The Ringer NFL Show - The Play Sheet [VIDEO]: What's Going On With Josh Allen and the Bills?

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

The Ringer’s Ben Solak takes a look at one of the NFL's most confounding teams: the Buffalo Bills. The Bills have a winning record in the brutal AFC and an offense that ranks highly in all the important metrics. However, if the playoffs started tomorrow, they'd be out of a spot. Is Ken Dorsey's offense to blame, or has Josh Allen regressed this season? Ben makes the case that the Bills are probably fine, though Buffalo fans might not want to hear that. Watch 'The Play Sheet' on YouTube or Spotify every Wednesday at 8 a.m. PT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Howdy. I'm Ben Solac. This is the play sheet. So weekly pod we do on Wednesdays. It is a video pod. We're going to break down some film. So click into the Spotify app. Watch the videos you listen along and enjoy. The opening script. What's going on? What's up with Buffalo? Man, how we do? How are we doing? The bills are 5 and 4 and it feels like the sky is falling man. They are outside of the AFC playoff fiction right now because like everybody in the AFC North is 5 and 3. And they're also losing the division to the dolphins who are 6 and 3. We're at the halfway point of the season. So it might feel. feel like early to be talking playoff picture, but it's not especially for Buffalo. According to Impredictable, the Bills have had the fourth easiest to schedule to this point in the season, and again, they're five and four. The upcoming schedule is the second hardest. They have road games against the Eagles, the Chiefs, and the Dolphids, and they have to face the Cowboys, the Chargers, and the Jets at home. Now, much of the anxiety around the bills is centered on the offense, where it feels like the units just kind of stuck in the mud.

Ever since Brian Dable, who was the old O.C. of the Bills left to become the head coach of the Giants, there's been a lot of scrutiny on Ken Dorsey, the new ones. offensive coordinator. And some of that is just the nature of like relative measures, right? When Daibel was coordinating the offense, Josh Allen was like really bad and then he got really good. The bill's offense exploded and they were they were the team that could potentially beat the chiefs. There was this huge improvement under Brian Daible. With Ken Dorsey, there's been no huge improvement. And so it feels like he's not doing as good of a job. But when you look at the numbers, the Dorsey offense has been just as good, if not better than the day bowl offense. Across the board, the offenses are like

basically the same, but Ken Dorsey's offense does have a slight edge in EPA per drive, which expected points added is just like a good way of measuring how valuable your yards are, and success rate, which is just what percentage of your plays or positive plays. Like the Dorsey offense is as good, if not better, than the Brian Daibble offense. Now, points per drive is the one metric that's down. And that kind of makes sense as to why we're feeling like, oh, maybe this offense isn't as good. But it's still worth noting. Last year, the bills were second in points per drive.

This year, they're fourth. Like, they might be down relative to Daible, but this is still one of the best. offenses in the lead. And the only reason the points per driver down is because the bills are turning the ball over a lot. Right now, 15% of the bills drives are ending in turnovers. That's seventh most in the league. It's not good company to be in there with like the Desmond Ritter Falcons and the Tyson-Basian Bears and the A. You know, O'Connell Rams. Like it's just nonsense. They shouldn't be there. And to talk about why they're there, we're going to go play action. This is the first play of the game, Bill's against Patriots. Josh Allen's going to throw a pick

and the bills are going to lose this game. Not like exclusively because of the pick, but because they played by whatever. Sale is the concept. We get a vertical stretch there. We're going to get the flat from the tight end. And then the other tight end here, Dalton Kincaid is running that sail route. This intermediate route on that three level flood. You run an outbreaker, you run a corner. This is a sail route for a lot of offenses. The player to watch here is Debril Peppers, the safety. We're going to watch him the entire way. Take away the flat, flip those hips, and there's the interception. Now, this technique is just, it's called sale technique. Like, it's named after the concept that you're trying to take away where initially you get wide with the flat route, right? Get wide with a

flat route. And then eyes on Josh Allen. See how he starts to get his butt into the sideline? You want to get your butt to the sidelines. You can flip your hips and get underneath that sale route. Get to that ball and then obviously the balls, you know, it's a little bit underneath. You could try to throw this thing over the top. But this is, this is, this is, Gibral Pivers talked about it after the game. this is great bait, right? This is winning on this technique against a common concept. The Patriots got beat on this concept by the bills last year and getting this interception. So this is just nice quality play by the defense. Now, two weeks later, we're playing the Bengals.

Now, this is not sale, but it's another very common concept that you get from the bills a lot. You get a vertical route outside release from Gabe Davis. Quick, outbreaking route here from Stefan Diggs. Player to watch is Cam Taylor Britt, right? Just like Gibral Peppers on the previous play, he's going to be responsible for the flat area. and he's going to be playing with his butt into the sideline and his hips facing Josh Allen, right? Facing this route.

If you're Allen and you're reading this out, we call this area right here against cover two, right? We have these two deep safeties. This area against cover two, we call the honeyhole, right? This is the spot, baby. We want to throw the ball right here on this vertical route because the safety is not necessarily going to have the width to be able to get to that ball.

And if we can just hold this corner down, we just tie him down with this route, then we can throw the ball right here with velocity, right? You throw this thing on a laser beam and you hit Gabe Davis before that safety can, get there. So we like the honey hole against this look. But this corner has got to stay low to the flat. He has to be afraid of this outbreak route. He has to be taking it away. The whole time he's sinking underneath this, right? The whole time he's given digs away. He doesn't care about it.

And he wants to stay underneath this because the bills, they just like sale. They throw this all the time. Now, Allen's already released the ball. You got to get this thing up here, brother. You got to get this thing on the upfield shoulder. You got to worry about this corner. But this ball is underneath and it's behind and it gets picked off. Now, if you want to argue that Ken Dorsey needs to be changing some stuff in this offense, which I think there are like some valid points for, even though he's getting too far blamed for a lot of stuff and the offense is generally very good. It's the fact that defensive backs are really keying in and jumping on a lot of these outside vertical stretches, right? We have the same thing as outside vertical stretch. We're

going to get a little outbreaking right here in the flat and then we're going to get the seven cup right here and we're trying to do the same thing where we take a flat defender, we tie him down with the underneath route and then we throw over the top of him. This time though, it's not the flat defender who makes the pick, it's Jordan Whitehead, right? Watch the safety right here. Watch Jordan Whitehead. Just reading this route the whole way. Ready, ready, ready.

See how soon he opens his hips? Just waiting, all right, Gabe Davis is about to break here, and I'm going to come underneath it. And then Alan is like maybe a touch late to the throw, maybe a touch behind if you want to argue it. But in general, it's just defense knowing where this ball is going to come the whole way, right? And so we have now thrown a lot of picks on different concepts, but the same idea out here of this vertical stretch.

And so we can maybe make some changes there. You can maybe take that away from the offense. The problem is that when Josh throws this stuff, he's crazy good at it. Like on this play here, there's no high-low stretch, but there's a sinking flat defender underneath the digs route to the top of the screen. Watch Alan put this ball in the spot. End zone view. Just, all right, land on the back foot.

There's my sinking defender. I can make this throw. I mean, come on, get out of Dodge. Why would you not want a quarterback who can make this throw? Because not a lot of guys can consistently attempting that throw on which Alan's throwing all those picks. So it's tough to complain about the fact that the bills continue to throw this because Alan can throw them and they're sick when he does.

But the issue has always been for Alan, and it is again this season, calibration. In quarterbacking, there's risk and reward, right? There's throwing the ball downfield, which is good, but you're more likely to take a sack because you're holding onto the football, which is bad. There's getting rid of the football quickly and avoiding the sack, which is good, but now you're more likely to be thrown checkdowns and getting tackled short of the sticks, which is bad. Everything is risk and reward, cost and benefit.

Right now, Alan is having an issue in that calculation of risk and reward, and he's struggling to find that sweet perfect spot where you're risking a lot, but the reward is worth it. All these aggressive, big armed scramble drill plays are actually paying off for him with super successful offense. The turnovers are hurting the offense too much, and that falls on Allen. There's other areas we can talk about this too, deep passing as an example. This season, Alan has been one of the shakiest deep passers. of the league. He's got 40 throws of at least 20 air yards, which is fourth most in the league.

But his completion percentage is bottom 10 in the league, only 30%. His EPA per dropback is even worse because six of his 10 interceptions have come on deep throws. Some of those interceptions have come as a result of calibration, choosing which throws are worth the risk. Here we are against the Jets again. Cool concept, right? We're going to get a through route here from the tight end. Big post there from the number two receiver and then the dig in behind it. So we're stretching them, right? We're going vertical. We want to hit a shift. We're going vertical. We want to hit a shot right here. Snap the football. We've got in the middle of the field a post safety. It's Jordan Whitehead. We call him a post safety because he is where the post goes. That's what we call

D middle safety. Post safety taking away the post. Same way of sale tech takes away the sale. Post safety takes away the post. When we have post safety, we don't throw the post. That's the rule because he's there. Alan's scrambling is out to his left. You got this here, which is like a challenging throw because you're running into the sidelines. You're going to have to put this upfield. You have just scramble, like just run, go get your jaw challenge, you'll get a first down. Or apparently we have the post. And he's going to elect to take this post across his body with a safety sitting there in the middle of the field. You can't choose to throw that route. Here again, against the Jets, it's Stefan Degs running the post from three. When we look at this pre-snap, right? I mean, there's one safety

you might be in middle of the field. It's Jordan Whitehead again. They might go some sort of cover two here. And then you get like a Mike linebacker, Tampa two runner, in which case, we love this, right? but in terms of guys we have to check our homework on, it's just him, right? I mean, like, like Diggs is going to be able to outrun this player. He's got bad leverage on this route. We just have to check this guy. We have to check our work. It's not the football.

All right. He's got right now hips facing this route, which is going to curl right here. So we're hoping maybe this pulls him down. And then we have the safety here playing, you know, man coverage on Diggs. And he's got outside body positioning. So we're going to be able to throw this to the inside. Like right now, this looks good. He's going to be on it.

You have to throw this thing upfield, right? You didn't, he didn't get pulled down. He didn't get tied down the way you wanted him to. So now you're going to have thrown into double coverage, and there's pressure, right? Which means it's a little bit challenging to check your work, right? This internal clock gets sped up a little bit. But Alan just hangs this ball out there assuming that the safety got held. He just puts out in the middle of the field as if he's just not going to be there.

Just not respecting the fact that the defense is going to adjust to what routes you're running. You got to watch the safety, man. This is a bad throw. It's a bad choice. Now, what's particularly frustrating is this. Since week six, Alan, he was playing the Giants, he landed on his throwing his shoulder, he heard it, wasn't good, they've been checking it out, he's mispractice.

He is three for 20 on throws 20 yards down the field. No touchdowns, two picks. And only Mac Jones has a worst expect of points out of for dropback on these downfield throws. For a volatile quarterback, who already, like, has struggled sometimes picking what throws he shouldn't, shouldn't attempt, also being inaccurate is a big problem. We got Stefan Diggs on the seam, right?

We're going to come across here with a dig, route. We're trying to hold this safety down. And then, okay, if they rotate single high, we're going to have to get away from it. But if they just stay bracketing Stefan Diggs with these two, then we can throw this seam heading down the field. And that's exactly what we get, right? Brackett here, the whole way. So inside leverage, outside leverage. But Diggs is just going vertical. So if he outruns Kyle Dugger, we're nice. And we got Miles Bryant getting held down right here by the dig. This is exactly what we wanted. Lain on the back foot, send this sucker. Look at the cushion, man. I mean, you have to put a castable ball on Stefan Diggs right here. If you do it's six points, misses them.

Missed them. So now we get to this play. This is a very important play. Against the Bengals, we got first and 10. We are going to get Deonti Hardy on the vertical route. We have two deep safeties it looks like right now, and they're both pretty low. We get the crosser as well from Gabe Davis. That's going to be an important route.

Play action fake, so we turn our eyes and then we land back on the defense. Both these safeties are staying low, right? I mean, we're looking for a crossing route right here. He's staying low, looking for anything that's going to come here. Deonti Hardy is going to win this vertical. And when he wins this vertical, he blows by these safeties. This right now, it is a totally. acceptable route to throw. You absolutely read this out. You say, I got one-on-one, no safety. I'm

chucking this thing. It's totally, totally defensible choice. It is a high-risk choice. A lower-risk choice, it's Gabe Davis on the crosser, who is very, very, very open, right? I mean, like, you're going to get the safety closing down, and the linebacker's trying to get underneath, but you're going to complete this ball out here 95% of the time, and he's going to turn up field and get a first down 90% of the time. This is low-risk, decent reward. This is Deonti Hardy. It's not Stefan Deonti Hardy one-on-one. This is high-risk high-reward. So there's a calibration conversation here. What route are you choosing? What are you looking for? Okay, we launched this sucker Deonti Hardy now. We get to the accuracy portion of things. If he's running this thing

vertical right now and leverage the corner right now is outside of him, you want to pull him to the middle of the field with this ball. Throw this ball right here. Take him to the middle of the field, run him away from coverage. What you don't want to do is put this ball upfield because you're going to leave him connected to this corner. Right. So where do we put this football, we have to put this on the B. Put this right in the B, brother. Put this right on that B. This ball ends up landing out here. And accordingly, I mean, Hardy never has a shot at it. He misses again, right? So we have a calibration conversation. It's not an issue. It's just a conversation. And then we have an accuracy issue. And that's how a great concept on first and 10 becomes

incomplete second and 10. And it's this particular sort of behavior. It's choosing these deep patterns, even when there's stuff in structure of the offense that might be preferable that led to some really frustrating Allen games last year. That was his issue with calibrations, less risk throwing into tight windows with interceptions and more just chucking the ball downfield when it would be nicer to kind of incrementally move down the field. Here, for example, this is a play from that 2022 article I wrote. We are going to get on this play, Gabe Davis on the vertical, Stefan Deggs on the crosser, late last season against the dolphins. What does Alan take? Play action, land on the back foot. We have a one-on-one with Gabe Davis.

We like him vertical. We like him down the field. Defensible choice. We have Stefan Diggs open on an intermediate route. Deep safety is too high to be able to get to that ball. This is open. This is open. This is NFL open.

This is low risk. Decent reward. This is high risk, high reward. What does he throw? I mean, he never brings his eyes to Dix. He throws this downfield, pass breakup, incomplete, no game. So if there's an issue with the bill's offense, it's this. It's calibrating.

It's choosing what we attempt and what we attempt. we don't attempt, what we risk and what the reward is from that. And if there's, if there's something that makes Alan different than Mahomes, who he's, he is, he's so close to being Mahomes. He is the contemporary to Mahomes. He's equal in like arm talent and physical ability, running ability, arm angles, the velocity, he's equal in so many ways. But the difference is this risk management. Mahomes is just so shockingly right all of the time. And Alan just makes a couple of mistakes a game. And usually for the bills, that's been fine. But introduce a really injured defense this season,

and those little mistakes accumulate over the course of a game, and all of a sudden everything is a one-score contest, everything is tight-late, and you have deficits, like the one against the Bengals, that you just can't surmount. The funny thing is that the exact issue with Alan is also the thing that makes him incredible, right? Like he has this calibration problem,

but he makes plays that nobody else makes, and that's why the bill's offense is still top five in every metric he can think of. It's the EPA and success rate and points and everything. It's still so, so, so good. Maybe that doesn't make Bill's fans feel better. Maybe it would be better if there were like two or three things that were very obviously wrong and you just fix them and then the offense goes thermonuclear and they score 40 points every game

and they win every game and it's incredible. Like that would be nice, but that's not reality. They have an extremely talented quarterback. They have a good offensive system around him with good weapons around him and accordingly they've been a really good offense. They also are two turnover prone right now. They've got to cut those down and they have to try to get better on defense and get those final end of game stops that they need to play complimentary football. Do that and they're going to go to

playoffs. Don't do that. You have a really beleaguered coaching staff that needs to produce results in a super competitive AFC with a star receiver who's been frustrated and a star quarterback who's not getting any younger, which could be bad. So yes, things feel shaky in Buffalo, but I think the offense is going to be all right. And that'll do it. For us here on this episode of the play sheet, thank you for watching. Thank you to Cory McConnell for producing. Thank you to Bill's fans for really, really, really worrying a lot about a team that has a winning record, has a very good offense, and it's probably going to be okay. And watch more of the shows, watch all the episodes, and enjoy them.