Matt LaFleur

[TwoToneBlue]

20 minutes ago, deeluxx3 said:

We're dead last in the league in passing attempts per game. That's appalling.

 

We just won't transition to the 21st century.

No matter how many coaching changes

[KingTitan]

13 minutes ago, TwoToneBlue said:

No matter how many coaching changes

I was thinking about the thought that we are wasting Marcus or that he isn't a franchise QB. I always come back with he might not be a franchise QB but his the QB for this franchise....

Being last in pass attempts and constantly wanting to run the ball like Eddie is in the backfield got me to thinking.....maybe we aren't the franchise for this QB. 

If all we are going to ask from our QBs (McNair, Young, Locker, Mariota) is to be second fiddle to the run game then lets just draft an 3rd round QB with good leadership skills and stop taking these guys with profilic college passing careers (McNair and Mariota mainly) and draft a guy with no expectation of being the rock of the offense. 

Steelers some how mad the transition from Bettis type RBs of the world and invested in WRs and how to scout them. They just reload and find a new one.
Sanders, Wallace, JuJu, Antonio, Marques Bryant, Heath Miller, McDonald.....

 

Sigh

Vent over

[TitanLegend]

59 minutes ago, KingTitan said:

I was thinking about the thought that we are wasting Marcus or that he isn't a franchise QB. I always come back with he might not be a franchise QB but his the QB for this franchise....

Being last in pass attempts and constantly wanting to run the ball like Eddie is in the backfield got me to thinking.....maybe we aren't the franchise for this QB. 

If all we are going to ask from our QBs (McNair, Young, Locker, Mariota) is to be second fiddle to the run game then lets just draft an 3rd round QB with good leadership skills and stop taking these guys with profilic college passing careers (McNair and Mariota mainly) and draft a guy with no expectation of being the rock of the offense. 

Steelers some how mad the transition from Bettis type RBs of the world and invested in WRs and how to scout them. They just reload and find a new one.
Sanders, Wallace, JuJu, Antonio, Marques Bryant, Heath Miller, McDonald.....

 

Sigh

Vent over

Heimerdinger is the only OC we've ever had that was truly consistently good as a play caller. I haven't looked back at our offensive numbers under him, but I always remember feeling his game planning ability was top notch, and he seemed to be the only OC Fisher ever completely trusted to run their own offense. His work with both McNair and Young was extraordinary, everyone knows about McNair's development in the 00 to 03 stretch, but VY was starting to look better and more consistent as a passer under Heimerdinger, it's a shame mentally he could never mature. Could also credit some of Billy Volek's development from a UDFA in to one of the best backup QBs in the league to him as well, I'd imagine. Had Cutler playing at a decently high level as a rookie/2nd year QB too. Unfortunately in 05, his lone year with the Jets, Pennington got hurt and he had to work with 89 year old Vinny Testaverde and Brooks Bollinger at QB.

In 01-03 when George was largely done, our offense shifted to being more pass oriented and still performed at a high level. In 08 when we had Collins at QB, his use of the run game/play action was superb and allowed us to produce an effective passing offense when needed despite Collins' overall limitations at that stage of his career.

I would love to see the kind of things Heimerdinger could have accomplished in today's game with the passing rules the way they are now. Truly an underrated coach as it relates to both QB development and play calling as an OC. May he rest in peace.

[dtait93]

1 hour ago, deeluxx3 said:

We're dead last in the league in passing attempts per game. That's appalling.

 

We just won't transition to the 21st century.

Yep. It’s no wonder we’re basically the worst scoring offense in the NFL. Just a complete refusal to air it out when the ground game is rubbish. Inexcusable with a QB averaging a historical completion percentage and career high YPA.

I also wonder if LaFleur tries too hard to set up 3rd and manageables. It’s hard to consistently put together scoring drives when you have to convert a plethora of 3rd downs. I mean he is allowed to try and get a 1st down on 1st and 2nd down. I noticed Kuharskey point that out. But who knows, maybe he really is overly concerned about a sack on 1st down putting us in a larger hole than the 0-3 yard rushes basically always do. But that’s retarded if true imo.

[TitanSS]

48 minutes ago, dtait93 said:

Yep. It’s no wonder we’re basically the worst scoring offense in the NFL. Just a complete refusal to air it out when the ground game is rubbish. Inexcusable with a QB averaging a historical completion percentage and career high YPA.

I also wonder if LaFleur tries too hard to set up 3rd and manageables. It’s hard to consistently put together scoring drives when you have to convert a plethora of 3rd downs. I mean he is allowed to try and get a 1st down on 1st and 2nd down. I noticed Kuharskey point that out. But who knows, maybe he really is overly concerned about a sack on 1st down putting us in a larger hole than the 0-3 yard rushes basically always do. But that’s retarded if true imo.

Ive been saying this since week 3. We have to convert 7 first downs to score on every possession. Our 3rd down offense isn't bad, but it's the fact that we have to convert on third down so many times.

Despite how bad we are at scoring, we're not bad at moving the ball to midfield and the last I checked we were onw of the top 3 teams in time of possession.

We took an up tempo, spread, high pass percentage QB and have given him 3 straight years of condensed, 2 TE, high run percentage offenses. We purposely try to slow down the game instead of playing with any tempo on offense.

You all should try this great new book I found, How Not to Run a Franchise by the Tennessee Titans.

[Dr.Doom52]

I really don't think anyone is advocting to abandon the run, I feel like people simply want to be unpredictable...and if something is not working...do something diffrent to see if that works. 

Would it surprise anyone if the Patriots came out and passed the ball 17 strait times to open a game, or if they ran the ball 9 strait times? No because they are not beholden to some need to be balanced or by some fear that it may not work. Thet simply want to score a touchdown by any means necessary on every possession. 

We quite smply do not have that same urgency. Look at how we play most of the game vs how we play when the game is on the line. Seems like we are playing not to lose the entire game then we get the ball trailing and we play wide open and put the game in Marcus' hands...I just say put it in his hands from the begining .

[TitanSS]

If he were running the ball like the Texans, I'd be all for the rate at which we run.

We're not.

[KingTitan]

1 hour ago, TitanSS said:

If he were running the ball like the Texans, I'd be all for the rate at which we run.

We're not.

Adrian Foster, Matt Schaub and Andre Johnson....Were deadly. 

[ragevsuall17]

For all this talk about Mariotas "historic" season, I feel some of it is currently fool's gold. I feel like if the throw he wants isn't there, he pulls the ball down too quickly and tries to run and/or takes the sack. Yeah, some sacks are on the oline, but a lot have been on him as well. 

His 12.8 sack rate is more than 3 points higher than his previous career high and almost double what its been the past 2 seasons. He's also 7 rush attempts from a career high... 53 attempts in 10 games, with career high of 60 in 15. Yet his yards per carry are 2nd worst of his career, only .1 higher than his worst and a half yard worse than his career average. 

Like I said, not all his fault, the pass blocking is part of that... And a high completion % is good obviously. But it's not as great a it appears on the surface. 

[dtait93]

3 hours ago, ragevsuall17 said:

For all this talk about Mariotas "historic" season, I feel some of it is currently fool's gold. I feel like if the throw he wants isn't there, he pulls the ball down too quickly and tries to run and/or takes the sack. Yeah, some sacks are on the oline, but a lot have been on him as well. 

His 12.8 sack rate is more than 3 points higher than his previous career high and almost double what its been the past 2 seasons. He's also 7 rush attempts from a career high... 53 attempts in 10 games, with career high of 60 in 15. Yet his yards per carry are 2nd worst of his career, only .1 higher than his worst and a half yard worse than his career average. 

Like I said, not all his fault, the pass blocking is part of that... And a high completion % is good obviously. But it's not as great a it appears on the surface. 

I don’t necessarily agree with that completely. We’ve seen him throw into double and even triple coverage plenty. Not to say that he doesn’t ever pull the ball down too quickly if a throw he wants isn’t there because we’ve clearly seen him look like he’s about to pull the trigger only for him not to. I’d say the eye test both agrees and disagrees with you but I personally don’t believe it’s enough to call his completion percentage to this point fools gold. I mean we saw him throw an interception on an intended pass to Davis right before the half against Philly in which people grilled him for not being conservative enough lol.

Either way, we have to find a way to throw the ball more than 24 times a game. Basically every single other starting QB is averaging 30-40 passes a game. I understand an extremely high sack rate causes you not to throw it as much because you don’t want to kill your QB, or if we had a good running game putting the ball in Henry and Lewis’ hands as much as we are, but we don’t so the bottom line is really finding a way to keep Marcus clean. Some of it’s on Marcus and he has to get better like you said, but something has to also be done to help him more. Additional blockers, throwing in some wrinkles to delay the rush, better scheming aka not putting Jonnu on an island against a HoFer, more rollouts (can’t vividly remember one outside of the sack against Baltimore), etc.

[imDelusional]

My incredibly scientific and unbiased eye test says the playcalling is more to blame than anything else on this offense. The offensive line is a close second, but in their defense (and Marcus') we're setting up 3rd and 6+ on almost every drive and letting a defense pin their ears back and go. The run game is just ridiculously predictable and these guys aren't purely talented enough to compensate for a defense knowing exactly what you're going to do so often. I feel like very few offensive lineman in the league really are with the talent we see on the defensive side nowadays. 

Mariota isn't lighting the world on fire by any means, but the dude has no chance on so many of those sacks. Maybe a few here and there he could have thrown away, but he's not missing wide open guys every other sack or anything like that.

[ragevsuall17]

24 attempts didn't mean we only called 24 pass plays. 

There's 24 attempts... Plus 6 sacks... That's 30... Say 5 of Mariota's 6 runs were not designed runs... So that's another 5 "passing plays"... Or a total of 35 calls intended to be passes. 

Vs 18 run calls... 8 attempts by Henry, 7 by Dion, 1 each for Davis and Mariota. 

That means that in this game alone, 66% of the calls were called passing plays. 

35 pass plays to 18 run plays. Take away that last drive, and we were still at a 29:18 ratio. I was frustrated with how conservative we got after that 4th down run... Especially running on 1st down consistently. But it's not like we went away from the pass exclusively. 

Mariota went back to not having trust, this time his oline. You started seeing the short passes and him giving up on the play too soon resulting in a sack or unsuccessful keeper. 

[imDelusional]

That is a really fair point, rage, and it's one that all of us trying to use LaFleur as the scapegoat are clearly turning a blind eye to in order to make the stats look more extreme.

But then at the same time, you can count the 35 sacks (or whatever it is now) and the 50 rush attempts from Marcus all as pass plays with zero adjustment made to any other team and we're still easily in the bottom half of the league on pass attempts. And as previously stated by so many of you guys, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing except our run game has been awful all season. These coaches either don't trust the QB or they really are stuck in an era of football that doesn't exist anymore. It's just incredibly frustrating to watch.

[ragevsuall17]

I think all 5 aspects are equally to blame for our lack of offensive success when things aren't clicking:

- Lafleur (the play calling) 

- Mariota (the lack of trust/skittishness) 

- the run game 

- the pass blocking 

- lack of talent in our receiving options (outside CD84) 

 

I expected it to take some time for everything to gel... Specially with an the injuries prior to the start of the season and early on. But here we are still going through serious growing pains and inconsistencies. 

We know how good we can look when everything's kicking. We saw how good that Cowboys defense can be, and how we dominated them and the Pat's in back to back weeks. 

So I think just getting most of these pieces in year 2 will mean more consistency and better results. But we're gonna need a little more. 

Getting Walker back is going to be huge... And Jonnu is finally showing promise. Firkser could be a good 3rd TE... But do we have any blocking (outside Delanie) or any STs contributions in that group?

I want to see more of Batson... Jennings is also not a bad 5/6/STs guy. But I need to see improvements with our 2 and 3 guys. If like to see us go for a proven/vet guy for the 2 spot. Tate, Cobb, Gordon, Hogan would be good options. And maybe another mid round toype guy to compete with Sharpe, Taylor, Batson, and Jennings for this 3-6 slots after Davis and the FA addition. 

But the main focus has to be on the oline. How much change though? Do we resign Spain? Do we cut Kline? Do we need to move Conklin inside? Do we replace Jones? So many questions on what one considered one of our strengths. So much change is never considered a good thing for a unit where continuity and communication is su important... But we need some major improvement there. 

We need to keep Mariota and LaFleur together if we hope to make that big jump though. They are really each other's best bet to succeed. They've shown what they can do when they're clicking. Now it's time to both do it more consistently and be more aggressive at the same time. 

[ragevsuall17]

20 minutes ago, imDelusional said:

That is a really fair point, rage, and it's one that all of us trying to use LaFleur as the scapegoat are clearly turning a blind eye to in order to make the stats look more extreme.

But then at the same time, you can count the 35 sacks (or whatever it is now) and the 50 rush attempts from Marcus all as pass plays with zero adjustment made to any other team and we're still easily in the bottom half of the league on pass attempts. And as previously stated by so many of you guys, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing except our run game has been awful all season. These coaches either don't trust the QB or they really are stuck in an era of football that doesn't exist anymore. It's just incredibly frustrating to watch.

Is be interesting to see where our ratio lands with those adjustments...

I think we're in the bottom 3 of plays run this season... So of course our bulk number of pass plays is going to look low from the start. But maybe the ratio is right there in the middle of the pack.