misdirection offenses

we should fear them more often

 

Dear Coach Fox,
When a team has Andre Johnson and Kevin Walter, please double Andre Johnson.

Love,
Mags

 

We don't double, but I guess we could have played more man. Obviously what we tried wasn't working, but generally you don't like to radically alter your philosophy to account for an opposing player. In this case, though, it's hard to imagine how that would have been worse.

 

Kind of reminds me of when Lovie Smith wouldn't change his plan while Smitty was burning it down.

 

We can double. Fox loves to mix looks up, and a 3 deep shell plus Lucas in man gives a similar look to what we normally run. We did better containing Johnson in the 2nd, but that was also a function of being up on us.

 

I think we could have given more attention to him. You don't want to see their only real offensive weapon running uncovered down the middle of the field. The safety play didn't help matters.

 

No. For one, you couldn't have Lucas be the one in man or you'd vacate one side any time Johnson's route wasn't to that side of the field. But even if you shadowed him with Marshall or Gamble (since he sometimes shifts to nickel), that would mean either one less rusher or a hole in the middle zone. I'm not saying that it wouldn't have been better, because we did get burned in base, but it would not have been similar to what we normally run.

Ultimately the problem is just that our LBs and safeties suck balls in coverage. Houston exploited that smartly, while St. Louis did not. This is what I warned about last week and why I said that the win was more on the Rams' poor game-planning than our efforts.

 

we could've done a better job with underneath stuff at times, but I'd still rather deal with that than let Johnson just run around. At least change up the look, though I guess you could argue that Cooper couldn't do anything about Johnson if strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn.

I dunno. Two years ago I would've simply expected Lucas to shut him down.

 

Any time the two were matched up, I think he did a good job. Even Gamble did fine aside from the one time he got picked, but the Texans did a good job of isolating Johnson on the safeties. We have a major weakness there and it got exposed.

 

I guess we'll never get an adequate explanation out of Fox as to why he's overlooked the safety position all off season. If it ends up ruining our shot this year I'm guessing someone will hear one.

The only consolation I got from that game yesterday was Smitty's play the knowledge that Falcon fans had to be sick to their stomachs.