The Colts are at home this week to take on the Bills in this week 10 match up. Get in on this open thread.
The Indianapolis Colts are at home to take on the Buffalo Bills for their week ten game, Sunday at 1 p.m. EST.
Week nine came with a new starter at quarterback for our embattled team and Joe Flacco was far from the revolution that Shane Steichen hoped he would be. Flacco, for his part, didn’t do anything wrong. He was Joe Flacco. You don’t get mad at a bear for being a bear and you can’t hate Joe Flacco for being the quarterback he’s shown that he is over his 17 year NFL career. Shane Steichen and his offense, however, have some serious questions to answer.
A year ago Steichen’s offense was ripe with quick hitting route combinations, receivers were getting open underneath and high percentage options were available for whoever was playing quarterback. This season has been another story. Steichen has replaced the quick game nearly exclusively with deep concepts, relying on keeping extra blockers in against the blitz instead of throwing quickly behind it. The offense looks modern with it’s formations and motions but it’s strategy is something that Steichen’s mentor, Norv Turner, would recognize from the mid 1990’s. Turner put his name on the map in the early 90’s with those dominant Dallas Cowboys teams. On those teams going heavy, keeping seven blockers in the box and dialing up deep shots to Michael Irvin from Troy Aikman, was as viable a strategy as anything else at that time. But it just doesn’t play with any consistency in the modern NFL when the pass is coming from Joe Flacco or Anthony Richardson to Alec Pierce.
That’s not meant to disparage Pierce, who has been good this season. Josh Downs, capable of being a driving force for the offense, has been an afterthought with Steichen’s downfield calls and Michael Pittman Jr. has been dealing with a back injury that has rendered him less effective than ever before. Adonai Mitchell, is a rookie going through what many rookies do and despite his well documented struggles, has been adjusting in the midst of substandard quarterback play, bad offensive design and the frustration of being oh-so-close to making major plays week after week and just not coming down with them for one reason or another.
And so far I’ve just addressed the passing offense, I haven’t even begun to rail on the ground game and how Steichen designed it to only operate at a high level with a mobile quarterback at the helm. With a mobile quarterback on the field the majority of the run game is designed to force the defense to account for the quarterback’s ability to keep and run the ball himself, and the thing is, it’s a great strategy! We’re seeing Saquon Barkley and Derek Henry have fantastic years with the same idea. The quarterback takes a defender out of the play and the offensive line suddenly finds itself with an advantage more often than not. Ultimately football is a numbers game. If you split the field down the middle at the center, one side of the field the defense is going to have five guys on it, the other will have six (insert “what about a zero tech” here). If you do it right, you force the defense into taking one of those defenders out of the play completely to account for the quarterback, so instead of five and six you now have four and five depending on the direction of the run. So you can build in a directional numbers advantage of blockers, knowing that a defender isn’t going to take on the back. And if that defender bails out and does take on the back, if they stop accounting for the quarterback, well then your quarterback is keeping the ball and he’s picking up an explosive run.
With Joe Flacco on the field this is no longer possible. Teams don’t have to account for Joe and Joe couldn’t keep it (and survive) if he wanted to. Steichen knows this. He knows it’s how is run game is designed (he designed it, well he didn’t as much as Eagles run game coordinator Jeff Stoutland did, but you get the idea). He knows it will suffer with Flacco in the game and yet here we are.
Steichen has done nothing schematically to help his young, inexperienced, basically rookie quarterback. And then in avoidance of changing an obviously broken strategy benched the quarterback he refused to help, starting a veteran journeyman, AND THEN he then did nothing schematically to help his old as dirt, former Super Bowl MVP quarterback, failing to significantly improve the passing offense while absolutely tanking the run game in the process.
Calling Shane Steichen’s decisions this season confusing would be an insult to confusing things like String Theory. Frankly, from the outside, Steichen’s decisions this season have been asinine.
Oh, and also, that defense that was terrible for the first quarter of the season, is playing great ball. Love him or hate him, Gus Bradley has his unit playing good football and Gus is doing things schematically I’ve never seen him do. Odd fronts and a high (for Gus) blitz rate? From Gus? Amazing. This is the defense we needed to get to support a young quarterback and it showed up just as we benched the kid.
Today, Indy plays a Bills team with a top five scoring offense, a top ten scoring defense and a top three quarterback. But here’s the problem with this Colts team- it’s still a quarterback away. They could win this game. Steichen could decide to implement some of those concepts we saw a season ago and the offense could start to move the ball and score some points. It’s incredibly frustrating because it’s all right there. They can do it. Will they? Probably not. But they might. And at the end of the season, when they’re stilling at 7-10 or 8-9, they would love to hang their hat on “yeah but we beat the Bills back in week 10” and truth be told winning this sort of game would show what I, and many others believe, this is a good team led by a head coach who looks to be in over his head in so many ways.
Don’t bet on the Colts this week.
Matter of fact, don’t bet on them for the rest of this season.
But you can hope, hope won’t cost you anything.
As always, go Colts.
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This is your week ten open thread so hang out here, chat, celebrate, commiserate, and argue in the comments! Go wild (within reason)!
Go Colts!