In times like these, I remind myself that the NFL is the ultimate “week-to-week league”. It does not matter if you are 0-5 or 5-0, you can get beat every single Sunday if you aren’t at your best.
If you’re an NFL fan or tune in to a press conference, you’ve heard every cliche in the book. “It’s hard to win in this league”, “It’s about going 1-0 every single week”.. you know the ones I’m talking about.
The reality is that they are all 100% true.
In college football resumes are king and style points matter.
But in the NFL, the only thing that matters is the W.
Make no mistake, the Cardinals may be 2-4 right now and had came off a brutal loss to the Titans, but they are not a bad football team—especially on defense.
I just love the way the Colts have used motion this year. There are a lot of reasons and intent behind why you might use motion. It can help you gain coverage clues, it can force the defense to communicate, force favorable matchups, and it can gain you free releases.
That’s what happens here. The Colts are running an option route from Josh Downs. Look at how the motion gets Josh a good matchup on a LB, instead of press coverage.
An option route is really hard to run vs. press coverage because it eliminates the space that the WR can attack in order to gain separation. The motion here makes it so Josh can force the LB into bad leverage and move the chains.
If you study Shane Steichen’s offense as thoroughly as I’ve tried to in his time in Indianapolis, you’d notice that he hasn’t liked to “scat” the back, or release the back into the route pattern.
This was because he likes to keep the back in to protect or use on RPO’s as a mechanism to attack space and numbers.
But Daniel Jones likes to have a check down in the progression that he can get to and Jonathan Taylor has vastly improved his ability to be a force on passing down, so that has inevitably changed this year.
Ok, now for this play. This may get a bit complicated, but stay with me because I promise it will make sense at the end.
There’s really two main types of zone defense. The first is vision zone, this is traditional zone defenses where the defense has their eyes on the QB while dropping to spots on a field. The second is zone match is where a defense is matching routes as they distribute into the pattern and into their zone.
The Cardinals are playing a a zone match quarters defense. This defense is all about matching routes vertical down the field. When a RB “releases” fast into the flat, it forces the defense to have an answer, because it’s way too easy in a match defense to outflank a LB without proper leverage. To counter this, defenses “push” it and the apex defender widens to take that route.
Because that apex defender can’t carry anything vertical, The LB on the weak side is now responsible for carrying the new #3 WR (Tyler Warren) when he goes vertical.
Here’s the only problem: Tyler Warren is pretending to block!
This forces that LB to turn into a zone defender because he doesn’t think Warren will be become apart of the pattern, and it allows him to sneak vertical with nobody around him. Very clever.
So if that made no sense, here’s the layman’s terms: Because Jonathan Taylor released into the flat it forced a defender in better position to follow him. The new guy responsible for Tyler Warren’s route, who is already out of position, didn’t think he needed to cover him because it looked like he was blocking.
A very similar idea here on the TD play.
This is just a ridiculous throw and want to include it. This a concept called ICE (In cut + Crosser). Watch Daniel take a big hit and throw that ball in a tight window to Pierce. This is big time stuff. More importantly, you can watch his eyes and feet stay in sync and keep the deep safety away from the in cut. It’s just beautiful.
This is teach tape. You need your skill players to block in the run game if you want to be more than just a good unit. Watch Tyler Warren put his guy on skates. Watch Michael Pittman Jr. take care of his man. And when you’re done with that, watch Big Q lead on this sweep play watch the safety quite literally back up on the play because he wants no part of 56.
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Defensively, when you rotate corners as much as the Colts have, it’s not always going to look perfect. Brissett definitely made some good throws in this game, but teams are finding ways to attack the Colts in key situations.
I do think some of this is correctable over time as some of the newcomers get more reps together. In my opinion, there’s always something to be said about continuity and getting more reps together throughout a season.
There were some leaky plays out in the flat, some poor technique in man to man coverage, and a pass rush that just is missing a bit of juice this year.
This to me is correctable. The Colts lost leverage on a lot of plays underneath and into the flat and just didn’t make the plays needed to wrap up and force the Cardinals to march down the field. They have been a much better tackling team under Lou and I expect that to regress back to the mean.
Overall, the only thing that matters is the win. The Colts have 5 of them through 6 games. Many thought that’s all they would have the entire season. Oh boy, were they wrong.
The Colts are firing on all cylinders offensively. There’s not a defense thus far that’s truly given them a bad day. They look like a complete juggernaut that can hang with the best in the league this year. They make you cover every blade of grass and pull out your hair trying to figure out who’s going to get the ball.
Defensively they are a work in progress. They’ve unfortunately had to rotate a lot of guys in and out of the lineup, and that’s hurt them. They still are getting good production out of their key guys, and Lou’s impact is certainly felt on that side of the ball, but they need to work through some of the issues that are holding them back.
