The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Mailbag: The settling-in process, Brian Daboll's coaching history, and more

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Friend of the show Mitchell Schwartz joins Robert Mays to open up The Athletic Football Show's mailbag after a wild Week 1. The guys consider how much Week 1 matters, examine Brian Daboll's coaching history, discuss how long it takes for a typical team to "settle in" to a season, and more.Subscribe to The Athletic Football Show...AppleSpotifyYouTube Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the athletic football show. Welcome to the athletic football show. Today is Monday, September 12th. I'm Robert Mays. Joining me today. It's my good friend Mitchell Schwartz. Mitch, how are you doing, buddy? I'm doing excellent.

Wonderful week one. How about you? Yeah, it seemed to go pretty well for you and your guys over there in the desert. I'm sure you had a good time watching that game. I was, honestly, the end of, like, the 1 p.m. Eastern slate was, like, right before that. And it was, like, so overwhelming. and then like right into the Chiefs game and a couple other good ones. And that three, for me, 325 slate.

It was a little bit overwhelming, honestly. I was not ready for it. I never am. And this is only your second season having to do this where you're having to endure all of the games coming at you at once. So you have less experience with that than I do. I have no excuse at this point. I've been doing this full time for like 10 years.

And I'm still never ready for what week one feels like. So I know you go to the bar and you have all the TVs and you kind of make sure that you're watching it home now. I watch it at home now. Now that I haven't. I know you used to. And so this is my first year in my new house. And I have a system that I've designed for Sundays where I can split my screen four ways. So I can have like my favorite four games on. And I've only ever watched two games once. My old place, I used to have two TVs. I had a remote in each hand, left, right. I go back and forth between the four games. But I do it more manually. And having four games on at once is like very overstimulating. And it's like,

difficult to kind of watch everything at once because the second you like turn to another game and what play just happened oh i missed that i'm not quite sure what happened so the fact that you used to like go and have all these screens going at once like i think that's actually more impressive now that i've seen four at one time and so i commend you for what you used to do even though it sounds like you changed up your setup now we're we're gonna talk a little bit today about how long it takes the team to settle into the season how real is league is week one when do you actually become the team that you are. I've talked to a couple people in the league, coaches, GMs, not even by Halloween, do they feel like they know exactly what type of team they are? It takes a long, long time.

So I'm going to give myself through week four to get back in game watching shape. The same way that NFL teams don't kind of come into their own until at least four, six weeks into the season, I feel like that's how I am with watching games. Even though I can have four games going at once, it takes me at least a month to actually be able to watch all four games at once. So I'm going to blame the NFL here because preseason game four used to be all the games were on that same Thursday night. And now you might not have had as many viewing opportunities in terms of all the networks and Red Zone and all that stuff. But you could at least still kind of like track all the games happening in a six hour window or so because I think they all went off at about 7 p.m. local. And now we don't have that.

You know, we have the three preseason games. They're trying to get like as many games on all the networks as possible. So even preseason game three is over four or five days. so they haven't allowed us to prepare for all these games at once either. So NFL, shame on you because you're not preparing us to consume your product. Well, we're going to dig through week one here. We're going to dig through all of your guys' questions. Really appreciate everyone that took the time to send them in.

This year, you're not going to be on with us every week, but we are going to do this every so often during the season. You are officially retired. Last year at this time, we weren't able to say that. So congratulations on that and congratulations on you being able to ensure your retirement. That's why we're not going to make you be tied to a computer at three, clock every Monday. But we're going to do this every so often and really excited to have you for the first one because we got some questions just about what it's like to be in the league and what it's like to kind of feel like a player in the league early in the season, including our first one here

from Jacob Grimm, who says, I wanted to ask, how much does game one matter in the course of a season? Is it the actual starting point? Preseason training camp is more of a prelude. Are there any fundamental flaws that are revealed four interceptions from Joe Burrow? Or should the reaction be more along the lines of, eh, it happens. Happy to not have consider a theory. happy to not have to consider theoretical stocks or results, but actually get to see the games played. I agree on that side of it. But as a player, someone in the league, how did you guys treat the first game of the season? Was it really an indication of everything that was to come or was it kind of a trial run for a lot of stuff that wasn't necessarily indicative of what was going to follow?

I'd say it's not, I don't think we want to say trial run, but I think you try not to overreact in either direction. And so if you're the chiefs right now, you know, you're saying, all right, we played a great game. This is what we expect, though. These are expectations, and this isn't some incredible feat that we just had. This is what we wanted to do. Our goals to win the Super Bowl this year are our goals to be a dominant offense, a dominant team. And so this is what we expected all along. And we're not going to think, oh, we've arrived.

It was one good game. And now we can just coast the rest of the way. And conversely, you know, the teams that don't have the weeks that they wanted, which I'm sure we'll talk about it. But I was surprised how little, like, true optimism and good football we saw in week one. That was my kind of grand takeaway, but those teams that didn't perform the way they wanted, you know, not just completely putting their head in the sand and, oh, man, this is terrible, everything's falling, I'm terrible.

But as a player in the moment, you probably do lean more into that than not. Like, you do get emotional. It is exciting to either go out there or play the first week, do it exactly the way that you wanted to, or not, and then you're super bummed because you just went through this whole training camp, all this preparation, preseason, now you've got two weeks to prepare for the first game, And then it just doesn't happen and you're super down on yourself. So it's important to go through and figure out what the important stuff is and what the learning stuff is and what just didn't work. You know, I think about last year the Green Bay New Orleans game.

I mean, that game had no indication on what was going to happen the rest of the season. And I think we would say this year, the Green Bay game probably is a little bit more indicative of what we might see from Green Bay. Although, I mean, I know they had their two tackles down. They had their now top receiver down. But I think it looked a little uglier than just kind of a flute game. And so in situations like that, how do you determine that, though? Like, how do you parse through all of that? Because it's so difficult.

Like, that game, the Rams game, I always have a hard time. And we're going to get a question about this, which I absolutely loved. But I always have a hard time figuring out what's real and what's not from all the results of week one. I mean, you can say some stuff after these games happen that makes you look pretty fucking stupid. So I tend not to try to say anything definitive after these games happen one way or the other. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. And, you know, as a player, again, it's usually we're harder on ourselves than anyone else. Now, some guys need the hard coaching.

Some guys need to kind of get that feedback. But, like, as an offense alignment especially, you're looking at two different metrics. You're looking at, did I use the right technique and did I accomplish the goal? And so I think for everybody, you're looking through, all right, the last month and a half has been mostly about ingraining proper mechanics, proper techniques, muscle memory, all those things. It's not just about did this succeed or not. And so you're really being critical on yourself, you know, in that kind of granular way. Like, am I doing the right things to put myself in a position to succeed? Now, again, that's where as a player, it's a little bit more difficult to parse, process from result.

And so you do feel like, oh, man, I gave up that sack. And even though the quarterback was at 11 yards, like, it's still my fault. I still know, you know, I'm supposed to get the guy. But when you look at it in that manner, like, well, I had the guy blocked at 11 yards. theoretically, that should be on the quarterback. You just don't feel that way. You feel like you let someone down. So it's really kind of collaborative.

It depends on the coaching staff, how they want to coach. A lot of the New England tree has a history of not disseminating that information in the nicest of ways. And so it kind of depends on the coach and how they want to meet it out. But yeah, I think looking at the things that are repeatable, the things are going to give you kind of that success over the long run of am I doing things the right way? Is this the right process? Is this going to yield the right results, you know, week after week kind of scheme and opponent dependent? We're getting a little bit granular here, but I want to keep digging in this a little bit because I'm really curious. When you have a game plan that you devised for week one, I think there are two different things that I'm interested in.

One, you do a lot of the stuff you did this season before, right? The Rams did not get blitzed in the game that they played on Thursday night. They had 11 personnel on 100% of their snaps. A lot of the things that they were doing some of the empty stuff, a lot of the things they did last year. And Buffalo was clearly prepared for it. They had a very good defensive game plan. They jumped on everything that they had shown a year ago. The Chiefs, on the other hand,

played against the Cardinals team that blitzed them on 45% of their dropbacks after Mahomes was the least drop back, were the least blitz quarterback in the league last year. So how do you kind of figure out, all right, we're going to try something, maybe to work, maybe it won't? How do you figure out, all right, this game plan didn't necessarily hit, but we were expecting something different? All of those different factors, I feel like have to play into what week one feels like for a given team.

And it can be uglier or better than it's going to look over the course of the season if you get jumped on or you jump on somebody. Yeah, for sure. And that's, you know, trying to find your identity early in the year. You know, as much as we can say, other Rams kind of did all the stuff that they did last year. Well, they did it with a different offensive line with a different group of skill guys. I mean, Stafford's elbow has been talked about enough. We don't know exactly where he falls in terms of health and feeling the same way he did last year. But they have to find their identity this year.

You know, last year, McVeigh was able to lean on the five wide stuff. he was able to lean on the downfield passing attack because of the arm and because of the offensive line. Obviously, after the Thursday game, we completely understand that Andrew Woodworthers no longer there. There's a couple different things on the interior as well that are different. And maybe they were trying to say, okay, well, we think these guys are good replacements, and we can still do what we need to do and get the ball downfield. And that wasn't the case. So now maybe McVeigh has to realize, okay, I can't do what I did last year.

I tried it. It didn't work. And I'm going to mix it up. Or he says, you know what, this is just a good front four. is one of the best defenses in the NFL last year and a defense that a lot of people had as a top three, if not top one defense. And this is just one bad game against a really good group, and we're going to stick with what we do.

So that's the interesting thing is the adjustments in week two, whether you think, oh, this is more of the same or whether you think, okay, I really need to make some adjustments because going back to last year again, Buffalo, their offensive line looked awful in week one. Well, they ran up against the Pittsburgh Steelers and Watt and Hayward and that buzzsaw of a defensive front. And so that wasn't really indicative of what their full season would look like on the offensive line. And so that's, again, to your question, it's hard to figure out, is this just the opponent we faced? And maybe the game plan was a little bit off given that opponent, or is this something that's structural that's going to take us through the rest of the year that we need to fix and we need to change schematically and change it like right now?

Are you really worried about the Rams? Or do you feel like it is just a one-week sample against the defense that's pretty built to take advantage of them in those moments? I would say I'm a little bit worried about them. the reason I wouldn't be is because I think he can pull the scheme back and make it more O-line-friendly. You know, if he goes back to running the ball and the play action and kind of the quick-hitting stuff, that makes it easier on the offensive line. And maybe he's realizing, like, hey, we can't live in the drop-back pass world. And that's okay.

We have the scheme. We have the history. We have still the weapons. I mean, it's not like they're deficient weapon-wise. It's not like they're deficient from, you know, a quarterback standpoint. So they can do that. They can, you know, switch things around and kind of. to a system that's a bit friendlier, especially for those guys up front.

So I'm not quite as worried. And McVeigh's got a pretty awesome history of figuring things out on the offensive side. It's just whether he becomes predictable if that does become the case. Patrick McGuire says at some point, don't the Jets need to start winning some games? I hear nothing but glowing reviews of Joe Douglas, but isn't the point for this to actually win some games someday? Love the podcast. Simon Dixon also already wants the Jets to trade multiple drafts worth of picks for Lamar Jackson.

So that's how you know that week one went well. I don't know how much of that built are the Jets Ravens game that you watched yesterday. I didn't watch a ton of it. I went back and I watched it this morning just to get a better sense of it. I always feel like this is the takeaway I have when teams win games in pretty deflating fashion, especially in week one. That's how I felt about the Colts yesterday, even though they didn't lose. But you go back and watch, it's like, I feel a little bit better than I thought I would, given the final score. After what happened with the Jets and after an offseason of optimism, even with Zach Wilson out in there, how are you feeling about the Jets after one week?

not good there are two offensive tackles down which is not ideal and you saw that yesterday too they they George fan had a problem a couple different times with Houston on an island which is not he switched positions twice in the last like month like they did not put him in a good

spot but there were definitely some problems with them up front which is to be expected considering all the issues that they've had yeah he's a guy they want to extend because he played really well last year and last year he was given one position and said all right go play this and I think maybe once he switched during the season when Mackay got hurt,

but like he was supposed to play left tackle and they switched him to right tackle. And then a week before the season, they switch him back to left tackle because Wayne Brown gets hurt. And that's kind of unfair to put on him and to have him do that. You know, I think, I mean, Joe Flacco's the quarterback.

I don't know how much more in depth we need to go about that. And I think Wilson, you know, we needed to see it. We were really curious what it's gonna look like. But yeah, these guys need to start winning games. And I saw, you know, to the point oh, Joe Douglas has had great drafts and all these things. It's like, yeah, you had three first round picks. Like, you're probably going to have a good draft.

Like, it's really hard to have three picks and not come away with everyone saying, oh, what a great draft. Because you've got three first rounders. Even if there reaches and you think that, like, those aren't maybe the best guys, you can always excuse it away by saying they had an extra one and they're able to reach for a guy. So I think the results definitely need to come. Now, whether they're able to kind of do the Wilson dance and say, oh, well, it's the quarterback and we need to find a new one and blah, blah, blah,

whether that gets back on Douglas for not having the right quarterback and choosing the wrong guy and all that stuff. That's where it becomes really interesting. But the same with Salah. I don't know that we can really give a proper evaluation. I know everyone still talks about him really positively and he's a great leader and all the stuff. But at some point, it has to show on the field. You have to get results. Going back and watching their defense yesterday, the big plays, you just see them pop up on Red Zone.

And there was that long touchdown pass to Rashad Bay, in which you hate to see. And there was the big chunk play to DuVernay. The coverage on the plate of DuVernay was fine. Bryce Hall was covering him one-on-one. They were in a dime look where they had four corners on the field. And we're not going to see a ton of Bryce Hall this year because of how many moves they made a cornerback.

But when they're putting four corners on the field, that's when you get into that depth a little bit. Coverage was actually pretty good. DuVernay just made a really nice play. I thought that Saus Gardner had a couple nice moments in that game. He had a really nice pass breakup on Mark Andrews when they were trying to take advantage of him in kind of a funky formation down near the goal. line. One guy who had a really rough day was Lamarce Joyner on a couple different plays. He had a

field flipping pass interference penalty that just didn't need to happen. He was in decent position and just kind of flailed at the end and it ended up becoming a huge play in the course of the game. And I don't know what he was looking at on the Rashad Bateman touchdown. He was clearly, him and Gardner were standing next to each other. There was some sort of miscommunication there. And I would assume that's going to go on Joyner. There was on the second Duvernay touchdown, The safety on, they were in like a quarters look and the safety that was on the back side where Duvonet eventually ran, like pulled down onto Andrews really hard. And I don't know if that was the right decision or what the coverage was supposed to be, but that was another miscommunication. And that's what it seemed like yesterday.

All of those plays are one guy kind of screwing up on the back end. And we've talked about this before. That's all you need. You need one guy not necessarily understanding his assignment of the spacing. And that's what ends up happening. But other than that, you know, I thought the defense played okay. The pass rush was not where you'd want it to be, considering the amount of investment they put in that group this year. I thought that John Franker Myers had some nice moments, but they weren't consistently getting after Lamar, especially with backup offensive linemen in the game and a backup left tackle having to come in a certain point.

Patrick McCarrey played, I think, 25 snaps after Juan James heard his Achilles. Back up to the backup, yeah. And it's, and the Jets got a decent amount of pressure, but it's not like they were overwhelming a banged-up Baltimore offensive line in this game. I think that's somewhat of a concern. The pick, the receiver fell down that Joe Flacco through. There was a 20-yard punt that the Jets had in this game that gave the Ravens back the ball at the 45-yard line, a missed field goal here and there. Some stuff that you don't expect to happen every game.

And with Joe Flacco is your quarterback, hopefully you're going to have some better results. I thought that the defense overall played pretty well, all things considered, with a couple really noticeable slip-ups. And, you know, if Joyner's going to be a starting safety over the course of the year, he's going to have to be better than he was yesterday. Those are pretty much my takeaways from what that game looked like. Well, before you said anything about the past rush and the front four, I was thinking like this isn't the greatest test for them.

I know everyone's excited about them and they got some guys and they got, you know, a rookie is doing well and Lawson's going to be back and coming back from the injury. But going up against Baltimore is never going to be the greatest test, even a depleted Baltimore offensive line. So I think that would be maybe the one thing in terms of optimism as, a unit that I look for going forward is you're not going to get a real test of how the front four is going to fare against Baltimore. It's very difficult, especially once the game starts getting in Baltimore's favor, it starts tilting towards them, being able to control the tempo,

the pace, the tenor, all those things. So I think we can still- Even formationally, you have so many chips and so many guys giving help. I mean, there's so many bodies in past protection when you're playing that Baltimore team that I think it's going to be difficult to gauge. But even in moments where it was just kind of a straight four-man rush dropback situation on like third down. It's not like they were taken over. There was one particularly devastating Lamar Scramble on third and eight that was absolutely brutal.

But in that moment, it's like, I just imagine Robert Solic tearing his hair out. You combine that with a 20-yard shanked punt and a misfield goal. And it was a frustrating day overall. But this Jets defense was the worst defense in football last season. They were dead last in defensive DVOA. They played better than that yesterday for the most part. And I think there has to be a little smidge of optimism. from that. But overall, I can understand being pretty frustrated as a Jets fan. You have this

offseason when you spend all this money. You have three first round picks. Like, here we go. Year two, the rebuild is in full force. And then you lose by multiple scores in week one. It feels like you never had a chance. Well, so the thing is, you went back and you watched the film with like a critical eye and you're looking for all these kind of specific things and know what's the coverage and has this guy playing it. The fans didn't do that. They watched the game on TV and they saw more of the same, get down early, no offense, no pass rush, Lamar making a few plays, and oh, I thought our defense was more athletic than that, oh, we're busting coverages again, oh, we can't get to the quarterback, and we can't score, and our special teams isn't good.

So from your perspective, you can go through and say, oh, well, I was more optimistic than I thought based on the box score, but from the Jets fan base that's watching this, it all looks the same to them, and there doesn't look like there's any hope, there's any progress, there's any optimism. So it'll take, you know, a couple more weeks. And I do think it's fair to, you know, kind of judge them before Wilson gets back. I think there's enough kind of infrastructure stuff that we can say, all right, this stuff we like, this stuff we don't like. Once Wilson gets in there, you can give a little bit more of a complete package overview. But defensively especially, like there's not much that the quarterback's going to change about that.

Like you might want to say, oh, they'll be trailing a little bit less and they'll be in more advantageous pastures situations. but I think you can still give them, you know, a full grade over these next few weeks. I thought all of the defensive backs that they added this offseason showed up at least once or twice in a positive way except for Joyner. Obviously, they didn't add in this offseason, but Jordan White had a huge pass breakup against. Soss Gardner had a couple of moments. I didn't really notice DJ Reed, which is probably a good thing.

So other than that, I think that the Joyner thing is what I'd be most concerned about. The other thing I wanted to mention from that game, lastly, Justin Matabike was incredible. he was so, so good in this game. And he's in year three. He's 24 years old. He was drafted really young. He was a third round pick. And with the Ravens, a lot of the pushback that we got when we picked the Ravens to

win the NFC North, both me and Nate on the show, was, well, what does the Ravens front really look like? They don't have that many guys up there. And that's true. But if Matabike is going to be a high level interior pass rusher, they had a lot of wonky blitz looks that they brought on third down. Patrick Queen had a couple plays as a. pass rusher. Again, Justin Houston took advantage of his one-on-ones. This is just a team that I

trust to piece it together, and they're going to be weird enough in some of the stuff that they try and throw at the wall and define passing situations, that they've been able to manufacture pass rush consistently over the years without true dominant edge rushers over the last three, four, five seasons. And if they're going to have really, really good players on the interior, can that kind of supplement what that group looks like overall? So again, banged up Jets' offensive line, the offensive tackle swapping every other week, it seems like. But I do think that the early returns on the way that the Ravens front played were pretty good. So my question for you is, do you think the Ravens defensively should be more of the high variance, kind of turnover happy, take some risks?

Because you can bank on a certain level of offensive performance, I feel like, with that offense with Lamar. And so if you're saying, you know, you don't quite have the guys to just, hey, let's turn the front four loose, kind of like Buffalo did on Thursday night. do you think they should go into more of the kind of ball hawking, let them take chances, let them try to go for turnovers and kind of turn games that way? Because I think everybody doesn't think this is the old school Ravens who are going to suffocate you every drive and you're not going to have any hope. I don't know that they're a team that down in, down out, kind of drive after drive is going to be playing that awesome football.

But do you think like just in terms of as a defense, how would you see that? I think they're going to be, conservative isn't the right word. I think they're going to play more zone. I think they're going to be more traditional in the way they approach some of this stuff. But I still think they're going to be a five-man pressure team. I think they're going to walk queen down into the box a lot. I think they're going to have a lot of those looks,

and they're going to bring extra guys at the quarterback a decent amount of the time. But I think they're going to play a lot of zone behind it in situations where it would have been six-man pressures where they're playing straight man in the past. So I think that's the formula that you're going to be looking for. It's not like they're going to be trying to think of a team that just brings for and never blitzes and plays it on the zone. I mean, they're not going to be a team that doesn't blitz.

I think they're still going to bring a decent amount of pressure, but I also think it's going to be more zone behind it and maybe not as much crazy pressures on early downs. Even though they did, I mean, there was a couple of run blitzes where Patrick Kreme was blowing shit up on first down. So I'm really curious to actually dig into that tape out, not just the TV copy. That's something I'm going to do over the next day or so. But it's a unit that I think I'm pretty excited about just because I think they go a lot

of different directions. And I think that they're going to be able to find some solutions. And so far, week, one of the season, they've managed to do that. Next one here, J.D. Smith. This question I found fascinating. It's very simple, but I wanted to dig into it. J.D. Smith asks, whose coaching tree does Brian Dable belong to? I think the answer to this is easy, but the fact that it's even a question, I think,

is a good thing for Brian Dable. Who would you say? To me, he's a Belichick guy. He comes from the New England tree. And I got to Cleveland after the Mangini era, which I believe Dave all was a part of. And let's just say the guys were not huge fans of that staff and kind of those thoughts. And, yeah, so to me, he's like a pure Belichick, New England guy that's been a little bit of my hesitancy with him in this last cycle getting hired because we've seen those guys that get hired. They still, for whatever reason, want to do it the Belichick way.

and they think kind of the fear-based regime and making sure that you're showing guys having all their bad plays and making the atmosphere less fun and you have to memorize all these random statistics and stuff. They think that's the way. That's the genius behind Belichick. But it does seem like he's distant enough from that past

that he's been through enough other coaches and I'd like to think McDermott was a positive influence on him as well, just seeing a guy who's a bit more level-headed and kind of goes about things in a different way. But I think New England is, the tree that he's from, but I would say because he's the furthest, like from New England as a new hire, there's a chance that he's going to be doing things kind of in his own way with his spin. I think the further away is exactly the way that I would describe it. The fact that it's even a question,

I think, is a step in the right direction for Brian Nable. He came from Alabama to Buffalo. That was the move that he made. He went from the Patriot staff to be the offensive coordinator to Alabama. I will say a couple different things, though. I think that being around the college game was very good for him as an offensive coach. Some of the stuff that he picked up, some of the places he was looking for ideas. I think he's been more than willing to steal stuff from the college ranks during his time in Buffalo, and it's been really, really good for them. I mean, we talked about this on the show we did with Brian, excuse me, with Pat DeMarco and with Blake Bortles about some of the new head coaches in the league. When they came in in 2020 with the offensive plan in that spring

in Daibble's second season, it looked nothing like it looked in 2019. In 2019, the bones of the Bill's offense were very similar to what they would have done in New England over the course of the last two decades. But they really revamped it in 2020 and then again in 2021. So I think he's moving further and further away from those New England roots, schematically, personality-wise. He was like dancing with players in the locker room yesterday after they went for two and won the game. And that's not the most important thing in the world. But I do feel like it's a pretty drastic departure from what the culture feels like in New England. So this idea that, that somebody who would listen to this show and be willing to take the time to send into question

doesn't instantly know that Brian Dable is a branch off the New England coaching tree, I think is a very good thing. Yeah, I'd have to agree with you there. Again, it's no one ever really questions, I mean, there's a couple of instances recently, but for the most part, the Belichick tree guys, they leave. No one questions the acumen or the ability to coach an offense. You know, no one questioned McDaniels when he left or kind of these defensive coordinators when they leave. It's just, it's the personality.

It's how are you going to run the system? How are you going to design things? You know, I don't know if it's still the case, but when there was eight Andy Reid disciples and 25% in the league was Andy Reid guys. It's because he creates that culture that works. Like it's everything is laid out in front of you. There's goals. There's, you know, things to achieve. And you treat guys right.

and you know you don't harp on the negative you accentuate the positive and if you need to be stern you'd be stern but for the most part it's an awesome work environment you wake up with the morning i mean honestly it's the night before you're not worried the night before like oh man i'm i'm getting embarrassed in the meeting tomorrow like if you play poorly you know when you go there you're it's not going to be fun to watch the film of yourself playing poorly but you're not worried like oh is he going to show my too bad place of the team and make a um example out of me and those are the kinds of things that like ruin you as a player in terms of stress and the things that you worry about. And so, as we're saying, the further away from that tree you can get, and the more you can realize that, like, that's not necessary. Obviously,

Buffalo didn't need to show low lights every single day. The past couple years, I have the success that they did. So I'm hopeful that personality-wise, that's the biggest thing that he's learned over these last few years. All right. Next question here. Abigail Lawson asks, I'm a Patriots fan. And like most fans have been very concerned about coaching since it was announced that Matt Patricia and Joe Judge would be sharing offensive coaching duties. During the game yesterday, one of the commentators said it might not matter who was calling plays on offense as long as we get results. Obviously, we didn't get a good result today.

Pretty skeptical about this, but I'm wondering what you guys think about uncertainty with the coaching play calling in the locker room and what it may do to the execution of plays outside of the quality of said coaching or play calling itself. So if you're in the locker room, if you were a guy on the Patriots, and there's all of this chatter about who's calling plays and about who's in charge of this, do you think that manifests for people that are actually on the team? Well, the question is if they know who's calling plays. Because as the lineman, like, I don't necessarily know which guy is in Pat's ear giving

him the direction. Like, I don't know, is it Coach Reed, is it Biennamy, is it the quarterback coach, is it the offensive line coach if there's a run call? Like, I don't know how that kind of runs. I have a good idea of who designs the offense and who has final. say over the play call, but as an offensive lineman for New England, especially, I doubt Belichick went in there and said, hey, guys, this is how it's going to run, this guy's going to handle this, this guy's going to handle that, play calling is going to be on this guy.

Like, I just don't think that that's the way information gets disseminated in New England. So I'd probably be asking Mack, like, hey, who's the guy in your ear? Who's telling you what to do? Who's calling the play? Like, I would be really curious as the linemen to know that. So I think there's an element of, you know, they have done a good job typically. New England fashion being tight-lipped and like no one's giving information about it but I think there's an element of like do the guys even really know aside from like the quarterback room and maybe the

skill guys like what's happening does the offensive line know like this is who's in charge of structure in the offense and calling the offense so from that perspective I'd be pestering the quarterbacks and be like hey Mac like who do you got in your ear on this one then after the first couple preseason games and we saw a couple different shots of you know Patricia and judge calling it independently. So I'd probably be asking again, like, hey, who's calling the plays? Is it Belichick who's really calling it? But he's letting Patricia like mouth it. So he looks like he's the one doing it. So there'd be a lot of intrigue for me. And I think you would start talking about that in the locker room, especially if things aren't working and if things are messy. And if the success isn't

happening. And we saw throughout camp, you know, there'd be a lot of articles and a lot of reports on the offense didn't look quite as good today. And the offense this, the offense, that. And so eventually, you're just like, what's going on? Who's in charge? And you really go to the quarterback. I mean, you're obviously not going to go to the coaches staff asking those kinds of probing questions. So, yeah, that would be interesting in the locker room, especially if you've got a little bit of an older group on the offensive line and an older group in the skill position rooms who are

curious and you kind of understand how things typically work or how they used to work. And now they just aren't quite sure. I'm curious. Going between different staffs that you played for, how much? does transparency change between staffs? I mean, like you said, it's probably a black box. There's probably not a lot of information coming out about these. This is why we're doing this.

This is the setup and this is the thought process and motivation behind it. Was that different between staffs in terms of how much they were willing to share, why they were willing to share it? Yeah, you do see, you know, guys have different viewpoints on that. Shanahan is excellent at that. I mean, he's always kind of the first one that I had who would give you. you more of the why and kind of break down exactly kind of full field why this is important why that guy is important and you would understand you know we've got this run play and offensive

line I know that you're used to calling like oh the safety's down so we're going to push to him but on this structure I already have the receiver six yards from the tackle so he can push crack and if you you know push your call one further and now you're working to the same safety the receivers working to, that's not going to be good for us because we're going to have two guys on one. And I'm going to take that off your plate, even though it seems really simplistic. I'm going to give that to the quarterback because he's more tied into the formations than you are. And the offensive line doesn't need to know exactly the splits of every single receiver. And so as my third year, starting to realize, like, wow, there's so much more to the run game that I didn't know about.

And it's cool that I'm kind of learning why on this play we're allowed to do this and why on this play we're not allowed to do it. and why with this specific structure, like we can make that guy the call linebacker on this other one we're not allowed to. And so he was a guy who gave you a lot of that. And again, he would teach everybody, you know, the receiver's job on the run play, the same as the center's job.

So, like, everyone would know this is the angle I'm blocking for. This is where I expect the ball carrier to be. If I don't do it, this is where the play is going to break down. He's going to have to cut back. Now, that guy's going to be screwed. So he was really good about that. I'd say, you know, Kansas City is similar in a way that coach definitely gives you kind of the full idea,

but they also break it up a lot more. So typically if the play doesn't involve offense alignment, the offensive line is in their own room and they're doing their own install. And so you're not necessarily going to be in quite as many of the past installs as you would be in some other offenses who like to install things a little bit more coherently. I'd say I prefer that style. I don't want to sit there and watch 200 Jed dragon, dragon, lion, and learn about what a dragon and lion route is.

Like, I'd rather be in the offensive line room learning what 200 jet is and what my responsibilities are and what the blitzes are going to be. So I think giving you enough information, enough of the why, you know, again, going back to the Rams, McVeigh, I know when he first got there, some of the vets talked about, like, this is the first time a coach has ever told me, like, why he's asking me to do this specific thing, how it ties into the whole offense, you know, holistically, how this works. and it's really just about empowering. It's empowering your players to learn more, to understand the concept.

And maybe if they come out in some odd look, some odd blitz, now this guy knows, like, oh, well, he wanted me to do that because the quarterback's supposed to be here, and then he's supposed to hit this guy. And we haven't talked about it because we're going against Todd Bowles, and this is the blitz he just designed four days ago for us. But I kind of understand the concept of what's supposed to happen. So I'll make this thing happen on the fly, and Stafford will make it work. Now you're empowered to think at that level to understand the full concept.

And I think it's to everybody's benefit for the coaches to kind of buy into that a little bit and to give your guys a little bit more ownership of the offense and of the process. Ownership is a great word. And I remember in Minnesota going up there right after the draft and spending a little bit of time and just chatting about some of the things that they were trying to instill culturally. And obviously Mike Zimmer is Mike Zimmer and he's prickly. and there's a certain tone that a team is going to take on and a building is going to take on when he's your head coach. But it wasn't just about this guy, this is a nice, softer, younger voice in Kevin O'Connell.

I think it was about creating kind of a two-way street of dialogue about the way things worked and why they worked that way. In L.A., it's a chicken or the egg thing, right? You bring in a guy like Cooper Cup who literally has an office in the building because he spends so much time trying to give his input on what they're doing offensively. you can say, well, you brought in that type of guy and that helps foster that culture, but building that types of culture helps foster that sort of buy-in. So in Minnesota, I think that's part of the goal here is can we make sure that we're saying, all right, you have ownership over this, you have input on this. And that allows in those moments like you're talking about to be a little bit more nimble,

to feel like I can take these sorts of steps to make sure that I'm putting my imprint on what we're doing. And I have to assume that if you have the right type of guys in your building, that can only be a good thing in the long run. Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up Minnesota because we're seeing clips of Jay Alexander basically lamenting the fact that he's not covering Justin Jefferson and he's like, you guys see me, I'm a good player, I don't know why I'm not covering him. Like that's obviously a guy that is not as tied into the scheme. Like they're just getting, hey, this is what it's going to be for the week. It doesn't seem like there's much back and forth.

I think if he had input and they still overrode him, he would say like, I tried to tell them. But it wasn't even I tried to tell them. It was just like, nope, this is what the scheme was. They clearly didn't want me to cover the best receiver. And so that's a situation that you look at, getting back to our first question of, you know, what is worrisome in week one? Like, that's a worrisome work dynamic that guys are that frustrated in a week one about the matchup, that they didn't get to, you know, guard the best wide receiver. They didn't get the input to say, hey, I want to shadow this guy. And if that wasn't going to be the game plan and you were adamant about it, you could still talk to the guy.

And you could still say like, hey, I know you're awesome. We love what you do. Obviously, you're high paid and you've got all the accolades and stuff. This is the reason we're going to use the scheme and deploy it this way. And we think this is going to be successful. But that's not the case in Green Bay right now. And so not having that empowerment, not having kind of the understanding of why this is the case led to a frustrated guy after the game venting and probably sharing more than he really should have. All right.

Let's get to our first voicemail here. Hey, Robert, big fan. kind of a weird question, but I'm curious how many games or how many plays usually consider for like a team to get settled in or for average? I kind of think of in baseball, like, if a guy's hitting really hot off the bat after like 10 games, is it like officially is really good? Is he just hot? I'm curious what amount of time do you think it takes for a team to kind of go to their average point. That's kind of weird. Thanks. It's not kind of weird. It's a great question. It's a very pertinent question after week one. We talk about this a little

bit, at the beginning of the show, but I think that was more about taking week one results with a grain of salt. As a player, when did you feel like, all right, this is who I am this season, this is what we are this season? How long does that take? Well, it's funny he mentioned baseball because it used to be in baseball that they would say that it's no longer a small sample size when Mike Trout was leading baseball in war. Like, however many games it took Mike Trout to finally get atop the war leaderboard was enough

games to say it's no longer a small sample size. Now, for baseball fans, the last couple years he's been hurt, that hasn't quite been the case. But there hasn't really been that level to say, you know, after so many weeks, the chiefs are in first place and now, you know, we can say it. I'd say two or three weeks gives you a pretty decent indicator. You know, you're able to implement the first game plan, understand how that works or how it doesn't work. You're able to make some adjustments, you know, depending on the opposition, depending on, you know,

kind of how things play out. I'd say, you know, two or three weeks is really when you can start kind of finalizing in your mind, like, this is what we're going to be, this is what we should be. I would be curious, you know, the DVOA guys and the guys who kind of do the qualitative and quantitative stuff, like how many games in do they actually start making things more permanent and do they start giving more weight to it? Because I know they have some schedule stuff and DVOA things that are more weighted towards the end of the year once things are more settled and once they have more data points.

But I think within that first, you know, three weeks for sure. Some people would argue two, some would argue four. I don't think anyone would argue one week. But again, you want the ability to try to implement what camp was for, have a week, you know, have a reactionary week after that, kind of figure out good or bad what you can change. And then, you know, one to two weeks of let's implement that now and make sure that we either continuing to do the good thing and it's staying.

as good as we want it to be or we're fixing the bad stuff and now we've shown improvement and we've shown the things are getting better. I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to look it up really quickly, but I know the football outsiders has their DAVE rankings that are a combination of their preseason rankings and what the first few weeks of the season look like. I don't know how deep into the season that goes. I assume it's like three or four weeks at least where they're saying, all right, we're not going to throw out what we thought coming into the season.

Eventually we will move away from that, but especially a lot. over the first month or so, we need to incorporate what expectations we're supposed to be and the information that we've gotten to this point. So I think a month probably makes sense. But with the NFL, it's just so crazy because they're only 17 games. So it's always a small sample size. And things are just so volatile potentially from week to week. If you look at a team like the bills last year and just how much their offense shifted late into the season. And we see that all the time where teams just kind of click into different versions of themselves. And sometimes that doesn't happen until week 10.

So the NFL season and just sport in general is such a living, breathing thing as it relates to how we judge certain teams qualitatively, quantitatively, whatever, that I definitely think it's more of a moving target than pretty much anything else that we deal with in the sports world. Yeah, for sure. And I think most NFL teams work in kind of four quarters. And so old schedule after four games, you kind of do a self-scout, like a more comprehensive self-scout.

Let's look back at the whole four weeks, see what we like, what we didn't like, and, you know, four, eight, 12, 16. I'm sure a lot of you know that math, but I think that's kind of the benchmarks that those guys like to use. So after four weeks in their head, like, all right, we have enough data. We have shown enough that we can really do a full self-scouting analysis. But as you were talking, I kind of was thinking of college football, actually, and how absolutely slow top 25 ranking changes used to be. and you could be ranked in the top five to start the season. And this kind of goes to the Dave point of like, all right, you're three in one,

but you haven't shown that well against, you know, the three powder puffs that you scheduled. And you'd still be like number four in the country. And it wouldn't really matter. And now I think college football, you can see people drop out of rankings, vault into the rankings a lot quicker, whether that's getting back to the NFL,

whether that's symbolic of kind of the error that we're in in terms of instant results and wanting to overreact and overjudge and, you know, make definitive statements after a week or two, I'm not exactly sure. But I do think there's an element of understanding the expectations, realizing flukiness can happen, and giving at least that two to three weeks to kind of let things settle out. And then at that point, you can start, you know, kind of transitioning into what's a trend and what's not. And you made a great point as well. Like a team after week nine can be like, all right,

we started out four and one. We're now five and four. We had a bad stretch. Like, we're going to change. We're going to make instant changes, personnel, scheme, everything. And those could be good. This could be bad. But that happens to most teams throughout the year that there's this break-even point of like, all right, something needs to change, good or bad. And that can lead to this whole renaissance, like you said, of Buffalo's offense, where you find your rhythm, you find your identity.

And it could happen after week nine after week 10. Did you remember anything that was like that, an experience that you had deep into a season where you kind of figured out something that worked? Yeah, Kansas City. I don't know if it was 2016 or 2017, but we were in a bit of a funk. I think we went to New York and lost to the Giants and maybe we lost to the Jets too. I think the Jets game was when Marcus Peters chucked the flag out of bounds. And I think it was after a Buffalo game at home, which I think we also lost where we were still doing a bunch of I-formation stuff.

We were in kind of the traditional old school, more Andy Reed, West Coast, under center, playing with a fullback, all those things. and they kind of just said like, screw it, we're going to change, we're going to go more spread, we're going to be in shotgun more, we're going to do more read stuff. And they had done that, especially in 2015, before I got there. But going into that year and the offense line that we had and stuff,

it had leaned a little bit more traditional. And there was just a point where I was like, all right, this isn't working, let's completely change it up. I can't remember if that was one of those times where Coach Reed kind of seated play calling duties to Nagy. I think those things kind of get lost in terms of the actual weeks, but I think there was some mention of that or whether he was just more involved in the play

design. It was more of the college stuff, the more spread stuff. But yeah, just this isn't working. Something's got to change. And for us, it was getting out of that, you know, kind of under center to backworld and getting into the shotgun spread stuff. And I think we had pretty good success. And obviously, the rest of Goetree's offense is kind of history at this point.

All right. Next one here. Jonathan Munshaw asks, thanks for the hard work, as always. I was thinking about this watching the Browns game this weekend, Cade York, thinking about the whole running backs don't matter argument with Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt combining for like 200 plus total yards. My question is, who do you think is the lowest level skill running back you could have with a good offensive line?

Chub is obviously incredibly talented, but I can't help but think that De Ernest Johnson would have put up Hunt's numbers with the schemes they were drawing up and pulling blocks from Joel, Antonio and Wild Teller. I think this is trading hunt before the deadline is a reality, and I feel like the Browns could probably be just fine, say, with an Alexander-Madison-type backup. How do you handle your running back room if you were a GM? I think it all depends on the team, right? I mean, running back injuries are so constant, and you're one running back injury from the

entire dynamic of the room changing. So if you look at the Browns right now, I understand why trading Kareem Hunt seems like a reasonable thing because you have Nick Tubb, you have Deeranis Johnson on the bench. Deerunice Johnson is making like a million dollars this year. Them choosing to bring back Deeranis Johnson has no bearing on their financial situation. Also, the Browns currently have $37 million in cap space. So whatever you're going to save by trading the $1.3 million of Kareem Hunt's base salary that's remaining on his deal isn't worth losing the options that you have running the ball. Like this team with Jacoby Percette, a quarterback, is going to need to hand the ball off 30 to 35 times a game to be the best version of their offense.

And I think you want to give yourself as many possible chances to have a. reasonable, reliable running back in those spots as humanly possible. I also think that Cream Hunt does very different things than what Nick Chubb and De Ernest Johnson are going to be able to do as receivers. I mean, even the little goal line play they ran your say he was at fullback, having that wrinkle is really important. So I think it depends on the team. If you're a team that doesn't necessarily need all of these playmakers and all of these skill sets at running back, you don't need three guys that could potentially handle the load for you. But if you're built like the Browns are, I think that having those three guys is almost a necessary bit of team building for them to be the

offense they want to be over the next 10 weeks. Yeah, this is a very context-dependent question. I think for the Brown situation, and you answered it really well, why would you trade Kareem? You know, you've got all this cap room. It's a run dominant offense. The quarterback situation is what it is. You know, I saw a stat right before we came on that the two guys who led the NFL in, I think

it was tackles broken or guys missed or whatever that metric is. it was Nick Chubb and Jonathan Taylor like the two guys that we think are the best running backs in the NFL and you can say running backs don't matter only the O line matters but like at some point you're going to get tackled and it'd be nice

to be able to get more yards than what was expected given you know the blocking and there's also an element of the running back being able to set up the blocking that I don't know you know if this comes out in the data and how well they're able to kind of marry the O line versus the running back but like

once we got, I mean, Shady McCoy, he did things I'd never seen a running back do before. And, you know, he didn't play with us that much. And by halfway through the year, he kind of didn't play anymore for us. But like in the few games that he did, like, he did things I've never seen where he's just like running to the right, running to the right. And then boom, plants and goes left. Well, all that running to the right and having all of his focus to the right, that ran the linebacker into the center.

And now the center blocked him and he made the cut off of it. So there's elements of that where really good running backs make the offense a line better and it might not be stuff that you can grade or that you can see unless you're like really really looking for it but I do think they obviously work in tandem you know the Barry Sanders is the extreme example of just being a guy who can make anything happen but also having the most negative plays in history as a running back so you know the O line has to be good to allow you some level of success it's just you want three guys at the beginning of the year that you feel like all right if two of them are down there's one guy can carry the

load for me and then I'll bring up a guy in practice squad because yeah the chances of getting through a season unscathed and the running back room is as close to zero as you can have. All right. We're going to take one more quick break. We'll get back with a couple more questions before we get out of here. All right. We got one more voicemail. Bell are cue it up for us.

Hi, guys. Love your show, big fan. I'm here in Chicago as well. I was wondering why as of late you don't really see strong safety and free safeties listed on rosters and if you do, they're interchangeable. I've been a Niners friend for a long time, and I remember on our 2012 team, we had Sean Goldson, who is firmly the free safety, and Dante Wittner is firmly the strong bills are, you know, they have a highly vaunted safety combo, Jordan Poyer, Mike Hyde,

but I can't really put my finger on who's the strong and who's a free there. Is that something that's new in defensive schemes or am I missing something? Thank you. Okay, before you jump in, before that guy even said he was a Chicago fan, which was very early in the voicemail, I was like, this dude has to be from Chicago. And I'm not usually good with accents or anything. I was like, oh my God, this is Chicago guy right off the bad. It doesn't jump out to me because it's everyone I ever talked to over the course of my daily life. Yeah, no, it was pretty apparent.

I heard that one. It's fantastic. This is a pretty easy one. I think that as we've moved to a world where a lot of teams are kind of basing out of too high looks and playing those shelves on her. way down so you need to interchangeable safeties. And, you know, there are roles. If you look at what like Chauncey Gardner Johnson's going to be

for the Eagles, for example, right? You want him as the down safety more often as you want him as the post safety. But I think having guys that you can play in either one of those scenarios is a huge part of just modern defenses because the benefit of those pre-snap two high

shell looks is that it can turn into anything. And if we're to turn into anything, you need safeties where either of them could rotate down. So I think this is just kind of an expression of where the league is heading defensively on the defensive side of the ball. I don't know if it's any more complicated than that. I don't think so.

And I think it's only really important from the fan perspective, too, which, you know, for the teams that are going into a week, they've scouted and they're not saying, well, this guy's listed a free safety, but he plays like, it's like, no, this is the down safety, this is the guy who plays more deep, but just more for fans who want to know like, all right, I know Jamal Adams is a strong safety. He's probably going to be in the box more. And I know, you know, Earl Thomas is the free safety, so he's going to be the deep guy. So I think it's just a little bit more important for the fans to kind of get that easy

kind of knowledge of, hey, free or strong. But obviously for teams, like it has no effect at all because the film was going to tell them who plays in what role. Last one here. Eric Brignan asks, it was a bit hard to tell on the broadcast, but it looked like the St. Center, Eric McCoy, started making protection calls when the team went to hurry up. And after that, the Falcons didn't get any more pressure on James. Do you know if it's common for teams to switch who calls protections during hurry-up

compared to the regular offense? And does it really make as big a difference as it seemed like in this game? It doesn't make like a huge difference in terms of like, oh, well, McCoy was the one doing it. So this is the reason the protection is working. It probably was a two-minute drill and the D-line maybe got a little more tired and things were happening a little faster and the Saints just blocked better. I think it's probably as simple as that.

But it's an excellent question because, yes, teams that are quarterback dependent on making all the protection calls. Once you get into the two-minute drill, for the most part, they're one-word calls, there are two-word calls, and he's going to be a lot more inclined to

think about like, oh, is it trips, is it doubles? Oh, trips right, trips right. You know, got to make sure my three guys are out there in the right splits, and now I'm calling the play, and now it's like, Chiefs, Chiefs, Chiefs, and is this guy, you know, four yards from the hash instead of two yards from the hash? And within Chiefs, it's baked in, you know,

maybe it's two jet and the offensive line can handle two jet, just slide to the left. So in that instance, the quarterback is doing so many other things with the offense, making sure guys are aligned, making sure things are set, everyone's up on the ball, that you do put some of that onus on the offensive line in the center in particular. So it's not something that's uncommon. I don't think it led to the reason for the saints blocking them better, but I think it's a really awesome observation, honestly. I'm pretty impressed that, you know, this question was asked and it was seen

that there's a center who's now taking protection calls when he wasn't before. But yeah, it's something that kind of just helps speed things up because of the quarterback has to do all those other things and then take a look at the defense and then see if the rotation means I got to switch it and all that stuff. It's like, no, we'll leave the protection of the O line, we'll leave the rest of the scheme to the quarterback and then get up, snap the ball, let's go. Awesome. Well, that's all we got.

Appreciate you doing this. Appreciate you helping us kick off week one. It was very good to have you back on the show. It was very good to talk to you. I'm going to let you get back to your rigorous golf routine now. No, the current routine is still dealing with house renovation. I've got like eight different people at the house right now, so I've got to go about downstairs. All right, we will be back tonight on this very YouTube channel.

Me and Mike Sandow will be reacting to Seahawks Broncos. It's going to be a lot to talk about pretty much no matter how that game goes. So I feel pretty comfortable saying we'll have a decent amount to talk about after the game is over. In the meantime, if you guys could please subscribe. to the YouTube channel if you have not. We've added a bunch of subscribers since we started doing this stuff. Like I've mentioned many, many times over the last couple weeks where we have a lot more YouTube content later today on Monday, Nate's first winding the clock, which is our little

X's and O's segment that's going to be tied to our Sunday night podcast is going to be coming out. So please go check that out. Me and Sandel will be doing our reaction. Our Thursday shows are going to be live with me, Nate and Deontay, every single week. So please subscribe. Also, please subscribe to The Athletic. Theathletic.com slash football show. that's always something you guys should be doing if you do not have a subscription.

And if you could, rate and review the podcast. Go leave us a review on Apple Podcasts wherever you happen to listen and you can review. It would mean a lot to us. Season's getting started. So if you like the show, let us know. We will be back tomorrow with Ali Connolly from Read Optional, talking about some of the units that we really wanted to dig into a little bit more after week one now that we've got a chance to look at the film. Until then, appreciate you guys listening. We'll talk to you soon.

This was the Athletic Football Show. Thank you.