn't a unit that people necessarily had as one of the better blocking units. And so it's just, again, with a quarterback has that type of performance that early, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about Bryce later and everyone's talked about Bryce. But it can wear on you when you're getting hit. Obviously, you're watching Caleb a lot. You know, if the guy's under duress a lot of the time, you know, that takes a toll. But the flip side is positive performances. are long lasting as well. He's going to feel great about this performance. He's going to have more confidence. He might be more willing to let some things rip in the next game or to stand in the pocket or to get to things that he wasn't willing to or aware of in this game. And so I do think having a performance like that early in the year, again, like we're saying, he's shown all the things that you want to see decisiveness, accuracy, awareness of coverage, you know, being able to throw the ball under duress. So yeah, it's exciting to think about what's going to come because

you're seeing a lot of good stuff and now he should have the confidence and that should be his like all right i can do this in the NFL i've shown that you know as a player you're not going to he's not going to sit there and think well the past rush was terrible so maybe this isn't my true self you know you're going to think like dude i just set a rookie record for completion percentage we just had a huge victory on monday night we didn't have to punt the ball we didn't have you know turnovers um so the confidence is going to be there and i think that's just going to uplift that unit and yeah it's it's it's going to be really cool going forward to see what he does because obviously the quarterback class coming into the year was one of the biggest discussion points of the NFL.

Yeah, I think that when we have young quarterbacks in the first few games of their career, you have to be careful in what sort of proclamations that you're making. But that's more on the negative side. When we see guys who have success early, that is typically a signal that they're going to be quarterbacks who stick around in the NFL. So I think this is worth getting excited about. I think it's just important to understand the context under which it happened. When I was there in training camp and I was talking to Cliff and some of the other people with the organization just about him, the thing that they kept coming back to about what makes him different is a level of maturity.

And I think that he's going to be 24 this year. I think that does help when you think about. Help he's mature. Yeah. Yeah. When guys have that level of experience, they were in college for a long time, I think you want them to come in and be a little bit more pro-ready. And it looks like he is. But they kept coming back to the processing and just the way that he sees the game.

And they did a lot of that virtual reality stuff at LSU where he's really working on coverage rotations and how I'm seeing things on the back end and when things are moving. And when you watch him play, he moves pretty quickly through stuff. And there was a throw he made to Luke McCaffrey in the first half. It was after the miss to McLaurin, which is one of the only plays he was pressured the entire game when he got hit by Trey Hendrickson and he missed McLaren on that big crosser. On that same drive, he comes all the way back to McCaffrey on a full feel read on a pure program. That's what's really exciting to me is seeing the progression and the maturity mentally from a quarterback in his first year. We know what kind of athlete he is. We know what he's going to be able to do as a runner.

But the fact that he's already moving through stuff that fast, those are the throws, I think, that I'm going to be coming back to when I think about why he's able to have some success where other quarterbacks at this stage of their careers might not. Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, I've said for a while on this kind of predates this whole too high discussion that's been going on for the last week or two, but the last few years. a quarterback to be good, you really just have to know where to go with the ball and you have to get it there accurately. How all those things happen don't necessarily matter, but the quicker you understand where to go with the ball and the more accurate you are, you're going to be a good quarterback. If you can add in escapeability or a rocket arm or these other things that puts you up the ladder. But I think with the way offenses down, with the way defenses are playing, there's now kind of coming back to more of the emphasis on the mental ability of the quarterback to be able to read.

coverages to understand how much her defenses are playing. And like you said, to be able to show that, even though he's, you know, older for a rookie quarterback, to show that in his third career NFL game at the level that he's doing it against, you know, a defensive coordinator two years ago was the hot name and surprisingly never got that head coaching job. It's not like Anirumo forgot how to call defenses or forgot how to disguise coverages or any of those things. So it's a really impressive showing.

And yeah, I think we're starting to get to the point where we're putting more emphasis on the mental acumen of a quarterback. And that's going to start superseding all the physical traits that I think, you know, kind of the Mahomes and Josh Allen's led us towards. I think it's going to shift back now. And to your point, Jaden, doing it as well as he did this early, it's really exciting for everybody, but Washington fans especially. Well, also having the physical stuff. I mean, again, like he's clearly a very gifted runner. He's able to throw the ball down the field. But there was a throw he made in the third quarter. They did a little like slide RPO out of that like full house backfield set that they're using with the two backs. And the edge coming off the right side is unblocked. And the,

the creativity he shows and kind of bending the ball around that guy and hitting McLaurin. I was just like, okay, like these are the things that you want to see. The mental stuff is there, the physical stuff is there on multiple different levels. It is a very exciting start to his career. We'll see what happens when he's playing against the defense that is not the current iteration of the Bengals. Yeah, it's just, it's tough because, I mean, Cincinnati, it just, they've been so good for so long and well I say that I mean it feels like they've been so good for so long but I feel like defensively they've always been a sum of the parts more than you know individual pieces and it feels like there really aren't any pieces and it feels like the sum of the parts is now worse than the

individual pieces and just like kind of a weird reversal like you almost come away from that game feeling worse about cincy than you do excited about jaden and that's saying something because as we've been talking about there's so many reasons to feel excited about jaden but man it's just it's it's rough and cincy overall, but it's rough, you know, defensively. And if you can't get pressure on the quarterback, especially against a team that doesn't have one of the top tier offensive lines, you know, when you got just one guy that's really capable of doing it, it's a lot easier for offenses to take that away. And it's, yeah, it's rough and hard to be too excited at Cincinnati this morning.

I'm concerned. I just point blank. I am concerned about what is going to happen with that defense over the course of the year. because even if they get guys like Miles Murphy back, we haven't seen Miles Murphy be a productive NFL pass rusher, even though he was their first round pick. Everything about the plan on that side where they were trying to restock the cover with all these young, highly drafted pieces and save some money because they were going

to have to pay the guys on offense. The plan has not worked. And like you mentioned, the personnel is a concern, but this defense no longer feels like it's more than the sum of the parts. It feels like it is the parts and the individual component parts are not very good. So I don't really know what to make of this. Like this team is 29th in the NFL and EPA per drop back through three games. They are one of the worst defenses in the NFL and have been.

And I don't necessarily think that there's going to be some huge jump coming. So if the defense is going to be like a bad unit over the course of this year, even if the offense looks like it did over the last couple games, when Burrow is playing well and they're putting up a bunch of points, I don't know what that means for this Bengals team overall. This team is already 0 and 3, and I just don't know if that offense is going to be able to consistently lift them if the defense is going to look like this weekend and week out. No, it doesn't seem like it's going to be able to. It seems pretty Blake.

This might be like a reset year that you didn't really know what's going to happen as the season started. But let's say it's a reset year. T. Higgins is on the franchise tag. He's going to be gone after this year, almost certainly. So this was supposed to be the year we're like, well, we'll put, we'll get, we'll pay T on the tag. We'll bring everybody together. We'll make one last run at this thing before we kind of have to take a little bit of a soft reset and figure out what we're going to do on offense. Well, the last run at this thing has involved an 0-and-3 start and I think a pretty depressing outlook for what the rest of the season might look like.

Yeah, I mean, it turns into a reset year in a Super Bowl contention year. And then that makes you worry about what next year, you know, the actual reset year is supposed to look like. But, yeah, the pieces don't seem to be there. I mean, obviously they wanted to draft and they wanted to go, you know, younger and cheaper and as players are developing, understanding who you have to pay, who you don't have to pay. But they also got kind of lucky with free agent signings that outperformed their contracts. The Trey Hendrickson won, the DJ Reeder one. And that was the cornerstone of their defense for a while as those two guys. Mike Hilton, Chedopee, Wuzier, Von Bell.

I mean, they built this thing out of free agency. And now they can't afford to do that because they have to pay the offensive guys. Well, it's funny to think that Cincinnati built it from free agency. But yeah, it's, they haven't paid Jemar. So maybe this is a reason that after this year, potentially they go five and 12 or something crazy happens. And they just say, like, dude, we need just like a total hard reset. Let's get rid of the guys bringing assets. I mean, I can't see them doing that.

But I would imagine if things keep going downhill, you're going to have to think about every scenario. You know, I think we always thought and assumed as we burrow and chase for the next 10, 12 years. and that was going to be the cornerstone of the offense and the offense was always going to have this high ceiling because of those guys. But if the offense has a high ceiling, I would say Burrow isn't performing to his best standards right now. There's some throws he's leaving out there.

I think the arm, the wrist, looks like he can make the throws, but whatever reason, some processing stuff has been a little off. Yeah, if you don't give up the ball at all and you don't have any punts and you still lose the game, like it's hard to win in the NFL. Down two scores. the end of the game. Not even just lose the game. Don't even have a chance on the final drive to put yourself in a position to win it. That's crazy. The fact that you cannot punt and not turn the ball over. Yes. Or Buffalo or against Washington, which could end up being a great team. We don't know that yet. But yeah, there's nothing promising to take away from that Cincinnati performance. And it just makes you ask a lot of questions. And it makes you worry a lot because just it's a dire state. There's like everything seems wrong. and off. And there's no simple, like, well, we just start tackling better. We just start blocking, we just start executing. Like, there's no simple answer. Like, we came into the year

knowing the run defense was going to suck, but that's okay, because if you can rush the passer and you can do creative things on the back end, you can survive in today's NFL. But they can't rush the passer either right now, so he can't go up on defense. And then offensively, yeah, we kind of assumed to a degree that Burrow would be back to the way he was and the offense was going to get better and they would start to, you know, be less obvious with the shotgun stuff and some of the run game play action things that they've struggled with in the past. But I would say they're not at their peak of what they've been. And the defense is at the lowest. It's been over the past, you know, three or four years. So, yeah, kind of a worrisome state of affairs. And like you said,

it's not like there's help on the way. It's not like these studs are coming back, you know, on four-week IR than weeks, you know, five, six and seven. We're going to start, you know, throwing these blue chippers into the lineup. It's just not there. You have new pieces on the back and maybe that potentially gets better as you like fold a guy like Gino Stone in. I'm just trying to like find, I'm grasping at straws here for reasons that this can improve. But I don't have a lot of hope. When you compare watching that defense right now to watching the good defenses in the NFL, it's a stark contrast. The way that they tackle on the back end, how not dynamic the front feels.

When you're watching a team, and I know the Vikings are like a crazy example of this, but it doesn't even have to be the Vikings. When you're watching some of the stunts that teams are using and just how, How uneasy NFL offensive lines feel right now because of what front fours are doing against them and then you go watch the Bengals, it's kind of crazy how different that product looks. So something drastic needs to change for them to keep pace because right now they do not feel like a good defense. They feel like an actively bad defense. Yeah, I mean, the stunts thing is interesting because I'd say Henderson is at his best rushing an offensive tackle and being able to work that guy. I don't think he's, you know, the dynamic T.E. stunt guy where you're loop.

So do it on the other side then. Let him crumble the pocket and then do it with the other guys. Well, yeah, but it's not like it's not like Hubbard is the ideal, you know, T.E. candidate. To your point, the defensive tackles, obviously right now they got a couple guys down, but the guys coming back. It's not like they're elite penetrators and disruptors. So, yeah, the way teams are getting pressure these days, it seems to be more of the twists and the stunts. Maybe they have to start doing some three-down stuff where they're getting linebackers and kind of smaller, quicker bodies in there just to bang around. try to shake something loose. But yeah, to your point, I mean, this is like when you're looking at offenses

that get too old and they're just reliant on, you know, shells of what guys used to be, and there's no speed and dynamic, you know, athletic ability, that's kind of what you're seeing up front. It's not going to work and it hasn't been working. Let's get to the other game we saw last night. The bill is absolutely destroyed the Jags, 47 to 10. Josh Allen has a monster day, 23, 32. 263.

0.72 EPA per dropback, just for context, that's like three and a half times what an MVP season would be. And they lead the league right now in EPA per dropback. I think he has been the most dynamic, exciting player in the NFL up to this point. This really does feel like a potential special season for Josh Allen and that bill's offense if they can keep rolling like this. And I don't necessarily think a lot of people saw that coming,

even if you think to Josh Allen is a great player. They had some real questions about their past catching spots and just what this offense would look like and what kind of felt like a year of transition after moving on from Diggs and trying to incorporate a bunch of new pieces. It has worked out about as well as you possibly could have hoped if you are a Bill's fan through three games. Oh, absolutely. And I think there was reason to be worried after the Milano injury that, oh man, it feels like, you know, the injuries are falling up early. You know, obviously Bill's fans know that you get rid of a lot of names, but those names were. were a little bit overpaid and probably not producing at the level that everyone else is accustomed to. So a lot of the offseason moves were warranted. I just, I keep thinking back to last year when,

you know, they fire the offensive coordinator and they bring in, you know, the new one. And everyone's, shouldn't say everyone, because I was one of the ones that push back. But like, oh, the third in EPA or second in EPA and this is such a good offense. And McDermott's, you know, dumb for firing this guy. The offense isn't the problem. But like, sometimes you're a good coach and you just know that there's this missing piece. And we saw last year, you know, starting to lead on the running back a little bit more, starting to use him in the past game, you know, kind of corraling in some of the bad Josh Allen instincts and, and, you know, making him into a down-in-and-and-down-out annihilator the way we saw last night and the way we're kind of seeing the beginning of the year. And it's paying dividends. I mean,

we know that he's a great quarterback. I think we're going to talk about him a little later in those terms. But seeing the offense perform this way. And that was what the first quarter- quarterback on Coleman benching. And I think he only has like five catches in three games or something like that. I think he's keeping pace with Travis Kelsey there. But, you know, it's still finding their way, finding the pieces how they fit, and to look as good as they have to put up, you know, 47 on a team that might be fraudulent, but we thought was going to be a good team.

And when the quarterback's operating that way, I mean, the game just feels easy. Like every single snap, he gets the ball and it's just like, he's going to do the right thing, something's going to happen or he's going to find a way into the right thing. And it's honestly just so much fun to watch because he's so good. The offense is rolling. You know, offenseal line-wise, they lost, you know, my guy Mitch Morris, but they've been, I would say, one of the more underrated, higher-level offensive lines in the NFL the past three or four years. And they're just continuing that. And it's a lot of fun. And there's not much better in football than a good offense with one of the top quarterbacks functioning at a high level. And that's what they're

showing. And they're kind of must-see TV every week because of it. Let's talk about the Joe Brady part of this because I do think that that's worth mentioning. I think that this is one of those moments where the bills made that decision, the bills moved on from Kandorsi, and that is a don't let good be the enemy a great sort of example, where the offense was good. The offense was undeniably good. It was one of the most efficient offenses in the league. What they are doing right now feels very different than what they looked like under Kandorsi. And the second half of last year, you know this.

You come in in the middle of a season as a new offensive coordinator. You can only do so much to change what that offense looks like in real. time. I mean, that train is moving. And we saw some of it. Well, I would say the structure of the offense is there. The wording is there. You can't change that kind of stuff, but you can definitely push the different buttons. And, you know, those offensive coordinators have those huge play sheets, and it might be all the same plays that the previous guy was going to run. But instead of the fourth play on third and one, now it's your number one play. Instead of, you know, these are our top five first and ten plays. And, you know, four of them are deep bombs and one of them is a Josh Allen sweep. Like, now we're

going to mix in some other things, the second and eight list of, yeah, before we're just going to go, you know, spread it out and chuck the ball. Maybe we're being a little smarter and where we, you know, pick and choose some runs based on coverages. So the structure is the same, but the sequencing, the emphasis, the, you know, how you push those buttons, I think you can change that pretty drastically. We saw that, but those things are more subtle in terms of like what the offense feels like week in and week out. They were running the ball more under Joe Brady. Maybe as a way to calm things down, whatever. They were running the ball more. They were throwing the ball more. They were throwing the ball to James Cookmore. There was a little bit more motion. This feels like a

pretty significant departure from what that offense felt like over the last couple years. And that's just how dynamic it feels before the snap. I mean, they're using pre-snap motion and like motion at the snap as much as almost any team in the NFL right now. Yeah, I think they saw their fourth or fifth right now. They're like fourth at 80 percent. And what the teams that they're right behind are the usual suspects. It's the Niners. It's the Packers. It's the Dolphins. And when you watch this team right now, it feels that way. I mean, you can think of the examples from last night, that fourth and one play to Khalil Shakir, some of the stuff that they're doing with Curtis Samuel. I think that they're being really thoughtful with how they're using motion within this offense. And the other

element of this is they're doing it for a quarterback who's gaining a lot of information from it. And as I think about why the bills right now feel a little bit different than the bills over the last couple years and why the receiver changes matter a little bit less. It's because Josh Allen is in command right now. If you watch what they're doing pre-snap, they're getting to the line of scrimmage with like 16, 17 seconds left on the playcock. They're doing all these motions, and he feels like he's in total control. Just watching him use cadence to get a little bit of information. It's like, all right, I saw you take a step. Now I'm going to send a guy in motion. I probably know what you're in and I probably know what the pressure is.

And this reminds me a little bit of watching Mahomes last year, where you have this guy who has been a force of nature physically for a huge chunk of his career. But now he knows the answers to the test. And Mahomes last year was handling all the pre-snap stuff. He was handling all the protections, doing stuff that we don't typically see NFL quarterbacks do anymore because so much is being taken off of their plate. I was talking to someone in Buffalo today, and I was just like, just for my own edification, he's doing pretty much everything, right? Like my mind isn't playing tricks on me as I watch the broadcast copy. And he's like, oh, no, no, yeah, he's in control of everything that we're doing right now. It's a little bit with the center, but for the most part, he is the one leading everything.

That combined with what he is as a physical force of nature, that is a terrifying proposition. And I think that is what you are seeing right now and why this team feels a little bit different. Yeah, it's a good point you bring up with motion and using that to your advantage. You know, I've had some offensive coordinators in my day. and, you know, one of them it felt like we did a lot of shifts in motions. And it didn't feel as tactical. It felt like that's what we're supposed to do

or that's what other teams do. And we're just going to do that because when you motion two tight ends from a wing formation and you fake the wing and you line them back up, we might get a man's own towel. But it just didn't feel as, you know, weaponized as we see with today's NFL.

So, yeah, giving the quarterback the answers before. And I think that's what, you know, we talk about these motion rates and all these things, like, teams aren't just doing it to do it. Most of the time it's to gain information. Some of the time it's to gain leverage or to gain an advantage where they've seen, you know, if you line up in a stack formation, you're going to get a pressed corner

and someone behind them and you might not like that for the, you know, initial jam on the receiver and it might throw things off. But if you motion a guy to a stack formation, they're not going to get down into press formation. So now that's a tactical advantage. So we're building our guys free releases and they can get into the rats quicker, all those things. It's not just like, all right, well, the chiefs are doing it.

So we're just going to send a guy in motion because against this team, this is what they did. Like, that's where, you know, that weaponized version of motion and formations and shifting and all those things comes into play. And so, yeah, giving Allen, I think he's always been a pretty good processor. Sometimes he's short-cirquited. He is very smart. We think about him as like big, dumb boy throw ball hard, but he is very smart. He's smart. I think he's just very competitive and very confident.

and his ability to make anything work and not as worried about the downside of what could happen if he makes one of those choices. So, yeah, so again, giving him more answers to the test before it's happening. To your point is a scary proposition. And also, I think you mentioned this, that he is getting to a point where the mental side of it is becoming easier, is becoming more refined. I mean, again, all these quarterbacks are going to keep getting better mentally. And they're still under 30 years old.

I think we think of quarterbacks like Payne Manning and Tom Brady and Drew Breeze. Like the stuff they were doing mentally was, you know, ahead of their time and ahead of their peers. But for the most part, that was getting into their 30s and getting into the late 30s. These guys are in their 20s and they're pretty much operating at similar levels. And it's so impressive. They're just going to keep getting more experience and more information. I mean, in 10 years, we're still going to be watching Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen. And they're going to have 10 more years of playing experience behind them.

And it's crazy to think about it. I've been saying this since Day 1-Wan-Mohms. He's only going to keep getting better because these guys, their physical peaks are probably going to go into their early 30s. And they're going to combine these high-level physical peaks with now 10 years of experience when you're 32 or 33. So it's a lot of fun. I think Allen's finally reaching that kind of the crescendo of the experience meets

physicality. It's converging. And that moment where it converges is really excited. And I think with Mahomes, it did happen last year. That was where I really felt like the step had been taken where it's like he's seeing everything. He's seeing what pressures you want. He's doing like all accrued changes to protections. And what's so, and I think why that sticks out so much is that we don't see it that often with

NFL quarterbacks anymore. There aren't that many guys handling that much stuff before the snap at the line of scrimmage. And when you come, when you have that level of mental acumen and control of the offense with the physical stuff, that's where you get really special players. And I think that Josh Allen is hitting that moment in his career, and it is very cool to watch. On the other side of this, the Jags defense, and one of the reasons that the motion was sticking out yesterday is every time they would send a guy in motion, the Jags would like three guys would move.

And the amount how it just sent them into a complete frenzy on the back end, that's just not what we see when teams use motion against NFL defenses right now. We'll talk about that in a little bit. You can just feel how discombobulated and out of sorts that defense was throughout the entire game. They are 30th in EPA per dropback right now. The Jacksonville Jaguars are through three games. That was not supposed to be the case with Ryan Nielsen coming in and taking over that defense. And I know that they were missing a couple guys last night.

Tyson Campbell was hurt. Donald Savage also missed last night. So you got Monteric Brown in there for Tyson Campbell. He struggled. He was wanting coverage on that. Keon Coleman touchdown. I don't really want to hear it. Like, they played against the Bill's defense last night. No Matt Milano, no Taran Johnson, no Terrell-Bernard, and you don't even notice because of how cohesive it all feels.

Sean McDermott's been there for eight years now. There's more of a sense of this is how we play. This is how it's all supposed to fit together. But at the same time, Tyson Campbell and Darnell Savage should not be the difference in the defensive performance we saw last night from the Jacks. Well, I mean, we started talking about Cincinnati, especially when you have, you know, two. first round picks at defensive end who are supposed to be game wreckers and for the most part three if you include armstead three well yeah just in terms of the actual jacksonville first round picks but yeah i mean again it's supposed to be happening up front that's supposed to be kind of the bread and butter being able to get after the quarterback uh so when it's not you know everything gets affected on the back and when you're missing a couple guys then it gets amplified i i think this gets into the larger discussion that's going on about jacksonville today which is as a coached

Is it bulky? Is it a combination? Is it, you know, Shod Khan getting a clear house by week six? Like, like you said, the defensive coordinator is supposed to come in, and we were all kind of excited to see him work with the pieces that admittedly are there. I mean, Josh, you know, Alan Hines has shown that he's an elite pass rusher. I think, you know, Trayvon Walker, the physicality, the size, you know, growing him into an NFL pass rusher. I think there was some optimism coming into the air. You put Armstead in there. Who's been probably an underrated. chess piece in defenses. I don't think people who aren't as clued and realize how much he can

align across the front and allow you to do certain things in nickel, certain things in base defense, certain things on third down packages. So using those three guys in any combination that you want should be the recipe for a really, I wouldn't say dominant defense, but a pretty good one. Just if you say, all right, I got these three defense alignment and I'm able to play them in a specific way in today's football. And like we talk about the stunts on the twists and the the ability to use athleticism and power and strength and length, which they have crazy length with those three guys. But just hasn't come together.

So again, it gets back to is it acquiring the wrong guys? Is it acquiring the wrong coaches, coordinators? Is it the head man who just can't seem to get anything right? It's an interesting discussion. And unfortunately, we're here in week three with Jacksonville already. Josh Allen, I think, had about 35 dropbacks last night. He had 30 attempts and I'm sure there were some scrambles in there, which that's another part of this, like his sense of when to take off and when to use his legs is more pronounced than

than it's ever been if we're talking about converging skill sets, but that's a whole another conversation. So 35-ish dropbacks last night. How many Jags do you think had more than one pressure in that game yesterday, according to next-gen stats? How many? More than one. Zero.

One. There was one guy on that defense who had two pressures last night. Everyone else had one or fewer. They dropped back 35 times. Yeah, that's one of those things that's not even like the rate said. It's just the total amount. It's just the total. One guy had two pressures in that game.

It's crazy. Yeah, that's the, well, do you know how many incompletions? This is a totally off topic, but fun trivia. Incompletions, Dallas's defense has caused over the last two weeks? It's probably less than 10. Correct. It's eight. Two games, eight incompletions.

So similarly, mind-blowing. It's funny that we're going to have a conversation in like five minutes about why offenses are struggling against all these crazy good defenses. And we've seen so much bad defense from like five units over the last two weeks. Yeah, that's what makes things fun. Every time you think you got something kind of figured out in the NFL, kind of gets flipped all around. But no, I mean, again, Jacksonville. So let's get it, let's dig into this. If we're trying to be, if we're trying to be diagnostic here with where the issues are with the Jax and what needs to happen.

Obviously, Trevor throws that horrendous interception last night, which is, that's just a bad ball, that can't happen. But for the most part, I do think that he's pretty far away from, like, what is the most concerning problem that the Jags have right now? So if you're trying to figure out, like, all right, these are the issues. This is what needs to be solved over the next year for this team to take a reasonable step forward. Where would you start? Man.

Well, typically you'd look at, I mean, quarterback, offensive line, defense line. I think those are still kind of the three things that you look at because you can have the Cincinnati version where it's, you know, Burrow and the weapons, but I think for the most part, teams that are successful long-term pair quarterback with offense-al-line and then kind of figure out the weapons from there. And they have had, you know, good players on the outside, but there's something missing with Trevor, there's something missing with the offense. So does he need to have a better offensive line that's just like, I know it's easy to say, just have an Eagles level offensive line, but like, is it that there's something, you know, mentally or physically that like,

if the offense line isn't one of the best three units in the NFL, it can't unlock him to feel calm, to feel comfortable, and to get the ball to where it needs to be consistently. Is it getting receivers he can trust better, you know, that are going to catch the ball? Maybe you have to give up a little bit of athleticism to just get guys who are catching the ball more consistently. Because every time the Trevor debate comes up, we see, you know, five-minute montages of all the drop passes and drop touchdowns over the past two years. So I think it's obviously figuring out why he isn't, you know, a top.

five quarterback, why he hasn't talked about along the likes of, you know, Herbert and Burrow and the non-Mohams and Allen guys. So that would probably be number one. Again, defense-line-wise, like you have the resources, you have the pieces there that should be a functional defensive line in the NFL. So it's a get back, it gets back to offense, gets back to, and this is where, again, the quarterback money, Lawrence was just signed. So he doesn't cost that much.

He doesn't cost as much as he's going to in the next few years as his cap number really starts to hit the team. So you're going to have to get better because he's going to be accounting for more in two years than he is now. So figuring out what exactly he needs, and I don't have that answer. I mean, I think that gets into his mindset and asking him to be very honest and just say, like, what is it that you need to feel better and to play better? And if that's O-line resources, great.

You know, we're going to pour as many resources as we can into there. Even if we have to overpay, even if we have to, you know, trade a second round pick for another team's, you know, starting caliber, guard, just to make him feel better. So to me, that's where you start. Does seem like a coaching change might be needed. You know, so I think you kind of combine those two. When you're looking at, if I am going to move on from a coach, you obviously want someone that's going to be a better version of the guy you just fired.

Is it, you know, I know Kubek was the hot name over two weeks, maybe cooled off after last week. Is it Ben Johnson? Is it someone that mirrors, you know, philosophically, scheme-wise? to Trevor with what Trevor feels like he needs and they can build it from there. That would probably be where I start if I was running things, you know, kind of honing in on that one. You just, you're not going to have a great team if the quarterback's not operating at a high level. And if the quarterback is getting paid a lot of money, it's hard to say we're going to

have a dominant defense and an okay offense with a pretty good quarterback. Like it has to be quarterback driven, so you have to figure out that answer. I'm trying to figure out, like, what is that missing ingredient? Like, why does it feel like everything is just off on that side? of the ball. I think offensive line quality is definitely a good place to start. If you just think about what the running game has looked like over the last couple of years, it's been actively bad. The tackle play last night, you know, Cam Robinson really struggled in some big moments. Gregoros was playing some really good football, so I understand that.

But this is a guy that you've paid. He's supposed to be a veteran. He's supposed to be reliable. He's just not at this point. The right tackle has been an issue with the rookie last year and I recycling between options this year. So the offensive line is a problem. The first drive of that game yesterday, there's a couple moments stick out. was either the first play of the game or second down. They run an RPO with a speed out to the right side. And that's just one of those plays where I'm just like, what is the best case scenario here?

Truly, what is the best case scenario? You're throwing a speed out against cover three with RPO attached to it. The best thing that can happen here is you gain four yards. And that is a hard throw that you're asking your quarterback to make. and this offense is just full of hard throws where the juice just is not worth to squeeze. And when I compare what this offense looks like and feels like and what watching Trevor feels like and how hard everything feels, I contrast that to a situation like what the Vikings have with Sam Donald right now, where you're giving him so many easy answers within the structure of the

offense. Everything feels easy. And I think that's when you're. you're talking yourself into Trevor Lawrence, he makes so many difficult throws. The way he throws the ball on outbreaking routes or big crossers, it's absolutely beautiful. The guy is clearly very talented. But I just think everything about the construction of the passing game, how it's being fed to him, and the options that are given to him within that, it just makes everything so much

more difficult, so much tighter, so much more on edge than it has to be when you're comparing it to the best offenses in the league. If I was trying to figure out, that's probably where I would land. Yeah, and I mean, you mentioned the offensive line. I mentioned offensive line. But I think you would have to, again, this is where it gets to like, we need to ask Trevor and have him be honest because Herbert didn't seem to be as affected by a poor offensive line, you know, the first few years in his career.

Like, it just didn't seem to really bother him that much. He was really good at evading pressure. It didn't seem to, like, affect his footwork, didn't seem to affect his accuracy. So there are some quarterbacks where they're more okay with back. that offense aligns. Again, the answer from Lawrence might just be like, man, it'd be really nice to just run like Shanahan style outside zone and then play action, pull up, you know, 12-yard over, boom. That's what I thought they were going to do this year.

And when they do that, the under-center play action that they use is the best part of their offense. When they use under-center play action, he looks really good because I think that it allows him to play a little bit looser and you're creating space within the offense that doesn't really exist in their dropback game. The problem is you can't run under center play action 30 times a game. So every time they do something else, I mean, there's just so many, like they'll be an empty, it's first and 10, and he's throwing a stick to the tight end. And my thought, what is the best case scenario here? You're throwing this into traffic and it's going to be a three-yard gain if you

complete it. So there's just something that feels fundamentally off about the way that they are teaching this, the way that they are feeding it to the quarterback, and what it is supposed to feel like. So I think that it kind of gets back to like Andy Reid style coaching trees and offensive coordinators that left. That is no longer like what the chiefs were doing with, you know, run game and RPO's and easy throws. That's no longer like the quote unquote easy thing to do in the NFL, to your point. And you don't see Andy Reed or a lot of his disciples lean into the Shanahan-McVeigh-style

under center stuff as much because that's just not, it's not old. It's not old school West Coast football, so it's not like the origins of the playbook, and it's not new school Andy Reid either. And so you go back to like Nagy in Chicago. There were what, the four or five games of Mitch Rubisky where I think they just turned over the OC to Bill Laser and he just ran an under center run and play action. And we're going to make this as easy as possible. And Trubisky is going to go 21 for 30 for 2117 yards averaging, you know,

two yards down the field of an on average completion. But like you can make the quarterback. look good in those offenses and to your point you can give them easy answers and I think there's just a little bit of a disconnect now and we're seeing this in the chiefs offense too to be honest like there aren't those just like easy I'm just going to turn my back to the defense we're going to make sure the linebacker suck up there's a you know massive void behind them turn around boom dot them and sometimes that is a bad thing you know we talk about you know purdy and some of the other guys they're just spot throwers and if a guy happens to be in in the spot on defense they're

still going to throw it because that's where they're supposed to. And sometimes you don't always see that. But yeah, again, that's where it leads me to think that, like, probably coaching staff goes and you try to find that, you know, offense coordinator that's going to lean into making life easier. Because it's one of those things, like, if they knew the answer, they wouldn't be 0 and 3. They would understand what Trevor needs. So it's hard to pinpoint. But, yeah, it comes back to making the quarterback. also I think like feel validated and I feel part of the, you know, discussion. You want him to be the leader of the team, the leader of the offense, the one who's driving things.

So I think making him like part of the solution is the way to go. And yeah, it's tough when you're in that situation. You don't want anyone, well, you don't want to be O and 3. You don't want to be staring down in the barrel of a terrible season when you're supposed to be one of the better teams, you know, from ownership-wise and kind of top-level team organization. You don't want people questioning why you just paid a quarterback a bunch of money. You want it to be very apparent. Like, this is why we gave this guy all this money. And unfortunately, there's just a lot of chatter around like, was he worth it? Is he a top guy? Like all those things.

That's just not what you want to see. You want Lawrence to be fixed. You want the conversation to turn to the Herbert side where the quarterback is awesome. Everyone else around is the issue. And we're going to figure it out from there. Yeah. I just, I think that we need to learn some lessons about context around quarterbacks. And you would hope that if you put this guy, if you make this guy the highest paid quarterback in the league, he can transcend anything that's happening around him. I just think that we overstate how easy it is to do that. Like there are probably two, three guys in the entire NFL that you can just drop into

any situation and they can look like competent NFL quarterbacks. Yes, I think there are two guys. I think that's probably the answer. And so if you put Trevor Lawrence into, again, I'm going to keep going back to this and it seems like simplistic terms, but if everything just feels a little bit easier, because when you watch this offense over the last couple years, everything feels really hard.

And how much of that is on him because of some of the decisions he's making and where he's trying to go with the ball, we can have that discussion. Like there's that throw he tries to put to Gabe Davis down the left side line, it falls incomplete, there's a three-man concept to the front side, and he decides he's going to take his one-on-one. We can have a conversation about what the decision should be in that moment.

But I think overall, if you just think about the construction of the offense and what he's being asked to do, it feels a lot harder than what the good NFL offenses in the NFL, than what the good offenses in the NFL are doing. And I think that until there is a pretty significant shift to that sort of situation, we're going to be really frustrated with the Trevor Lawrence experience. Yeah, this gets, I was trying not to chuckle while you were talking because I was thinking of like, well, what's your biggest strength?

Well, let me tell you about my weaknesses first because my biggest weakness is my biggest strength. But like there's probably an element that Trevor shows so much in practice and in games that they're thinking like we don't have to do the easy stuff anymore. We can go to the high level stuff and he'll turn high level into easy if it's not presented. And, you know, I think that's where the chief's offense is. I think, again, kind of gets back to that more, you know, Andy Reader's tree. We're going to make the offense as complicated as the quarterback allows us to. And we're going to put more on his plate because he's shown that ability. We saw that after Stafford got to LA, McVeigh changed the offense a bit, and the quarterback, the onus was more on him.

You know, if you plopped Stafford into the base level, you know, 2018 Jared Gough offense, it would still look a little different. But he got there and McVeigh was able to expand the playbook and be able to put more on the quarterback. So I think there is an element that Trevor is probably so advanced that they're giving him the hardest version of what an offense can look like because they think he can do it. but that's where like you know the RPO with the speed out like that's supposed to be the easy play but when the easy play is a four yard I'm going to catch it and go out of bounds like that's not that doesn't become easy anymore that becomes a half so hard throw it's it's not an easy throw to make right so yeah that's where like those hard play actions from under center even though you're turning the back you're back to the defense like those are easy because you move guys off of spots and you create

huge voids where you no longer have to be pinpoint perfect um And that I do think like offensive line wise, you know, the backside of power, the backside of duo, you know, the backside of an RPO. Like those are nice breaks. Those are, I just need to get into my stance, basically take one kick, touch my guy. I got him. Like it's a nice mental refresher. And when you're asking the quarterback to do 32 hard things in a game versus 17 hard things, like it uses strength. It uses, you know, your energy. It zaps you. And I do think there is a toll that it takes and we probably, you know, overstated a bit because, again, the Allen and Mahomes don't get, you know, I shouldn't say fatigue. That sounds bad that like Trevor gets fatigued.

But it's just, it's true. Like the more easy things that you can have throughout the game, your confidence builds, you feel better. And when you get to the hard things, maybe subconsciously you are able to pull the trigger better. You are able to find the open guy. You are able to throw that thing with accuracy. It's just everything you started this with the context of a quarterback. Everything is so interconnected. It's just hard to know which. things have, you know, greater effects on a guy than some others. Yeah. And I think that we'll continue to have that conversation about Trevor Lawrence and this team if they continue to struggle. And it seems like that might be the case.

All right. We're going to take our first break here and then we're going to come back. And we're going to have a conversation that's, it's been pretty prevalent around the football internet over the last few weeks. But we haven't really dug into it. We're going to talk about why offenses around the league are struggling. All right. Let's dig into this. This is something that we've danced around a little bit on this show in various forms. But I think that it's a conversation I'm interested in. And I feel like it's so multifaceted that you can't really hit all of it in one segment on one TV show or one segment on one podcast.

So I wanted to take a really holistic view with this in terms of why we think that offenses around the NFL are just not having the success that they had, let's even say, five years ago. I mean, you were a member of the 2018 chiefs. You understood what it felt like when offense was easy in the NFL. And if you're watching the chiefs right now or you're watching the chiefs right now or You're watching pretty much any offense in the league that's not playing against the defenses we saw last night or the Cowboys. It's a little bit of a tougher sledding than it's been in recent years.

So if you were trying to pinpoint the number one reason in your mind, why this is happening, where do you think you would start? I do think it gets into the too high discussion, the defensive structure discussion. It felt like we were always the ones attacking and the aggressors and they had to figure us out. And we had so many answers and so much speed and so much space career. the motions, the shifts, you know, we talk about eye candy for linebackers, you know, putting them in a bind when you've got a jet sweeper going one way and you've got the O-line going the other and the quarterback going the other and all of a sudden a Titan runs behind him and its play action.

I think defenses are now starting to give that to the offenses. You know, this gets into disguise. I mean, Flores says his own animal, so we don't necessarily have to discuss him. But I do think that that is a signal of where the league is right now because even if people aren't doing it to that extreme. I think a lot of people are adopting ideas adjacent to what the Vikings are doing. Yeah. And again, it gets back to, you know, the Fangio Staley, you start in a similar is shell and now right before the snap, right at the snap post snap, the quarterback's having to try to figure things out. I mean, coming from the Pete Carroll tree of single high, cover three,

pretty much know how everything's going to be run. And so it's just, it's this, you know, eye-candy version of defenses now making offenses have to adjust after the fact or on the fly, where before it was more static, it was more obvious. Because if you line up in Tampa 2 and the middle linebacker is a little bit deeper than the other two guys, and it's obviously Tampa 2, like, quarterbacks are pretty much going to eat that up to a degree. But if you start disguising it and all of a sudden a corner runs across the formation with the receiver, which has been a man zone tell for as long as football existed, and now the

backside defensive end is playing the flat because they ripped a cover two late, that's like, oh my God, I couldn't believe this happened. You know, we used to play Tennessee and they would run that inverted version of cover two. And we'd be so excited, you know, on the field, like, oh, this is invert. Like you started to see those things. And it was crazy that they could run cover two with, you know, the safeties at eight yards and just sprint the corners back and the safety become the flat defenders. Right.

So like the way defenses have evolved to throw the. eye candy at offenses, you know, we just came off talking about making offense easy for the quarterback. You know, now defenses are making offense hard for the quarterback because they're putting so much on that guy's plate, so much deciphering, so much figuring out. And there's still a lot of, you know, routes and route concepts that are, if is it cloud, is it cover two, is it cover four, is it whatever, that it's not just the quarterback that has to make those decisions. It's also the receivers have to be seeing the defense the same way the quarterback is and they have to run the right routes. They have to run the right adjustments.

They have to be on the same page. So you're making Sony guys try to figure things out as they're flying around full speed. I do think that's an element of it that isn't getting talked about or covered as much, that it's not just this coverage takes away deep routes and you're forcing quarterbacks to, you know, be patient, throwing underneath stuff and attack when they will. I think just quarterbacks are having so much more to think about and to react to after the fact that it strains what everything can look like on offense. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

And I think if I'm trying to pinpoint one thing, it's how murky it all feels on the back end. It's not that you have two high safeties and you're taking away explosive plays. It's that because you have two high safeties, the coverage could literally be anything. And that's not even necessarily the answer anymore because we have teams lining up in one high and then spinning to all these crazy versions of cover two. So I think it's at the core of this. I think the biggest issue is that we had a moment, let's say, seven, eight years ago. And I think 2017 is a good kind of thing to pinpoint here because you have that's when McVeigh and Shanahan get to L.A. And then in 2018, you have Mahom step in.

And that feels like a real moment for NFL offenses. At that point, offenses could manipulate defenses in a huge variety of ways. There were so many different things you could do to an NFL defense to make them react the way that you wanted to. And one is just we have beaters against whatever coverage we think you're lining up in. If we send one guy in motion, we know it's man. These are our man beaters. If you're in single high, we know it's going to be one of two things. These are our cover three beaters.

You can't just dial a bunch of beaters anymore because you don't know what the coverage is going to be. You don't know what it's going to be pre-snap. And a lot of the time, you don't even know what it is post-snap. So I think that the ability to manipulate defenses has really been sapped from NFL offenses. I had a conversation last year because I was really interested in this topic. I had a conversation with an NFL defensive coordinator who was on the Raven staff in 2018. and he was telling me about the joint practices they had against the ramps. And he said, I went home after that practice.

And I was like, they have built something that is perfectly engineered to mess with us, like to destroy us. And it was all of the condensed splits. It was all of the bunches. It was all of the stacks. It was all of the jet motion. Well, defense is a problem solving game. And over time, as you get exposed to those things more often, you start to develop rules for how to approach them.

There was a moment seven, eight years ago where a guy would go in jet motion and four guys on the defense would move. That doesn't happen anymore. That was fun. Yeah, it was fun, right? It was an easy way to play offense. Those days are gone. The ability to manipulate defenses is just those strings are so much harder to find for

offenses. And I think that offenses have struggled to regain the high ground in that battle. And then I think what you said is completely. right, we flipped it on its head where now defenses are manipulating offenses. And I think the biggest area where that is in terms of, all right, these are your rules and we know how to fuck with them now in the same way offenses could in 2017 is in past protection. Like what pass rush plans look like on defense right now feels similar to what those motions and stacks and bunches felt like for offenses in 2017. Where we're going to be in these five-0 looks, we're going to have a

the linebacker walk down, we know what your rules are, and we know exactly how to manipulate them. And we're going to run all these stunts and games. And because we have better players, better athletes, and we understand how to manipulate and snap your rules, we're going to make it really, really, really uncomfortable for you in the pocket. Okay. So now, if the quarterback is sitting back there, and the coverage can unfold in any way, and he can't just have an easy answer versus, I know what this look is, this is my option. And he has to hang on to it for an extra half beat because there's uncertainty. And the pass rush is going to be getting home more and more often because defenses have figured

out how to manipulate pass rush rules. It's going to be pretty hard living for the quarterbacks back there. And I do think that that's kind of the place that we've arrived in the NFL right now. Yeah. And to take it stuff further, I mean, there is an element that when you are playing too high or some sort of zone coverage, you know, the quarterback has to, make a decision, and this is, you know, a crazy thing I didn't even realize really until I got to the NFL and started hearing how those guys talked. You know, zone coverage kind of comes down to one person

the quarterback needs to make a decision off of. Like you're creating this triangle and, you know, there's all these different guys, but essentially you put one person in a bind, he makes a decision, you make him wrong, you throw to the other guy. That takes time. You know, if it's man coverage, you kind of know who's going to be the guy you're throwing to. You're not like waiting to see that Tyree kills open. Like, you know, it's man coverage. this is the guy that's supposed to win, I'm probably going to throw it there. You can make decisions quicker. You don't have to wait to see how it unfolds to get rid of it.

You know, similar to that Jaden throw last night. Like if he had to wait to see, was it cover zero? Was it a zone? Is the safety going to sit on an inside route to let a post, you know, develop behind him? He gets creamed and the game's over. But no, it's cover zero. That means they're playing man. That means I've got a guy one-on-one.

There's some still shots. I don't know if it was Barnwell or someone else throwing the dots. that when he throws it, McLaurin's like five yards behind the DB, but Jada knows that the guy's going to be in the spot he needs to throw to, and it's man coverage, and he's probably going to win. So he throws it. So that's another element that zone and murkiness forces the quarterback to take longer to make that decision to wait to read out that one guy and what that decision is,

and then I can throw it. Well, now you've got, you know, to your point, protection breakthroughs, and you've got just defense aligns that are better than offense lines. I think that in general, like we've been saying forever that offensive lines suck and that, you know, they're way behind defense lines and there's no two a days and there's no college football as doing this. And like, I think that discussion's a little boring for me that it's not as simple as O lines are worse. That's been happening for years. But the ways that defenses are taking advantage of it are more pronounced than they've ever been. Right. So to getting into it. So in

maybe 2017, 2018 playoffs, New England, they did the three down linemen, two guys in the B gaps. Usually it was High Tower and maybe a Van Nuoy and then with three true defense alignment on the field. And they were running all the cover one behind it. And so they were running picks and stunts and twists and they destroyed Philip Rivers and the charges in the playoffs with it. That kind of became the invoked thing in the next few years. But again, they're doing that with cover one behind it. Yes.

So you're running twist and stunts and picks. And the quarterback is still able to know who he's throwing to because. Because it's cover one. Because this man coverage, he doesn't have to wait for the zone to develop and to decide which guy he needs to throw to. So now they're doing all that same stuff. And even if it's not designed to mess with a pure blitz protection, we're going to get a free runner, it's designed to make offense aligns worse. That extra half second is all the difference. Time to throw. If it's 2.4 versus 2.9, that's a sack versus a 70-yard pass. So I think that's where the offensive line thing comes into play, that it used to be this style of defense's

and disruption was being run with man coverage, and Belichick relied on better coverage guys to kind of make the guys up front have more time to make it work, but the quarterback could still make a decision and throw the ball. It might just be covered, and it might be a PBU instead of an interception because the guy's not sitting in zone. Now it's that same thing with indecision

and waiting on the quarterback's part, and that's causing destruction. Yes. The blitzes are so much more dynamic now because we're playing less man behind the blitzes. And it's not even just that there were more like fire zones. It used to be like you go back and watch a game from like 2002. And I did this in preparation for some of these discussions.

I went back and watched the Bucks play the Eagles in the NFC championship game. Because like, all right, just what's a refresher about how this felt? And you see zone blitzes, right? Like Jim Johnson was doing all that stuff back then. But one guy's dropping off and they're playing like a three deep fire zone behind it. Now you have no idea what the coverage is going to be with these five-man pressures. If you did some of this stuff to an offensive coordinator in 2000, Even though there was a lot of cover two back then.

The guy would shit himself. It's just a completely different beast that these guys are having to deal with. And I think that's exactly right. It's not necessarily the more too high stuff that's affecting this. It's less man and just as many pressures. And all the stuff that you're having to wade through, I think has made it really, really difficult on quarterbacks. I also feel like, and we should mention this, the makeup of the quarterback position also is

driving some of this and why some of these struggles are happening. Make sure we mention that because that's definitely a factor. This is part of it. And this has been brought up by a lot of different people. This isn't a new thought for me or from us in this discussion. The league is incentivized now to make quarterbacks younger than they've ever been. And the number that I would throw out is when Matthew Stafford was drafted with the number one overall pick in 2009, his contract paid him $12 million a year.

That is more than Caleb Williams will make on his rookie deal that he's. signed in 2024. The cap was half in 2009 what it is right now. And the number one pick made more than he does in 2024. The way that the rookie salary scale has been laid out, you are so incentivized to try to find these young quarterbacks at cost control that you're just going to keep taking your shots on those sorts of guys and bypass the veteran options available. The best example for me is if you look at the way the league and the position was comprised

in like 2009, 2010, before the CBA came into play. The match job trade would never happen in 2024. It would never happen. You would never trade multiple picks for a guy entering the final year of his rookie deal and have to pay that guy. You would just use one of those picks and draft Will Levis in the second round. And so that has changed how young and experienced the position has become overall. And there are other layers to this, but I think that the incentives for how we pay the quarterback

has caused a lot of this shift. And that's the reason that you're replacing Bryce Young or some of these other guys' production with veteran quarterbacks who would be capable players. Like Andy Dalton would be a starter 12, 15 years ago. Andy Dalton is no longer a week-one starter now because of the finances around the position. Yeah, and I mean, there's the element that a lot of the older guard

kind of retired over the last five years and it's been replaced by a lot of younger quarterbacks. We don't have to have the discussion, the quarterback thing. but it incentivizes them to keep having young, cheap quarterbacks, and yet teams still pay quarterbacks next in line top of the market money. So that change hasn't happened yet, which I still find weird. I mean, I feel like if a Shanahan just drafted a quarterback every three years and kept recycling them, he'd probably be pretty good.

But I don't know, it's just that that's the one missing piece at the quarterback position that I think would alter it for the better, that once you stop paying guys, the next up, who's anywhere from the sixth to the 15th best quarterback, top of the market money, and you create a true second class of quarterbacks in terms of contracts, that would make everything so much better across the NFL. Because then you could justify paying Andy Dalton 20 or 30 million and having a serviceable quarterback at a normal salary. But there's just not really that market for it.

And I think there kind of is, though. And I think the two guys that stand out that exist in that middle class of quarterbacks are Gino Smith and Baker Mayfield. And I think that those guys are really good examples here. Quarterbacks get better. We just talked about this with Josh Allen. Quarterbacks, when they get to 27, 28 years old, are going to be more viable options than these guys on rookie deals. And so there's a reason that Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold and Gino Smith and these guys who are in their late 20s early 30s when given a second chance can look surprisingly good playing the position.

It's because you get better. You understand how to play the position when you get a little bit older. But teams don't stick with guys through those sorts of struggles because it's not worth it financially. It's just easier to reset the clock than work through some of the issues with these guys. And I think that's part of what's driving this as well and why we have so many young guys playing. Yeah, but that gets into the flame out thing. Like they had to switch teams and kind of get jumbled around and have their dips to then accept kind of their role in their monetary stature. Most of these guys are either good enough to keep playing quarterback, in which case the team feels obligated to pay them, or they're so bad that they just get recycled and then eventually can kind of find a home and start to play better.

I think those are more the aberrations in terms of how their careers played out than what we typically see with quarterbacks, again, like the goffs and Wentz and Jalen and Tua. and it just, it seems like if you're still playing in year four, you're not just going to get discarded and not given a contract. Like the teams are just giving out contracts to everybody. Like who is truly the last guy who was playing top 16 to top six NFL level quarterback play that got discarded after their rookie contract? I don't think those guys exist.

They get paid. That's the problem. Because Daniel Jones is about the only one. You could argue whether he's top 16. But we've talked about him. in terms of like the second tier contract. I still think that's way too much money for the second tier. It should be 30, not 40.

But for the most part, all those guys get paid towards the top of the market. And that's the problem. Those guys aren't comfortable accepting Baker and Gino contracts because they haven't been discarded and they haven't finally felt accepted and found their home. But let's have this Baker conversation. Let's say that the Browns just stick with Baker and that at the end of Baker's rookie contract, he takes the contract that he accepted from the bucks. right like we've established this there's precedent for this your agent can ask for that sort of

contract and not be immediately fired because that's how the NFL works then i think that there's a path forward for somebody like baker where he can play like this with the browns the browns never had to move on from him because it's not elite quarterback or nothing like that that to me feels like a reasonable option yeah but no one's done it yeah no no one has done it are willing to accept that kind of money because if you've started four years and you've started 55 plus games and again, you've shown that your 16th to 10th best quarterback, your fan base thinks your top five. And there's going to be an onus on ownership to lock the guy up and to feel like we finally had the guy. So that's where, again, it falls into quarterbacks that get fired and that get cut and they get discarded that

then show signs of life. It just doesn't happen to, you know, again, and keep going back to the top six to top 16 level quarterback that are playing decent football and that will keep improving, but they want to get paid as if they're going to improve into a top five quarterback. They're not willing to get paid to improve into the 10th best quarterback. And that's kind of, I think, the impasse, which, again, good on them. I'm a player. Get every freaking cent you can from ownership. but we're looking at it from the business perspective and, you know, ownership shouldn't be willing to, you know, throw around these contracts as willingly as they are when cost controlled options alter the scales of 80% of the quarterback at 5% of the cost with the right offensive coordinator is more effective than, you know, that quarterback making, you know, 50 plus million. Yeah, we need a Caleb McGarry contract for quarterbacks, right? That's what we need.

We need like a Caleb McGarry contract for quarterbacks, and those contracts for the most part do not exist. The last thing I wanted to bring up when we're talking about why the age of quarterbacks looks the way that it does in the modern NFL, we kind of have a lost generation of quarterbacks. If you look at the guys currently in the league, you mentioned this earlier, and I think it's a really important point. When we're talking about Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, even Philip Rivers and Ben Rathesberger to an extent, when you're imagining those guys, the year I always throughout is 2,000. 2011 because I think it's instructive in two ways. One, that was the year with the passing boom where we had all these guys thrown for 5,000 yards, but it was also the year where the rookie salary scale gets instilled. So it feels like an inflection point in the NFL, it's important.

If you think about that season, we're talking about 34-year-old Tom Brady. We're talking about 32-year-old Drew Breeze. Peyton Mani didn't play that year, but, you know, obviously in 2012, he comes back. He's a monster. He's in his mid-30s at that point. Eli and Philip Rivers are like 29-30 at that point. Rogers is like 28. those quarterbacks, those guys that are like 30 to 35, for the most part, do not exist in today's NFL.

No, it's all my guys. It's Andrew Luck. It's Russell Wilson. It's a lot of guys that for one reason or another should be still at the top of the game. And they're not. Let's look at quarterbacks drafted in the first round from 2010 through like 2015. Okay. Here are the names. Sam Bradford, Tim Tebow, Cam Newton. Jake Locker, Blaine Gabbert, Christian Ponder, Andrew Luck, RG3, Ryan Tannanahill, Blake Bortles, Johnny Mansell, Teddy Bridgewater, James Winston, Marcus Mariotta, Carson Wentz, Paxton Lynch. Those should be some of the best quarterbacks in the league right now. Those guys who are like in their mid-30s or early 30s should be some of the best quarterbacks in the league. And for one reason or another, that production just does not exist when we're looking at the

aggregate stats for NFL quarterbacks. It's injuries, it's flameouts, it's so many different things that have contributed to this. It's guys that maybe would still be starters if, like, James would probably be a starter in the NFL somewhere in a different world. We were incentivized to go younger and younger and younger. He might not be a great starter, but he would still probably be a starter, right? Like, David Gerard does not really exist in the modern NFL. And I think that that's another reason that we just have younger guys and more inexperienced

guys and lesser play across the board. Yeah, no, I think that's totally valid. It's fair. That's part of the discussion, but I think talking about defense and talking about the way it's changed is, you know, a little bit more instructive of what's to come as, you know, Mahomes and Alan and Lamar get into that early 30s and this new wave gets into the later 20s, how they're going to combat kind of this new era of defense and, and how structurally it's changed and getting offense back on board. that's far more interesting.

Let's be clear about that. That is the right answer and to me the preferred answer. But I think that that, again, why the quarterback, why the age of the position and the aggregate looks the way that it does, that's just something I think is worth bringing it up as we think about some of the layers to all of this. But like you said, your explanation at the top and this idea of what it all looks like on defense compared to what it looked like 10 years ago, I think is the best explanation. I think the reason that's driving a huge portion of this. For sure. I think that's, it's, you need a forum like this to kind of like fully talk about the progression of it. And I'm glad we did. All right. We're going to take one more quick break and then we're going to get back with this week's ball knower before we get out of here. We did this last week for the first time. This is something we're going to do with our midweek guests. We're calling this the ball knower. I'm going to ask you three questions about what you know about the NFL three weeks into the season. The first one, what is something that you know, you know after three.

three games. Oh, I know that Josh Allen is a freaking stud and he is clearly second best quarterback in the NFL. He is, he and probably Gino are playing as the top two quarterbacks through three games. Oh, man. I know. I'm just descending to heaven right now after that sentence. Wild, wild with darn old and Andy Dalton. No, I mean, Josh Allen is, it's very clearly the second best quarterback in the NFL. You have to include Patrick Holmes's entire resume, which includes six. Congress championships and six years starting in three Super Bowls won. And it's just that's, Allen's that good.

And we would be talking about him much differently if Pat didn't exist and if they didn't have to go head to head in the playoffs for a few times. I just think it's that obvious. It's not just the Monday night performance that we saw yesterday. It's just more and more evidence that he is someone that changes football games in a way that no one else does the side of Mahomes. And he's done it now consistently enough. And we talked about him earlier,

have to go over everything, but I just think there's so much conviction in him being that good. And it's just, it's fun to watch. It's, it's awesome. He does everything on the football field. You know, if you like lasers down the middle, he does that. If you like bombs, he does that. If you like quarterbacks to juke people, he does that. If you like quarterbacks to run people over, he does that. If you like quarterbacks that spasm and every now and again do something dumb and you like to laugh at them, well, he doesn't do that much anymore. But every now and again, he'll do that for you. So he does everything you want to see on the football field. This conversation and this moment that we've all reached, I've kind of just sat back quietly as it's happened because I said this all summer.

Like, I just, this is not surprising to me. I thought it was actually pretty self-evident after last season that he was the second best quarterback in the league. And I think Lamar is, it's a dynamic, incredible football player. And giving Lamar the MVP last year, I had no issues with it in real time. But Patrick Mahomes was still the best quarterback in the league last year, even if he didn't win the MVP. Josh Allen could not win the MVP last year and still be the second best quarterback in the league. I just thought that after the season he had and everything that you're talking about, the thing that sticks out to me, it's everything we talk about with the mental stuff beforehand, it's how not daunting third and 11 feels for the bills. Any chunk of yardage at any point is available to this offense because Josh Allen is their quarterback.

And I think Mahomes is like that. was the Mahomes thing, like third and 15 was more successful than most other teams like third and five. When they're sitting there. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. He is just an explosive or efficient play waiting to happen in five different ways anytime he's touching the ball.

And I'm with you. I said this in real time when we were watching them play on Thursday night a couple weeks ago. If Mahomes didn't exist, we would be having a very different conversation about Josh Allen. He's a special player. He's the second best player. the league. He's the second best quarterback in the league. I believe this for some time. And watching things kind of shift that way and this being potentially his look at me,

look at what kind of force I am sort of season en route to the MVP would not be the least bit surprising to me. And I think it's going to be a fun ride if we do actually get to take it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't have much more to add. I think we're both pretty convicted in that. Again, it's just obviously I'm a Chiefs fan. but I love good football. I love good quarterback play. It's exciting to see someone play the position as well as he does, especially as we just talked about in this era of declining offense.

It's just great. It's great for him. It's great for football. Great for Buffalo. Hopefully he can have some success, I should say more success come playoffs to kind of validate his career in a way that, you know, Super Bowls tend to validate quarterbacks. All right. That's something you know you know.

what is something you think you know three games into the season? I think I know that Minnesota is actually legitimate and a very good football team. This is perfect. This is exactly the right answer to this question. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what they've shown that isn't sustainable. I mean, yeah, Flores, you might have more film on him and start to kind of find these minute tails in the defense. I think he's going to keep evolving. I think if they really just wanted to line up and play normal football,

football, they still have horses and they still have pieces up front to play, you know, a more normalish version of we're just going to line up and we're not going to try to be all fancy and we're just going to come down hell. I don't know about that. That's the one thing I'd probably push back on. I'd be a little bit worried about what that run defense looks like if they were just going to line up and play normal football. Well, again, I think if run defense is the worst part of your football team, that's usually

okay. Totally. So that's where I get into like the thing that they do, the worst is run defense, sure. But offensively, it all seems sustainable. I mean, there's, you know, the darn old section of the internet that's, you know, claimant victory laps. But it does seem like he's playing successful football that's not just an aberration. The defense does seem like Flores has, you know, a beat on the rest of the teams.

And now he's defeated two amazing offenses that we were all excited about and that typically have a lot of good answers against what defenses do. So, yeah, I just, I think I know. know that they're a really good team and are they the best team in the NFC like totally right now you can argue that because you know Detroit doesn't look like you know they did last year I think they're still really good I'm not saying that they're not but I think they've looked like they're down a notch or so San Fran record wise obviously not there but injuries and those things starting to accumulate Rams more injured than anybody packers we're still excited about but you know love loves injury

and maybe didn't look quite as sharp and as good as people wanted in that first game. So, yeah, I mean, Philly looks terrible. Dallas looks not great. Could they be legitimately the best team in the NFC? You think Philly looks terrible? Oh, I mean, pass rush non-existent on a defense that prides itself on pass rush. I just think things still look really. Yeah, Jaywood Carter was really the only one making things happen in that game,

and he was doing it against an offensive line that was, you know, doing a lot of shifting around after mid-game injury. Yeah, and like, I just still think offensively something's missing. Like, obviously, Seriani doesn't seem to be pushing the right buttons. What does it exactly you do here situation? I should say terrible expectations. You know, they're not a terrible football team overall, but like based on what we thought they could be

and their best version of themselves and getting excited about the pieces plus the coordinators. But just relative to Minnesota, I think Minnesota has looked way better and way more sustainable than what Philly's done. So, yeah, I think I know that they're legit. Yeah, I don't have a lot of pushback on that. I've really enjoyed watching them. And I just think that the pieces that they added on defense and, you know, just when you have a good team, when you have a team that's surprising and just feels a little bit different than you expected, you need contributions in unexpected places.

You need it all to kind of come together at the same time. And I think that's what we're feeling with the Vikings. They go out and they get all these guys in free agency. and I think that pretty much every single person that they sought out has been a positive ad for them. Blake Cashman, Andrew Van Ginkle, Grenard, even some of the cheaper pieces they went out and got have played a role. And I just think that Flores is doing something that no one else is trying to do. And now that the players are better, it looks more dynamic and even scary than it did last season when it felt like they were just kind of white knuckle in it holding on for dear life. I'm excited to see what that looks like over the course of the year.

I'm curious, and this isn't even like a criticism. I'm curious when teams have more film on, all right. This is what they like to do out of this cover zero look. This is the way they're trying to get into this version of cover two. Do they have a slight change up on that stuff? I think the answer is probably yes. I think that Flores deserves the benefit of doubt at this point. But I am curious, similar to the way we talk about offenses, it's like, okay, we've seen what the fastball is.

When you have to start throwing the off speed stuff in week 11, what does that end up looking like? I'm not, I don't doubt what Minnesota's answer to that question is. I'm just curious what it ends up being on the defensive side of the ball. And then you talk about, again, contributions from Pat Jones, what Matt Ellis has been, Cambinum, you know, these guys that are cheaper pieces within the overall ecosystem of the roster that are now positive, like, plus players for you. It's coming from every different direction. I think you can make the same argument on offense, like what Blake Brandel has been for them and the way that their offensive line is currently playing, how they can assert themselves running the ball in ways they couldn't last year because the line looks better. and Aaron Jones is just so much more dynamic than the backs they've had in the past. And the bet that you're making with a guy like Sam Garnold is Kevin O'Connell is one of the dudes.

We are going to get the best version of whatever quarterback we're dropping into this because of our offensive structure and how we built this thing and who the main voice is at the top of it. Every back, check, check, check, check, check. That's what this team feels like right now. And I don't know that the one devil's advocate moment played a point I would make with the offense. The Donald whoopsies have not come back to bite them quite yet, right? He threw the pick to Fred Warner. But the ball has been on the ground a bunch of different times and not they've not lost it. Right.

Like, he has done some crazy shit. Historically, he likes to give the ball back. So I'll just say that that's probably not entirely eradicated from his game. That's never going to be eradicated from his game. But I think that down to down, He's playing really good football. The decision making has been very sound. And it's, I talked with him about this during training camp, and I think you're seeing it.

Like, there is a feeling with how he's operating within that offense right now of, I don't have to be Superman. We got the best receiver in the NFL. We've got a system that makes sense. You guys like Jalen Naylor. Like Jalen Nailer feels like a nice piece within this overall offering. Like it just, it all has come together in a way that I understand. And it's a little bit surprising, but very exciting.

and so I do not disagree with you. I think that that's right out. Last one here. What is something that you want to know three weeks into the NFL season? Okay, so I say this with a big sigh. I want to know why running backs aren't like superstars the way they used to be. I feel like the running game is back. You know, everyone's excited about the run.

Teams are playing too high. We're starting to pound the football. And it just doesn't feel like it's still a running back central league. And I feel like we grew up watching football. It was all about the running backs and all about their importance. You know, we've talked about the dying running back position the last few years, and you look at the top guys, and, you know, Sequin, it's Sequin. He's got star power, but it's still like Philly's offensive line and Stoutland

and their structure and Kellynne Moore. And still, you talk about the excitement of Sequin, but it's still kind of couched behind, like, well, it wasn't there in New York and it is there in Philly, so clearly it's like offensive line related. And then you look at, you know, San Francisco and it's supposed to be McCaffrey, and now it's not McCaffrey, but he still has successful as McAfree, so maybe it's Kyle, maybe it's not the actual running back. And then you look into Orleans and it's not Camara's great again. It's, you know, Kubiak and what he's able to do offensively and the zone scheme. And then, you know, in L.A. with the Chargers, yeah, Dobbins is like a fantastic story and we're talking about him, but it's still tarball and physicality and O line up front and Greg Roman running the ball. And then it's Derek Henry, who we've talked about for forever. But the first two weeks, the discussion was what's wrong with Derby. Eric Henry in the Ravens offense, why can't they seem to make him fit?

And last week, the discussion was what's wrong with Dallas's defense? Yeah. So it just, it just doesn't feel like even though running games are, you know, quote unquote, back, even though guys are putting up averaging over 100 yards a game, which now equates to, you know, 1750, 18, 1900 yards in a season, which are great running back years at any time in the league's history, it just doesn't feel like we revere running backs in the same way, which, you know, kind of bums me out a little bit when you think about what football was like growing up and now that these guys are performing the way we're used to see with bell cows

and you know the way mix in performed in week one 30 carries 150 yards it's still just talked about within the structure of the offense within what the coordinator is doing more so than you know that running back making it work um so i guess it's it's just a long way of me saying i feel bad for them because it's uh you know they're starting to get paid a little better and even with better performance it just doesn't feel like running backs have arrived the way they used to be and it just doesn't feel like they're ever going to you know get back to that i think it's we're probably going to be a step or two beyond where we were a few years ago like when the running backs don't matter thing was happening and running backs are going to matter a little bit more if running the ball is going to

matter a little bit more but i do think that we just understand that what situation you're dropping them into and the structure of the running game, if it's not more important than the running back himself, then it's almost as important. I think it's fair to say more important. I know the reasons as I'm saying it. It's just, again, it's just, I feel like for the general fan, we talk about football in a very high-level way. We talk about EPA and analytics.

I'll speak for yourself. I don't know anything. So the majority of fans, I think, still see football from, you know, a more basic perspective of they follow the football and the guys who touch the ball or the guys who do the important things. And so, I mean, I don't play fantasy football. So maybe I have a different opinion of what running backs are really revered like in the public. But it just doesn't seem like the running backs are the focal points of offenses, even when they are the ones being the most successful in the offense,

kind of the way it used to be that if guys were averaging over 100 yards a game consistently, it would just be that guy, that guy, that guy, all the time. And again, it just, it hasn't seemed that way the first three weeks of the year. Maybe if it rattles off 10, 12 games, you got a guy with 1,400 yards pushing the 2,000 yard mark. Maybe it starts to become that, that he himself is kind of the reason that that's happening. But just, you know, something that I'm curious about, something that I want to know, why, from the general fan perspective, from not even the people that care about structures of offenses and all that, it just doesn't seem like the running backs are getting as much credit as they used to. what I'll say is in a world where it's harder than ever to find explosive place,

if you have a running back who can do more than what's blocked, that is going to have a bunch of value. That's Sequin touchdown from the game against the Saints. That comes to mind. If you have a running back who can do that, that's going to be something that really does lift the rest of your offense. And Aaron Jones comes to mind. Like what Aaron Jones is doing for the Vikings right now,

if you want a running game that's successful and you want to running a game that's efficient, it's going to be more about the guys that are on their offensive line and what the structure of the run game looks like. But if you want a running game that's going to be lifting you and finding explosive plays, the running back is going to have to be a necessary component of that. So I do think that element of it is one area where some of these guys who are truly exceptional talents,

they can stand out and we can talk about them being just difference makers based on like the current balance between offenses and defenses in the league. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's, That's fair. It's also, I feel like McAfrey was kind of the one guy seen as that coming into the year, but it still feels like it's because he provides that passing ability that he can turn into receiver and change the, again, the ultimate chess piece that can change what Kyle Shanahan can do and can change what the offense can do, not necessarily like McAfree himself is going

physically bludgeon the defense into submission the way we used to talk about, you know, some of these guys. All right, that's all we got for today. Sincerely appreciate you guys listening. obviously we had two Monday night games this week, so a little bit of a different structure to the show. But we're going to continue doing this pretty much every single week over the rest of the season. So we're excited to keep doing that. For now, that is all we got. We will be back on Friday with our week for preview with Derek.

Until then, I appreciate you guys listening. We'll talk to you very soon.