Green Bay neutralized Seattle’s brutal first half sack barrage by running the ball and swing passing their way down the field. It truly looked like two different games. That’s always the way to slow down the pass rush, run at it. Green Bay’s ability to do that is a bit alarming because they are not well designed for it. They rank well in the bottom half of league rushing. (Of course Seattle didn’t game plan for them doing that so that makes a difference.)
New England on the other hand responded to getting run over by the Giants pass rush in the Super Bowl by retooling this off-season to run more. At this point of the season the Pats rank #3 in rushing offense.
Take your focus off Brady for a moment and let that sink in.
Five games in the Patriots have more rushing yards, more yards per run, more rushes per game and more rushing TD’s than the Seahawks. The number three rushing attack in the league with Tom Brady taking the snaps.
That’s scary.
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Brian Burke asks a first-grade question that, in 30+ years of watching the NFL, I'd never even considered. Is a team better off playing to create "manageable third downs," or is it better off just using its 1st and 2nd downs to avoid as many third downs as possible?
This question reminds me of when Bill James asked, "Do Rickey Henderson's 130 stolen bases really matter?," and revolutionized the way in which "speed" was prioritized in the game of baseball.
A stolen base causes an amount of psychological pain, or pleasure, that is far out of proportion to its actual impact. This is a case in which our human intuition lets us down.
And why would our intuition tell us that something is important when it's not? Part of the answer is that we invest in the outcome. Two or three tosses over to first base do indeed drive the runner's success rate way down. Sometimes there are things you have to invest in, that don't give you much reward for your trouble. For me, that includes mowing the lawn and weeding. I take an hour or two doing it, and I don't care enough about it to get any satisfaction out of it ... but now that I've spent time on it, I don't want a doggy coming over and messing it up.
NFL coaches in the 1970's thought about little else, it seemed, other than The Big War to stay out of third-and-longs. 3rd and 8 is a down on which the defense puts on a Cheshire-Cat Grin, and all of a sudden the other team is the bully and you're the nerd. Coaches hate that. (Maybe this is a human factor that is not captured by Burke's fine analysis: set the other team up to "bully" you on 3rd and 8's and the psychological war will slip away from you.)
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=== Patriots, Seahawks ===
Supposing we grant Burke's premise, that teams should just treat each down as an isolated chance to move the chains. If this were generally true, it would be more true for some teams than others. It is generally true that baseball teams should use strikeout pitchers, not groundball pitchers. But that principle can be warped if you're in a huge stadium.
The Seahawks might be a team that does need to stick to the old "Manageable Third Down" paradigm, because (1) they've got Lynch to convert them, (2) they can't throw for 12 yards on first down very well, and (3) they don't want Russell Wilson facing a series of 3rd-and-longs.
The Patriots, if any team ever could, would be a team that could ignore the "Manageable Third Down" paradigm. For Brady, Gronk, Welker & Co. to treat its downs as three separate chances to torch a defense ... well, sure.
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=== Audibles and Check-Downs ===
The Patriots have been my family's #2 team for a long time. We love watching Tom Brady stand there and point at defenders, calling out the blocking schemes, checking down to backup plays.
Sunday, he won't be able to set detailed blocking schemes at the line of scrimmage, ever. (Can you check down to a backup play with hand signals? Do the guards and tackles, who can't see the hand signals, just block the same way on a backup play?)
Does that mean that the Patriots' entire system is exceptionally vulnerable to CLink? Or does it mean that Brady's checkdowns have never been anything other than grandstanding?
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