Alright, so people are going to overrate Manziel’s performance because it’s highlight friendly. He was basically just playing like he did in college. “Oh shit, someone made me move around. Now I can’t remember where the fuck my reads are supposed to be. Fuck it, I’m throwing a fuckin dragon”
It just so happened to work a few times so far. It also almost resulted in an interception at one point when he did the same thing thrown into double coverage.
On the plus side, he seems more composed and capable. He doesn’t look like a high school student that won some raffle that let him play on an NFL team for a day. He shows pretty good accuracy and decent enough zip on the shorter stuff. He can move.
On the other hand, the Browns can’t run well enough to give him a flukey day where he only has to throw 15 passes. He’s going to have to beat a better defense and not with his “fuck it” dragons before I’ll be impressed.
But hey, could be worse.
The Browns running offense is a mess. Alex Mack went from a top 3 center last year to looking pretty awful. Yeah, he broke his leg, but don’t those sorts of injuries pretty much clear up entirely? He’s just getting his ass kicked by every nose tackle he comes across. We should probably stick Ervin in there at this point.
The offensive coordinator is not doing him any favors. The Browns have the best athletic technician type line in the league. Before Mack went down, under Shanahan’s zone-stretch scheme, that line was dominant. It fit their talents well. The new guy says he’s keeping the ZBS, and some of his plays are zone, but he’s fitting way too many power gap type runs in there. They’re totally unsuited to the sort of linemen the Browns have, and combined with Mack’s regression, it’s resulting in a wall of men at the LOS as the linemen can’t drive block their men out of the way. Whenever we actually call something like a zone stretch, it works fine. But those are like 10% of the run plays at this point.
Really, the running game is all sorts of badly designed. There’s barely any misdirection, not many pulls or traps, very few reach blocks. You can’t even tell if there are designed plays for the quick guards to chip and move on to a linebacker because they all get caught in the big pile of men in the middle when even the double team is not getting enough movement off the line. It is exactly the wrong sort of scheme and an otherwise excellent offensive line is being totally wasted. I have no idea why we’re square-peg-round-holing here.
But what do I know? I have BOTH cable and DirecTV. One for decent channel selections at a decent price, with a tuner that doesn’t take 10 seconds to change channels, and has decent customer service, and the other for NFL Sunday Ticket.
I sure hope they lose the exclusivity someday. I’d be so happy if I could pay a la carte for games. The Packers are just so much the networks’ favorite that I get about half their games over the air anyway.
I have Brees in two of my leagues. I was already going to sit him for Carson Palmer in one. In the other, my backup is Eli Manning, who plays Thursday. No waiting for a Sunday game-time decision.
I’ve managed to be mildly bemused, but nothing more extreme, about pretty much the whole Chip Kelly era, but the one thing that gets me is why people didn’t see this coming before it was actually happening on the field. If you just looked at the roster on day one and thought to yourself “is this a good bunch of players,” without factoring in any kind of bizarre Chip Kelly calculus about how it must be part of a plan, I’m pretty sure you’d think they kind of suck. It’s not really clear why they even have Murray in the first place. It seems pretty obvious to me that he doesn’t think they need any particular talent level at any particular position in order to succeed; I think he believes it’s just going to be fine with whoever he decides to put out there.
I’m an Oregon homer, so I had a lot of faith in Chip at the outset. I totally supported ditching McCoy on the grounds that any competent RB can succeed in his scheme with the right talent at O-line and a mobile, accurate QB.
And then Murray got signed for basically the same contract as McCoy, and I thought, ok, he’s acquiring a trade chip so he can get Mariota? Maybe? Which sort of made sense with the QB acquisitions as well, some sort of package deal?
And then…he just kept all these players that make no sense on the team. I don’t know if there was a deal that fell apart or what, but the team is just a nightmare mess. And yes, it looked like hot garbage from the outset.
