Adapting to Survive

Well, we’ve almost made it. One meaningful game remaining, two teams left to fight for the title of the best in the league, a matchup that for the next two weeks will be driven into the ground as the old guard versus the new. The veteran Peyton Manning playing in what is likely the final game of his career, against the emerging superstar Cam Newton who is looking to cap off his breakout season.

Only two teams remain, and by this point I don’t have to point out that there is more to each of these teams than just the quarterback position. No one makes it to the Super Bowl on the performance of one individual, and this year is an excellent example of that, with arguably the two most complete teams in the league facing off against each other. On Carolina’s side we have the league’s most productive offense supported by a playmaking defense, and on Denver’s we have an efficient offense keeping things going for the best defense in the league. Both teams have superstars on each side of the ball, and neither has a single glaring weakness.

I’ll get into the actual matchup of these teams next week, but for now I want to focus on how they got here. A week ago I wrote about how games at this stage of the year are often decided by the smallest of factors, events or aspects of the game that give the winning team the slight edge it needs. We saw this again this weekend (even in the blowout Panthers victory). Both of these teams have benefited from luck, health, and coaching down the stretch, but in each case their greatest asset has been their adaptability. The strength and depth of the Broncos and the Panthers have allowed them to reshape how they play from game to game, giving them the needed edge to make it as far as they have.

This is a topic I’ve covered before, but it’s something we have to come back to time and time again. We get so caught up in discussing systems and schemes that we often forget the value of flexibility. Truly great teams can impose themselves on lesser opponents, but by this point in the year, there aren’t really any lesser opponents to face. At this point, the most valuable thing a team can have is flexibility, the ability to adjust what they do to attack the other team’s weaknesses.

The Undoing of Arians

We’ve seen plenty of examples over the years, but we may never again see a team as doomed by its lack of flexibility as the Arizona Cardinals. Bruce Arians has received almost nothing but praise since getting his first opportunity as a head coach with the Colts in 2012, and it is almost universally agreed that he is a top five head coach in the league. And while I absolutely agree with this assessment, I also acknowledge that Arians isn't flawless. His problems go back to his days as an offensive coordinator, where in Pittsburgh and then again in Indianapolis he put together potent offenses that were never consistent enough to take the next step, largely due to struggles to protect the quarterback and run the ball.

Arians was dealing with terrible offensive lines in both those situations, but he has to absorb part of the blame for not doing anything to compensate for their flaws. His scheme relies on constant deep passes, which leaves his offense nonfunctional when an opposing defense generates pressure.

He didn’t adjust then, and he didn’t adjust on Sunday. Arizona’s offensive line has been steady all year, but against Carolina’s front seven they were absolutely dominated. The first couple turnovers by Carson Palmer were the result of a collapsing pocket, and he wasn’t helped by having to hold onto the ball. The deep passing game can beat Carolina’s defense, but it wasn’t working for Arizona, no matter how many times the Cardinals tried to force the ball down the field.

The other side of the ball was a very similar story. Arizona’s defense has been one of the most aggressive in the league for the past two years, as evidenced by the blitz after blitz they sent to unsettle Aaron Rodgers in the Divisional Round. At this point we know what we’re going to see from Arizona’s defense. They are going to send constant waves of pressure, and they expect that their blitzers can get to the quarterback before he can find the holes behind them.

This has worked for the past two seasons, but it failed on Sunday. Carolina’s offensive line is better at run blocking than protecting the passer, but they played the best game of the season in the Championship Game. Cam Newton had a clean pocket to throw from the entire game, and with only a few defenders left on the back end, even his mediocre receiving corps was able to find separation. And when he did get the ball out, there weren’t enough tacklers on the back end to corral Carolina’s receivers, leading to big play after big play.

Even with all of this, the game was a lot closer than the final score indicates. Arizona was still very much in it late in the first half, as they stopped Carolina a couple times and managed to get their offense going by feeding the ball to David Johnson. But after the turnovers in the final two minutes, they entered the second half in full panic mode. Suddenly they had no choice but to abandon the run and attack downfield, playing right into what had been failing for them all game. Things spiraled from there, Carolina continued to break off big plays, and we ended up with the 34 point margin, far from indicative of the team that Arizona was this year.

Out of Options

The result of the Panthers-Cardinals game is easy enough to explain by looking at the coaches involved. The same can’t be said about the other game. On one side you have Gary Kubiak, a slightly above average coach whose career has been defined primarily by his consistent mediocrity. And on the other you have Bill Belichick, the best coach in the league and arguably the greatest of all time, a coach who has proven over and over again that he can find ways to win with whatever roster is put on the field for him.

The edge in coaching is the primary reason I picked the Patriots to win this game. Because outside of that and the quarterback position, Denver has the edge at every spot on the roster. It may have been a more competitive matchup early in the season before the Patriots were decimated at running back and across the offensive line, but coming into this game it was clear that the Broncos had the edge in depth.

This proved to be the difference in the game, but it didn’t have to be. New England’s defense did more than enough to keep them in the game, holding the Broncos to only twenty points (with some help from a highly conservative strategy by Kubiak in the fourth quarter), and in the end it was the offensive side of the ball, the strength of the Patriots for the past five years, that cost them the game.

The matchup of Belichick and Kubiak seems like an obvious mismatch, but it is mitigated somewhat by the presence of Wade Phillips on the Broncos side. Phillips has a shaky reputation based on his struggles as a head coach, but the fact that he keeps getting opportunities demonstrates just how good he is as a defensive coordinator. Denver’s defense is loaded with talent, but Phillips deserves credit for shaping them into the best unit in the league.

On Sunday he reminded the NFL once again just how brilliant he is. He designed the perfect scheme to go after New England, completely changing his tactics on the defensive side of the ball and exploiting weaknesses that the Patriots had managed to cover against almost every opponent so far this season.

I mentioned above the injuries that New England had suffered on the offensive side of the ball, but I think we need to go into more detail. Without both Dion Lewis and LeGarrette Blount, the Patriots were forced to resort to bottom of the roster player James White and off the street veteran Steven Jackson in their backfield. Against Denver’s defense they had no hope of running the football, and their rushing game actually outperformed my expectations by putting up 31 yards (not including Brady’s rushing total).

They had similar problems on the offensive line, where over the course of the year they saw an astonishing 37 different combinations play at least one snap. Part of this is due to an unusual substitution pattern, but a lot of it has to do with the constant injuries they’ve faced. And yet, they did a fine job keeping Brady upright, finishing near the middle of the pack in sacks allowed.

The key to New England’s offense is a quick passing attack. They spread the field, they give Brady lots of options to choose from, and they let him pick the defense apart with slants and screens. Teams try to bring pressure at Brady, but he is always able to find the hole behind them before he can get hit, getting the ball to Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, or Rob Gronkowski and trusting them to do the rest.

The Broncos could very easily have tried the same strategies that had failed for every other team. They were a heavy blitzing defense this year, as all Wade Phillips defenses usually are, and with a strong and deep secondary, they had reason to believe they could hold up in man coverage on the back end.

But that’s not what the Broncos did. Not only did they avoid blitzing, they actually went a step further, sending only three men after the quarterback repeatedly in the first half. I usually despise a three man rush, but in this case it was spectacularly effective. A three man rush fails because it gives the quarterback all the time he needs to search the field for a hole in the coverage, but for a passer like Brady, time is not the issue. His entire game is based on rhythm, and once that rhythm is disrupted, he struggles to improvise outside the normal framework of the play.

This is something that the Patriots obviously saw as the first half progressed, and the big question coming out of the break was how the Broncos would hold up once New England adjusted. And yet, for some reason, the Patriots really didn’t mix things up. They kept running their offense into the teeth of a defense designed to stop it, leading to stalled drives and ill timed turnovers.

The Broncos ramped the pressure up in the second half, even if that only meant sending four rushers. After spending a lot of the first half in coverage, Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware were unleashed around the edge, wreaking havoc against New England’s trash heap of an offensive line. The Patriots could not create separation to throw the ball underneath, and they couldn’t hold the ball long enough to go deep. And without any running game to turn to, their offense was rendered helpless.

There are still steps they could have taken, and it is strange that Belichick wasn’t able to make it work. The obvious solution when a team is getting pressure off the edge is to keep additional blockers to help, either by keeping a running back in the backfield or chipping with a back or tight end as they go out on their route. Yet for some reason, Miller and Ware played nearly the entire game facing only single blockers, a matchup the Patriots had no chance of winning.

Part of this may come back to the injuries at running back. Blount has his flaws as a runner, but he is a damn good pass protector, and Lewis was a nearly unstoppable weapon out of the backfield during the first half of the season. The Patriots tried to replicate this sort of player with White, but he only managed to haul in 5 of the 16 passes thrown his way. I haven't seen enough of him to judge his pass protection abilities, but judging by the way the Patriots used him, I have to assume he is totally ineffective as a blocker. But even if this is the case, at a certain point simply having his body in there would have been more valuable than throwing incomplete passes his way over and over again.

This was the close game of the weekend, and there are any number of places we can put the blame for the Patriots defeat. We can give it to Stephen Gostkowski for the missed extra point in the first half (we could, but we shouldn’t). Similarly, we could misplace the blame at Belichick’s feet for passing up multiple field goal opportunities in the fourth quarter (correct decisions both times). We could even blame Brady for not seeing Gronkowski wide open in the back of the endzone on the two point conversion (though I would rather question the playcall that has Brady rolling out of the pocket).

But if I had to identify the main cause for the loss, it has to be the inability or unwillingness to adjust their scheme. Had they been healthy, they would have had more flexibility to adjust to what the Broncos were doing. But as it was, they could only make the same mistakes over and over again, costing Belichick and Brady a shot at another Super Bowl title.