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I really enjoyed this article from Mark Decourcy from
The Sporting News about the whole option QB issues and Lamar Jackson. This isn’t an Xs and Os trigonometry lesson but more of just conventional wisdom that does a good job explaining why the Ravens offense (and other option-based systems) are typically shut down in the NFL and more often in the postseason. This is not a “Lamar hate” article but raises some concerns about the two postseason meltdowns and suggests these are not just coincidental flukes.
What’s very interesting here is that what Vrabel did was very much what the average fans thought teams should do, which was to sell out against the run and take away the middle of the field. It really isn’t that complicated. The real question is why teams don’t just do it, which is why this article is great in its simplicity. Teams play 16 games; while they’re willing to make tweaks to their overall schemes during the regular season, they aren’t going to fundamentally change their defense to a massive extent for one opponent. In the postseason it is different. Teams will essentially change their DNA for survival. The option itself is not incredibly difficult to stop; forcing Jackson to pass like a regular QB is not incredibly difficult to do. It just takes the commitment to do so, and so Ravens opponents are going to be generally preparing for 15 other non-option offenses rather than that one outlier. In that sense, the option is somewhat of...as we often say...a gimmick. Gimmicks are typically appear a lot more sizzling than they actually are.
HOPE YOU’LL CLICK ON THE LINK AND GIVE THE ARTICLE SOME CLICKS, AS IT NEEDS THOSE TO BE JUSTIFIED FOR PUBLICATION. FULL ARTICLE IS NOT THAT LONG AND A GOOD READ.
Ravens' loss proves they need a new offensive approach with Lamar Jackson
There is no question Jackson is an outstanding NFL quarterback. There still has never been, however, a Super Bowl champion that has built its attack on the option game. That is the vehicle that carried the Ravens as far as they went this year. There was beginning to be some belief the reason no one had won it all with the option is it had not been deployed by a team blessed with an operator owning Jackson’s surpassing talent.
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Decourcy dismisses the injury risk theory, which was brought up on this forum. Instead he points to 3 main points. #1 is the real gold here IMO.
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1. Opponent game-planning: The Titans understood their only concern at this point was to stop the Ravens attack. NFL teams can say they play one game at a time, and it’s true to an extent, but rare is the team that will completely abandon its principles to deal with a single opponent in the regular season.
Perhaps an opponent within a division will consider it, because that game is going to be played twice in a year, but someone from the NFC West will recognize there are 15 other games on the schedule that are more or at least as important.
The playoffs are different. The Titans were ready for everything Jackson can bring to a game. They worked hard to force his throws to the sideline, where he tended to be less accurate and the passes were more easily defended, and they also forced him whenever possible to run wide rather than upfield. They used a spy on the quarterback when necessary, which mostly kept Jackson from dashing into the secondary.
Tennessee coach Mike Vrabel said the key was restricting Jackson’s activity “between the numbers” and forcing him to go searching for room on the outside. “The players understood the scheme, some of the keys to dealing with him,” Vrabel said. The biggest: making him move laterally and eventually search for refuge out of bounds.
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Point 2 hits on the intensity of playoff football and why going for it on fourth and short is not the same against frenzied defenders as it is in a regular season game. He runs through the whole list of 4th down running plays getting stuffed. Ravens were 8/8 on 4th and 1 in the regular season and I think 0/2 in the postseason.
2. Desperation matters: There was a least one different ingredient. A team’s defense is fundamentally altered by the degree of intensity invested in it. The Titans recognized Baltimore was going to have some success moving the football and concentrated on ways to excel in short-yardage situations.
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3. Coming back: Because the Ravens are first a running team, there always was doubt about how they would handle facing a significant deficit. One reason that doubt lingered is they so rarely were behind by more than one score.
They scored first-drive touchdowns in 11 of 16 games. They hadn’t overcome more than a single-score deficit at any point.
So far behind for so long against the Titans, Jackson wound up throwing 59 passes, completing 31 for a .525 percentage. Throwing so much led to two interceptions and one sack that caused him to fumble. That represented half his turnover total for the season.
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There are six teams still playing, and though all the remaining quarterbacks function differently, they all are operating with the same fundamental approach. For lack of a better term, this has, for decades, been called a “pro-set” offense. It makes sense, when you think about it.
All in all, a lot of this is stuff that fans have casually observed. The fallacy is in thinking that coaches are sitting in message boards all day focusing on Lamar Jackson when they are preparing the team for every attack, few of which include option style plays. And that during the couple of days of film breakdown/game planning, they are not typically going to blow up a defense’s identity for one game. Of course, as time goes on it may become more obvious on how to stop LJ while still maintaining your core principles on defense. That’s what typically happens to these guys.
