Playoffs on the Line

The first weekend of the NFL playoffs has run its course, and it was kind of a drag. We saw four low scoring and occasionally ugly contests, between teams that mostly looked surprised to discover they were still alive. The most points any team put up was Dallas with 24. We saw missed field goals, turnovers, exhausting replay reviews, and only very occasional touchdowns. And yet, through all of that, I had a fantastic time, thanks to fascinating clashes between the offensive and defensive fronts that went a long way to deciding these games.

In the past I’ve used this forum to mock the old saying that “the game is won or lost in the trenches”, but for this single weekend that turned out to be a pretty good summary of what happened. Of the four games all but one was claimed by the team with the superior line, and the battle in the trenches was one of the key deciding factors in each and every contest.

It started on Saturday afternoon with a matchup that looked particularly enticing, at least on one side of the ball. The Texans rolled into this game with a star studded defensive front, led by JJ Watt and bolstered by Jadeveon Clowney and Whitney Mercilus. Facing them was a rebuilt Colts offensive line that was arguably the best pass blocking unit in the league over the second half of the season, featuring All-Pro rookie Quenton Nelson.

This was every bit as exciting a matchup as we expected, even as it swung in two very different directions over the course of the game. From the beginning the Colts seemed to be in total control, grinding their way down the field repeatedly during the first half. They had five possessions during that half and scored touchdowns on three, only stymied on the other two deep in Houston territory by a deflected pass that turned into an interception and the first half running out. Watt and Clowney made their share of splash plays, but it wasn’t enough without being able to generate consistent pressure on Andrew Luck, and Indianapolis raced out to a 21-0 lead.

The second half was a different story. The Colts ended the day with the exact number of points they had at halftime, thanks to a sudden turn in the fortunes of the battle along the line. In the second half the Texans pass rush came alive, and though they didn’t manage to actually bring Luck down, they disrupted the timing of the offense and forced him into throwing a couple balls away. This defensive line kept Houston in a game that looked like it was heading for a blowout, and it was only the failures of their offense that kept things from ever becoming competitive.

The battle between the Colts offense and the Texans defense was a draw. The clash on the other side certainly was not. Indianapolis is far from prolific along their defensive line, but they were good enough to utterly humiliate the dreadful pass protection Houston has placed in front of Deshaun Watson, and to disrupt the Texans offense into only producing a single score.

Watson spent the entire afternoon running for his life, as he has pretty much the entire season. A soft schedule meant that most of the time it didn’t matter, and his ability to connect down the field with DeAndre Hopkins let them beat up on teams like the Giants, Jets, Bills, and Jaguars. But outside of Hopkins this offense really doesn’t have any reliable weapons, and after he suffered an injury in the first half that left him limited the rest of the game, there really wasn’t anything Houston could do. The Colts kept Watson contained in the backfield, and they forced him to make quick decisions against their zone defense, tricking him into a couple terrible throws and leaving him rattled so he missed some easy passes.

If there is anyone that can sympathize with the constant pressure Watson has faced this year, it’s Russell Wilson. For the past few seasons he has played behind one of the five worst lines in the league, regularly facing multiple defenders unblocked from the moment the ball arrives to him. After their offensive struggles left them on the outside looking in of the playoffs last year, the Seahawks finally decided they had seen enough and made major changes in the coaching staff on that side of the ball.

People rejoiced when they finally canned Tom Cable, and they were mostly okay with the decision to let go of Darrell Bevell. Those reactions became quite a bit less joyous when their solution at the position was Brian Schottenheimer, the face of nepotism in the league and a man who has failed at every one of the many opportunities that have been given to him. And yet, somehow, it seemed to work out for most of the year. They patched up their offensive line, and they found a way to keep Wilson upright using the most run heavy attack in the league.

Seattle’s loss to Dallas returned some sense of normalcy to the world, as we once again saw just how brutally incompetent Schottenheimer is. Dallas spent the game loaded up against the run, and the Seahawks could manage nothing on the ground. Even after Rashaad Penny broke a 28 yard run early in the second half, they managed just over 3 yards per carry as a team, utterly unable to stop Dallas’s linebackers from crashing down and ruining their plays.

And yet, even as things fell to pieces, they did not change their strategy. They had 24 rushing attempts for the game versus 27 passes, an insane ratio considering they were trailing at the end and had to go passes exclusively on their final drive. Over and over again they found themselves facing third and long, which was undoubtedly a factor in them converting only twice on thirteen third down attempts in the game.

Both Dallas and Indianapolis won because they dominated an inferior offensive line. The Colts erased Houston’s ability to pass by generating nonstop pressure on their quarterback, and the Cowboys forced the Seahawks into an awkward situation by taking away their rushing attack. Despite their better performance this year, Seattle still doesn’t trust their pass protection, and if they didn’t have the threat of run to slow down the pass rush, they didn’t want Wilson dropping back. It was only late when they began to trust their star quarterback that they finally got things clicking on offense, and by then it was too late to save their season.

Not trusting the offense was a trend that carried over into both of Sunday’s games. A pair of low scoring defensive slugfests emerged from teams that really had no interest in playing any other sort of game. Outside of the Chargers none of these four teams was particularly prolific on offense this year, but their unwillingness to at least trust their offenses to make plays led to some seriously negative consequences on Sunday.

The Ravens-Chargers matchup was one of the most fascinating chess matches I’ve see in a long time, and it all goes back to their regular season clash two weeks earlier. In that game the Ravens dominated the Chargers on both sides of the ball, harassing Philip Rivers with a nonstop frenzy of blitzes and controlling the game on the ground offensively. The Chargers entered this game knowing that they couldn’t trust their line to protect the quarterback, and that they needed to find some way on defense to keep from being overwhelmed by Baltimore’s ground attack.

The solution to the first problem was to not even try. The Chargers came out with the most conservative offensive gameplan I have ever seen from a team with a Hall of Fame quarterback. They committed to running the football, and they made no effort to the throw the ball down the field. Every pass came out of Rivers’s hand almost immediately, and more often than not their drives stalled as the Ravens rallied up and made the tackle short of the line to gain. A few times they tried to stretch the Ravens defense horizontally with receiver screens and swing routes, but they weren’t able to break the tackles necessary to turn these into big plays.

This strategy only worked because they trusted their defense to stifle Baltimore’s counterattack. Baltimore has a very strong offensive line, but it is limited in key ways. They aren’t the most athletic unit in the league, particularly on the right side where Marshal Yanda is well past his prime and Orlando Brown is less than a year removed from one of the most notoriously terrible performances in NFL Combine history. They found success down the stretch with a shotgun running attack powered by Lamar Jackson, but it was an attack that only had a few ways to succeed. Everything went to the right side, and it was all built around power and gap schemes that asked for limited lateral movement from their linemen.

Los Angeles’s solution to this was to stack the field with as much athleticism as they could muster and attack the gaps between the linemen. On 58 of their 59 defensive plays they had seven defensive backs on the field, more plays than they had such personnel the entire regular season. If these players had sat back and tried to play a solid gap scheme to bottle up the run, the Ravens would have had no trouble pushing them around. So instead they attacked, bringing a constant stream of run blitzes that shot into the backfield and disrupted Baltimore’s running game.

This exploited a couple key weaknesses in Baltimore’s attack. The first is that everything was designed out of shotgun, which slows the runner down receiving the handoff compared to a standard under center attack. This gave the Chargers more time to shoot the gaps on the backside and disrupt the play in the backfield. The normal counter to this strategy is to try more zone rushing, to exploit the cutback lanes left as the defenders race upfield. But Baltimore doesn’t have the personnel on the offensive line or at running back to make these schemes work, so their running game was bottled up most of the day.

Everything Baltimore does flows from their running game, and if it isn’t working then their passing game doesn’t work either. They found some success when they opened things up late in the game, but unlike Seattle I don’t think they would have done a lot better if they had tried throwing more earlier. Several of Jackson’s big plays were little more than wild swings of good fortune, as he scrambled behind the backfield then blindly chucked the ball up to a receiver who happened to come up with it. If they had tried this the entire game, it would have gone against them more than it did in the final couple minutes, setting the Chargers up for more easy points.

Both the Chargers and the Ravens limited their offenses for clear schematic reasons. It is a little less clear why Chicago and Philadelphia did the same, especially as the game wore on and they started to see what was and was not working. Obviously this game came down to a matter of a few inches, so it’s absurd to say that these teams were anything other than evenly matched, and evenly matched in a very similar way.

This game featured a collection of pass rushing talent that you would normally only see in a quarterback’s nightmares. On one side you have Khalil Mack and Akiem Hicks, while on the other you have Brandon Graham, Fletcher Cox, Chris Long, and Michael Bennett. But both sides also feature strong offensive lines, with Philadelphia having a clear edge thanks to All-Pro center Jason Kelce and arguably the best pair of tackles in the NFL.

Another similarity between the teams is a weakness on the back ends of their defenses. Chicago’s secondary performed very well this year, but on a pure talent level they are behind the rest of the defense. And with both Eddie Jackson and Bryce Callahan injured they are even weaker than normal, leaving big gaps all along the back end. The Eagles have been even more beat up than the Bears in the secondary over the course of the year, but they found some competence with a few young players down the stretch, who excelled due to their aggression challenging receivers at the point of the catch.

Aggression is fantastic for a defensive backfield, and it has worked wonders for both these defenses this year, thanks to pass rushes that force opposing quarterbacks to make quick and often incorrect decisions. But if a team can slow down their pass rush, aggression in the secondary often proves fatal. We saw plenty of that in this game, one of the most offensive 16-15 contests I can ever remember seeing.

The Eagles had open receivers running down the middle of the field most of the day, and they picked up big chunk plays thanks to penalties on open deep shots down the sidelines. During the second half the Bears exploited Avonte Maddox repeatedly with double moves over the top, a luxury they wouldn’t have had if they hadn’t been able to protect the quarterback.

Both the Eagles and the Bears were able to move the ball more or less whenever they wanted to. The strange thing was that most of the game passed without either team really seeming all that interested in attacking down the field. They were reasonably scared of the opposing pass rushes, but for most of the day these were held in check, with the offensive lines winning the most crucial battles. But both quarterbacks are prone to mistakes that can doom a team even with occasional pressure, as we saw in the first half with a pair of ugly interceptions by Nick Foles and several that should have been picked by Mitchell Trubisky.

If this game had opened up, it could very easily have been a 36-35 finish rather than 16-15. But either way the game was extremely evenly matched along both fronts, and in the end it came down to just a single kick. The Bears didn’t have the pass rush to beat Lane Johnson and Jason Peters on a consistent basis, and they couldn’t keep the Eagles out of the endzone at the end of the game. And yet the Bears had a chance because Trubisky was able to hit plays down the field in the final minute to get them into scoring range.

The rest of the playoffs will be just as fascinating along the lines. The only team left without an above average offensive line is the Chargers, and we haven’t even heard yet from dominant pass rushers like Aaron Donald, Chris Jones, Dee Ford, and Cam Jordan. Of course, there are plenty of elite skill position players left alive as well, and I expect things will open up more in the coming rounds. But for one week we had a bit of throwback football, where for once the games truly were won and lost in the trenches.