Week 14 Preview: Brady and the Deep Ball Conundrum

Also, the Steelers running nowhere, Josh Allen under pressure, pray for Jalen Hurts, Washington’s way, and more. Plus, musical guest: Pavement!

1a. The Bucs are coming off their bye week, which was the last, best opportunity to make some minor alterations to their offense.

The issue all season has been Tom Brady’s lack of efficiency when throwing downfield—at one point an 0-for-19 streak on passes traveling 20-plus yards. But overall in 2020, Brady’s downfield accuracy hasn’t been disastrous. He’s hitting 28.1% on throws beyond 20 yards, which is not far off his career average of 30.3%. But he’s being asked to throw downfield more often than he ever has. So far in 2020, he’s averaging 5.33 attempts of 20-plus yards per game. His average over his New England career was 3.67. In 2018, which for brevity’s sake we’ll call his last good season, he averaged 2.88.

If we could get away from those precious spreadsheets for a second, the bigger issue might be that Brady has a history of getting skittish when he gets hit a lot. Asking him to hang in and make those deep throws, at a time when he does not have the ability to create his own time and space (and there was a time when he could maneuver within the pocket as well as anyone even if he didn’t look like vintage Michael Vick), runs the risk of longterm effects that could show up in January. It’s too late for the Bucs to scrap their offense and build a new one from scratch, but there was an opportunity to make it a little more Brady-friendly.

1b. I’m not going to harp on this, but let me just bring in up for the 12,000th time: This offseason the Bucs were unwilling to remake their offense to better fit their newly signed 43-year-old starting quarterback’s strengths and weaknesses. But they were willing to debase themselves by signing a player who partook in a public feud with the head coach, seventh months after the head coach said, “it’s not gonna happen” in regards to signing that player. Apparently, the lines get drawn in strange places with that organization.

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2. My favorite matchup of 2020 is Bills-Steelers, two teams a half-step behind the Chiefs in the AFC and the two teams best-equipped to trip up the Chiefs in January. Here are four things to watch on Sunday night:

a. Josh Allen has had some issues in the elements this year—Lord knows we all have—including the shaky home performances against the Chiefs and Patriots. But it looks like it will be chilly but otherwise unremarkable weather-wise in Orchard Park; the precipitation is expected to have stopped by kickoff and it doesn’t look like it will be particularly windy.

The bigger challenge for Allen will be dealing with a Steelers defense that generates more pressure than any he’s faced this season. Pressure was a major issue for Allen in his first two seasons—according to Player Profiler, he completed 17.1% of throws when pressured last year, and 22.2% as a rookie in 2018. This year he’s up to 46.4%.

b. If your team had to have one weakness, you’d probably want it to be rushing offense. But the ability to run the ball loosely correlates to red-zone efficiency (when the field tightens there’s less room to work with for your passing offense), and the lack of a run game might have something to do with the Steelers’ red-zone struggles the past two weeks. They had just 23 points over seven red-zone trips in a narrow victory over the RG3/McSorley-led Ravens and a loss to the Football Team (that’s 3.29 points per trip, compared to the league average of 5.02, which is right where they are for the season). They’re also averaging just 2.9 yards per carry with one rushing TD over the last five games. Red-zone efficiency is a fickle stat, but being able to, for instance, run the ball into the end zone from the opponent’s 1-yard line is a thing you’d like to be able to do.

c. If, back in August, you had looked me in the eye and told me that on Dec. 13 I’d be categorizing Robert Spillane’s knee injury as “potentially devastating” for the Steelers, I’d be mostly confused because how did you get into my house? But after the Devin Bush season-ending injury, Spillane had emerged as the best (and, one could argue, only) coverage linebacker in Pittsburgh before injuring his knee on Monday. Avery Williamson and Vince Williams are going to have bright neon arrows pointing at them in passing situations. The Bills don’t use their backs a ton in the passing game, but you wonder if this will be a night for Devin Singletary.

d. The Scoreboard. If you’re an avid golf fan, don’t get confused: The team with more points at the end of the game will be declared the victors, receive a “win” in the standings, and be awarded the 40% off Quiznos coupons that are given to each member of the winning team in every game each week. However, that coupon is good on Tuesdays only.

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3. I’ve said my piece on Jalen Hurts and the Eagles’ risk of doing irreparable damage to a second young quarterback by thrusting him into what’s basically a Benny Hill skit masquerading as an NFL offense. Doing so before facing a red-hot Saints defense on the road seems like the worst possible timing.

I also understand why they’re making the switch. Carson Wentz is culpable for their issues, but it’s impossible to determine just how culpable. Going to Hurts tells the locker room they are going to try something different. Better? Who knows. But “different” is enough for now.

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4. The Football Team continues to be the most fascinating, uh, football team of 2020. In an era when teams are racking up huge numbers through the air, Washington’s passing offense has been an oxymoron.

Next Gen Stats tracks a stat, “Air Yards to Sticks,” a measure of how deep a quarterback’s throws are in relation to the first-down marker (a higher number means you’re being aggressive, lower means you’re being conservative). Since they started tracking it in 2016, no one has been lower than -3.3 (Mike Glennon in 2017, Teddy Bridgewater in 2019). On 201 attempts this year, Alex Smith is at -4.1. Over Smith’s four starts, part-time back J.D. McKissic has as many targets as stud receiver Terry McLaurin (31).

It’s a do-no-harm approach that basically banks on things like incompetence (the Cowboys’ inability to tackle on defense or catch on offense) or catastrophic injuries (they were down 9-7 in the third quarter at home to the Bengals, who had missed two field goals and a PAT, before Joe Burrow had his knee caved in). Or, in the case of the upset in Pittsburgh, it effectively shortens the game into a handful of situational plays, like when Washington drew a penalty on their fourth-and-goal from the 1 (then punched it in on the next play), while the Steelers went 0-for-2 on fourth-and-short, including a failure at the goal line.

It’s an awfully narrow path to victory the Football Team has each week. But with four games to go, and just a half-game out of the playoffs (they’re tied with the Giants but have already been swept), the season might come down to four or five situational football plays over the final month.

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5a. Metaphorically, as a journalist (even a sports journalist which, I know, barely counts as a journalist) you shine your light toward a previously dark place and sometimes what you see isn’t pretty to look at, or doesn’t match up with what other say they have seen, or both.

5b. If you have 20 minutes this morning, I’m very proud of this piece and I know Jenny and Greg are too.

(5c. That link above is the kind of thing I do during the week when I’m not brainstorming poop jokes for my weekend columns. But, to be clear, the majority of my week is spent brainstorming poop jokes for my weekend columns.)

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6. Ladies and gentlemen . . . Pavement!

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