Recalibrate the total Win [Archive] - Page 5 - Commanders Post at The Warpath

mredskins

11-27-2024, 05:37 PM

I thought wed win 6 or 7 based on decent HC, ok offensive coordinator, bad oline coach , questionable OTs ok guard, good center, generally weak oline with a rookie QB, and generally week CBs. I forgot what it was but i think we had lost like 7 in a row. Plus, how many oro bowlers did we have? Zero. So going from 4 wins to 6 or 7 would be pretty reasonable, it helped in who we played to get us there too. I understood people saying we could approach 500 based on our schedule, but I didnt buy that. Our preseason left me very concerned about OTs .So now what? Well some of y'all were saying we could beat anyone, that is clearly not true after Philly, what we have learned due to dallas is we can lose to anyone. That is the sign of a team on the wrong side of 500 normally, particularly at home. This team is playing like a 500 team at best right now and the talent level would support that too. Can we win 3 of our last 5 now that the league has tape on JD5 and kingsbury? Sure, but we can just as easily win 1 or 4. It is a crapshoot. This team wins 9 or 10 and has to get lucky on a tiebreaker to make playoffs. I just dont know if we will be a 500 team or a playoff contender beyond this year. But at least we wint be bottom third for a change!

you need espn plus but a good article about the Kliff cliff

For about 55 minutes, Dallas at Washington was a normal football game. With Jayden Daniels and the Commanders offense struggling, a Brandon Aubrey field goal put the Cowboys up 13-9. After a disastrously blown coverage led to a Luke Schoonmaker touchdown, the Cowboys seemed in position to close out the game at 20-9 with 5:16 left on the clock.

Then, the chaos came. A quick drive from the Commanders produced a Zach Ertz touchdown. The Cowboys immediately responded with a 99-yard KaVontae Turpin kickoff return for a score, aided by one of the great high-variance plays on special teams: dropping the football. Fumbling a punt or a kickoff is obviously dangerous and not recommended, but it can also mess up the timing and rush discipline of the would-be tacklers. The famous DeSean Jackson touchdown against the Giants is a classic example. Turpin initially fumbled the kick, picked it up, inexplicably hit the spin button and then ran upfield to restore a 10-point lead.

After the Commanders kicked a field goal to get back within seven, a failed onside kick seemed to all but end the game. What little we knew. The Cowboys didn't try to move the ball aggressively and instead burned Washington's last two timeouts, punting the ball to the Commanders' 14-yard line. With 33 seconds and no timeouts, Daniels was somehow going to need to drive 86 yards for a game-tying touchdown.

While Cowboys fans might have had nightmares of Daniels' Hail Mary in their heads, it turns out that Washington didn't even need to resort to one. With Dallas rushing three and playing soft zone coverage behind, offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury flooded the right side of the field with receivers, and Daniels hit Terry McLaurin on a go route up the sideline. Jourdan Lewis and Josh Butler were nearby but weren't able to tackle McLaurin or force him out of bounds, and with a lead block from Noah Brown, McLaurin simply outran the Cowboys to the end zone.

Since 2000, 94 teams have started drives inside their 20-yard line, with 40 seconds or less left to go, out of timeouts, and needing a touchdown to potentially tie or win the game. The Commanders are the first of those teams to score a touchdown in that situation. More teams have scored defensive touchdowns in those situations (three). It's more likely an offense will complete a Hail Mary than score a touchdown in such a desperate situation. The Commanders have done both at home in Daniels' rookie season.

Then Austin Seibert missed the extra point. Oh no. Shades of John Carney. Should the Commanders have gone for two? There's no clear right answer. The strength of the team is the offense, and Daniels is still a threat to score as a runner in short yardage, as he did on a 2-pointer earlier in the quarter. They had to go for two on that earlier score because Seibert missed an extra point earlier in the game. And if you have any belief in momentum, it's hard to imagine a moment in which the other team would feel more deflated than this one, where it had allowed an 86-yard touchdown in a hopeless situation in the middle of a lame-duck season.

On the other hand, the Commanders were huge favorites playing at home and Cooper Rush was on the other side of the field. While Rush had a solid day, going 24-of-32 for 247 yards with two touchdowns, Washington would have liked its chances going into overtime against Rush. Going for the lead can inspire aggressiveness from an opponent, which is why win probability models are often more conservative in those situations than would be expected, but the Cowboys weren't going to get frisky with 21 seconds and one timeout. I can see arguments for both sides here.

Of course, the game wasn't over. The ensuing onside kick was returned for a touchdown by Juanyeh Thomas, who surely should have kneeled down to end the game, only for the siren call of the end zone to lure him in for a score. (To be clear, I don't blame him. If you're a special-teamer who never touches the ball with green grass ahead of you, you're not kneeling.) The Commanders got the ball back and got in position for another Hail Mary, only for Daniels' pass to be tipped and picked to end the game.

Whew. Obviously, being defeated at home by a Cowboys team that had lost five straight games isn't exactly a great result, even if the fans got their money's worth along the way. Before the game and for most of the contest, there was plenty of chatter about how the Commanders were dealing with the aftereffects of hitting the "Kliff Cliff," the idea that defenses figure out Kingsbury's offenses as the season goes along, leading to impressive first halves of the season and disappointing second halves.

Is it a real thing? I wouldn't rule it out, but some of the evidence I've seen backing it up isn't sound. Although there's no clear definition of what a "Kliff Cliff" would look like, most of the evidence I've seen has pointed out that his squads at Texas Tech and with the Arizona Cardinals won more games and scored more points in the first half of seasons than they did in the second. There's a chart that looks something like this:

the 'Kliff Cliff' Real?

2013 Texas
Tech NCAA 7-0 41.1 1-5 29.5
2014 Texas
Tech NCAA 2-4 30.3 2-4 30.7
2015 Texas
Tech NCAA 5-2 49.4 2-4 40.0
2016 Texas
Tech NCAA 3-3 48.8 2-4 38.5
2017 Texas
Tech NCAA 4-3 40.3 2-4 27.3
2018 Texas
Tech NCAA 4-2 43.2 1-5 31.5
2019 Cardinals NFL 3-4-1 21.2 2-6 23.9
2020 Cardinals NFL 5-3 29.3 3-5 22.0
2021 Cardinals NFL 8-1 30.8 3-5 21.5
2022 Cardinals NFL 3-6 22.6 1-7 17.1

That's a pretty clear trend, but is it proof there's something innately wrong with Kingsbury's coaching? I'm not so sure. For one, the college data has one really obvious flaw: scheduling. Teams begin their seasons with games against opponents from outside their conference, and while that can mean playing a powerhouse in a dream game, it usually means beating up an overmatched smaller school. Texas Tech dropped 61 on Stephen F. Austin, 59 on Sam Houston and 69 on UTEP early in the season with Kingsbury at the helm. That's not some great scheme. It's scheduling.

If we do this same exercise for the college years but include only the nine games Tech played in the Big 12 each season, there's still an effect, but it's not as prevalent. The Red Raiders were 13-17 and averaged 35.9 points per game during the first half of the Big 12 schedule (I'm treating the first five games as the first half of a nine-game slate.) They fell to 6-18 afterward, but they still averaged 32.4 points per contest. The defense is really what collapsed; it allowed an average of 30 points per game during the first half of the Big 12 schedule and 41.9 points per game afterward.

What about the pro game? In 2019, the Cardinals actually scored more points per game during the second half of the season, so while their record declined slightly, it doesn't appear to have been an offensive issue. In 2022, they struggled throughout the season, but quarterback Kyler Murray played just one full game during the second half of the year, as he missed two games with a hamstring injury, came back and then tore his ACL early in a loss to the Patriots. It seems bizarre to include those years as evidence that teams figure out Kingsbury's offense late in the season.

Plus, in 2021, Murray missed three games at the end of the first half and the beginning of the second half. Colt McCoy went 2-1 in his absence, but a bigger issue might have been losing wideout DeAndre Hopkins to hamstring and knee injuries. Hopkins had 486 receiving yards and seven touchdowns during the first eight games of the season, but he played just two games the rest of the way. He was replaced by Antoine Wesley, a Kingsbury favorite from Texas Tech, who never played in the league again after his lone season in Arizona.

Are these too many excuses? Maybe. Everyone battles injuries, and it's possible Kingsbury's style of play exposed Murray to more hits. But I find the college arguments to be specious because of scheduling and the defense falling off far more significantly than the offense, while the Cardinals lost their quarterback and best offensive player in back-to-back seasons for almost the entire second half after having them for all of the first. Those seem like compounding factors.

Kingsbury's status as an Air Raid coach raised some concerns across the league that his playbook wouldn't be up to NFL standards, given that one of the original tenets of the offense was around running a small number of plays more effectively than teams with larger playbooks. I'm not sure that has been the case in reality, but the Air Raid also prefers to line up receivers in the same spots snap after snap, which makes it easier to avoid giving away play tells and play with tempo, albeit at the expense of allowing defenses to know exactly where receivers would be every play.

That's fine, but if that were really the case, why would defenses' ability to sniff out Kingsbury's playcalls reset at the end of the year? If Kingsbury's offense was easy to solve after seeing it on film, it would have given defenses trouble in the first half of his first season. After they adjusted in the second half, though, they still would have had access to that film and Kingsbury's concepts after the season. That same knowledge still should have been applicable to the first half of the following year, but the Cardinals thrived in the first half of each season, even though they apparently were not installing drastically new or expanded concepts.

Washington's offense has declined in recent weeks, and it was quiet for most of Sunday, although it eventually finished with 412 yards and 26 points. The line struggled to keep Daniels protected at times, with an injury suffered by right tackle Andrew Wylie not helping matters. The three-headed backfield of Austin Ekeler, Jeremy McNichols and Brian Robinson combined to carry the ball 17 times for 55 yards, with Robinson suffering an injury early in the game before returning and Ekeler leaving with a concussion on that final kickoff return of the contest.

If the Commanders are struggling institutionally on offense, the run game is the most likely culprit. Through their 7-2 start, they were producing successful runs on 47.8% of their carries, the highest rate of any ground game in the league. They ranked seventh in rush yards over expectation per carry and did that without a recognized lead back in the mix.

Since Week 10, they've kept up the success rate, with their 48% mark ranking fifth. They just haven't hit any big plays. They've dropped to 29th in rush yards over expectation per carry, which is closely tied to big plays. They had 11 runs of 20 yards or more during the first nine games. They have one over this three-game losing streak, a 23-yard scramble by Daniels in the fourth quarter Sunday.

Does the rib injury Daniels suffered last month factor in here? Maybe, but it hasn't been in the playcalling. Outside of a game with seven designed runs in the opener against Tampa Bay, Kingsbury has been pretty conservative in saving Daniels' designed runs for the red zone or key situations. With scrambles, sneaks and kneel-downs not included, Daniels averaged three designed runs per game between Weeks 2 and 7. He has had 14 over the ensuing five games. He has been less likely to scramble over that stretch, which might be more about how defenses are playing him than the playcalling.

The screen game, which is tied to Washington's run concepts, has also fallen off, although the divide isn't as neat as this three-game losing streak. Through the first six weeks of the season, Daniels averaged 33 passing yards per game on screens, the fifth-most of any quarterback. Since Week 7, that has dropped to 12.5 passing yards per game. Those are easy yards when Daniels gets to decide whether to hand the ball off or throw a high-percentage screen if he has the right numbers.

The Commanders' third-down performance has suffered. Through Week 9, they were converting just under 46% of their third downs, the fourth-best rate in the league. Since then, they've dropped to 31.7%, which is 29th. That might typically be chalked up to the third downs being more difficult, but the average distance needed to convert those third downs has been virtually identical across both those stretches.

And again, schedule matters. Washington topped 30 points three times during the first half of the season. It had a great day against the Browns, but its other big games came against the Bengals, who ranked 29th in EPA per play, and the Panthers, who are 31st. The first two games of this losing streak came against the Steelers and Eagles, two of the league's five best defenses. The Cowboys decidedly are not, but again, the Commanders got to a reasonable offensive performance by the end of the day.

One thing I'd like to see the Commanders do to try to show newer looks on early downs while creating more opportunities for the run game is emulate what Kingsbury's replacement has done in Arizona. Drew Petzing's offense leans heavily into 12 and 13 personnel groupings, loading up on tight ends, which allows it to dictate defensive personnel while creating physical advantages in the ground and play-action games. Washington still uses 11 personnel as its base grouping, but it isn't exactly blessed with great wideouts behind McLaurin. Leaning into the trio of Ertz, Ben Sinnott and John Bates might help get the run game started again. With an upcoming bye after next Sunday's game against the Titans, Kingsbury has a chance to rest Daniels and take a big-picture look at how the offense might want to evolve over the final month of the season

And realistically, Daniels was playing like an MVP candidate for the first two months of the season. It's tough for anyone to keep up that level of play, let alone a rookie. That was always going to be difficult to sustain given the quality of talent on this roster. If he has settled in as a good quarterback with special moments for the rest of the season, that's still an incredibly valuable player and a franchise-altering addition for the Commanders. Yes, 7-5 feels disappointing after a 7-2 start, but every single Washington fan would have been thrilled to find out their team would have a winning record in late November. There's enough here to get them over the line and into the postseason.