Falcons: Amateur Opinion: our coordinators

[Beef]

This made me think even a little more and I went back and looked at all the games from last year. Other than the Arizona game and the Baltimore game, I don't remember any others where we actually won the game because of scheme and play calling. Carolina, St. Louis, and Seattle were just bad teams, our talent simply beat theirs no matter what the play calling was on either side of the ball. But the majority of games we won were purely because we had incredible talent making incredible plays.

And so far this year, it's the same thing. It would be nice to actually win a game because the other team simply had no clue what we were doing next while we appeared to know exactly what they were doing every step. And like I said, other than maybe Ari and Bal last year, I don't remember the last time I saw us win a game because we just out-schemed them rather than out-talent.

Right now, if I'm a DC, I'm finding it extremely easy to game-plan against the Falcons because all I'm doing is playing the percentages. When I see X formation, I know that Y or Z is going to happen so I'm stacking against those possibilities in that order.

For example:

I-formation set with Ovie in front of Turner = 100% run to either LG or RG.
4-WR, 1-RB set = 2% chance of run, 3% chance of screen/draw, 10% chance of time to go deep, 85% chance of check-down inside 10 yards.
2-TE, 2-RB in T form, 2-WR = 10% chance of < 10 yard seam pass to TE or sideline pass to WR, 10% chance of RB inside tackles, 80% chance of run off either TE end, or if TE goes in motion it's 100% run to motion side behind TE.
Matty in shotgun with 1-RB, 3-WR, 1-TE = 1% chance of draw, 1% chance of screen or dump to RB, 3% chance of quick slant to slot receiver, 10% chance of 3-step drop skinny post pass, 20% chance of Matt rolling into flat on wide side hoping for open WR 5-10 yards away, 20% chance of seam pass to TE, 55% chance of check-down inside 10 yards.

Either way, on all of those I'm bull-rushing no less than 6, covering the 2nd layer with 3-4 and 3rd layer with 1-2 no more than 15 yards deep and cheating up. Fully willing to give up the 10-20% chance you burn me for the 80-90% chance I stuff you.

And if I wanted to seperate out the down and yardage and maybe even quarter and if we're behind or ahead I could probably be even more precise. But I'm just trying to make a simplified point.

We just aren't unpredictable at all. We have very very little dynamic, complexity, and variance to our plays. When you see us in a given formation and you stack against the percentages, you're going to stop us more times than not. I watch NE, GB, and NO games and I see opposing defenses looking stupid a lot. Like half of the plays called, the defense is out of position and looked like they had no freaking clue what might be coming at them. But when I watch our games, I see that on maybe, MAYBE, 10-20% of the plays tops. The vast majority of the time, the opposing defense looks like they know exactly what we were about to run or they sorta know so they shade a couple different possibilities and end up being right. I almost never see defenses against us look like we just flat out-schemed them into complete foolishness.

I would love to see us win a game without Roddy, Gonzo, Julio, Turner, and/or Ryan having to make some incredible play (or combination of plays) to beat the other team. It would be really nice to see our defense stop the other team from beating us because they're in position to make plays and/or our offense is beating the other defense because they can't figure out at all WTF play we're going to run next and we just make them look stupid.

Imagine if we lined up in the I-formation with Ovie and Turner, but Matt took a 7-step drop, Ovie and Turner actually blocked, and we threw a latteral to Julio or Roddy who are now 1v1 on a CB. Or we faked a handoff to Turner who actually turned around once he broke through the DL and caught a dump pass while Matt is backpeddling away from a charging DL and LB corps.

Or imagine while in the shotgun with Quizz in the back and 3-WR set, we pull 2 OL's while Matt backpeddles and tosses a screen to Quizz in the flat on the stacked WR side and he gets to run his little ass behind 2 big OL's and a couple WR's. Or maybe we just finally run multiple short crossing routes from a formation we normally run from and cause some confusion out there for a change.

When that starts happening and it looks like our plays are winning us games rather than our players making incredible plays, THEN I won't put this on our OC and DC. Until then, IMO it's on them.