EDIT: I apologize for the length here, but a lot of this post is a radio show that I transcribed what Trent Dilfer said about Tampa’s defense in the Super Bowl. Obviously, it might be too long for some to read but some might enjoy hearing an Ex-NFL QB explaining what happened in that game, and why their defense isn’t as good as they looked that day. When I’m transcribing what Dilfer says, I put it
in italics. What I say is in normal font.
I keep hearing people talking about how great the Tampa defense is, mainly in relation to how ordinary they made Mahomes look in the super bowl… particularly how much their pass rush got to Patrick.
I have to say, they
are a good defense and they can get to the QB, for sure. However, they aren’t the dominant defense that they appeared to be in the super bowl. They have some talent but they are very well coached, both from the head coach (Arians is good) and from their defensive coordinator Todd Bowles, which makes them look better than their talent says they should be.
Their defense looked solid against Green Bay and Washington but they didn’t look nearly as great as they looked against the Mahomes led Chiefs. In fact, the terrible Washington offense looked better than KC against them. Why was that?
Was it the KC missing both OT’s? No it was not. Tampa’d D didn’t dominate Kansas City in the SB because KC was missing their two OT’s (although that helped for sure), they dominated because Arians and Bowles completely changed what they had been doing in defense for the past couple of years.
Trent Dilfer was on the Doug Gottlieb show on Fox Sports Radio right after the Super Bowl last year and Doug Gottlieb asked him how TB so thoroughly shut down a high powered KC attack and asked if the OT’s being out made that much of a difference. Trent said it wasn’t just the OT’s being out, that it was more what Tampa was doing schematically against KC that made it so lopsided.
What Dilfer said was interesting because he has played QB in the NFL (and in a super bowl) and knows more than just about anyone else in the media about reading defenses and what defenses are trying to do to a QB and the offense. Despite just being an average QB, he is very, very good at analysis and has a ton of knowledge.
Anyway, I couldn’t remember exactly what he said, so I had to go back and find the Podcast of that show and re-listen to how Trent describes it. I pretty much had to listen to a couple of sentences and then write down what he was saying. Below, I describe what he said that explains why Tampa was so dominant against the Chiefs:
Here is the link to the podcasts if anyone wants to go find the February 8th podcast and listen for themselves. It was in the first hour of the show.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1-the-doug-gottlieb-show-28117179/
Here is what Dilfer said about the Tampa Bay Defense on the Super Bowl:
Start Dilfer.
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KC went in wanting to throw short, perimeter screens to slow down the Tampa Bay pass rush, which is a typical west coast offense philosophy on how to combat a good pass rush. Todd Bowles and the Tampa defense knew that’s what Andy Reid was going to do.
Dilfer said that Tampa and Todd Bowles really reconstructed their defense for the super bowl. Not only were they anticipating and prepared for KC answers to their pass rush, but they were giving Mahomes pictures on the sidelines of a defense that they hadn’t seen. He said that there was no way that KC could have prepared for that Tampa defense because it was so out of character for what they had done all season long. The previous season too.
Bowles is a pressure guy. He normally likes to get the safety involved in bracket coverage. He’s a lot of man coverage guy with some unique looks he gives you. In this game they changed their front up a little bit. They lightened the box and played as deep as Dilfer had ever seen a Bowles defense play in the secondary. They lined up in a real high 3-shell or 2-shell and then dropped what he calls an insert person that comes up to support the run but also handles crossing routes, TE over the middle and handled a lot of the RPO and screen stuff. He said that Bowles essentially bet that a front 6 (instead of front 7) would be able to stop the KC run game. He said that Bowles was also banking on Andy Reid’s history that he would abandon the run game. Andy wants to throw more than he runs it.
He said Bowles was basically saying “I dare you to run it 28 times in the A and B gaps… I know that your DNA won’t let you do that.” So Tampa built a defense around Reid’s DNA. They build a very detailed, pass coverage concepts and flooded the passing lanes to disrupt what KC wanted to do in the passing game. And Tampa said that no matter what, we’re not going to let Tyreek Hill (or anyone) get vertical on us. No matter what, they had a deeper guy than Hill on every single play.
None of that is how Bowles defenses had been at any point in his time with Tampa Bay. He said Tampa is normally a lot more aggressive on defense but in this game they more just kept everything in front of them and flooded the passing lanes.
Dilfer said that KC really needed to run the ball against that defense and they just didn’t. He said they needed to have some time of possession and keep the ball but instead they kept having really short possessions and giving the ball back to Brady. He said KC needed some play action and to establish a running game against this defense. However, the KC game plan was what you should do against the normal Bowles Tampa defense… not the odd way that Bowles was playing that was so different than any they had seen… and Reid just didn’t make any adjustments to Bowles trickery.
He said that early on, when KC did actually run the ball, it was successful. They just didn’t do it very often at all.
He said he gives Bowles and Tampa a ton of credit for how they approached that match-up and how they changed just about everything they did on defense to utterly surprise KC. He said Bowles did a great job of teaching his defenders how to do a bunch of new stuff in a very short amount of time. He said that KC just had no counter to it because they had practiced against a completely different defense for the entire time.
He said that Bruce Arians offense also went completely against his own DNA in this game as well, catching the KC defense off guard a little bit too. They played differently on offense than they had, calling a much more patient game than Arians normally does. Very little deep passing when Arians is normally very aggressive. Normally he’s a “no risk it, no biscuit” coach but he called completely different game. They put in what Dilfer said are some college plays… some RPO’s and things that he’s never seen Brady do. They wanted to control the ball and took a lot less risks than normal.
END Dilfer
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It wasn’t a matter of Tampa’s defense and players just being dominant. They weren’t simply
that much better than KC. They basically completely surprised Mahomes and Andy Reid, and Reid never really adjusted for some reason.
It wasn’t that the OL just couldn’t protect Mahomes, it was that Mahomes was seeing something completely different than what he had prepared for in the two weeks leading up to the game. He was confused and holding on to the ball too long or was making bad decisions about where to throw the ball. It completely messed up everything that KC was going to do on offense because it was essentially like they had prepared for the wrong team before the game. Everything was different.
Throw in that KC
had lost both OT’s and it just made it that much worse… but make no mistake, their starting tackles wouldn’t have helped KC much in that game. They were doomed from the kickoff because of Arians and Bowles brilliant sneak attack. They absolutely surprised and confused KC in the biggest game of the year.
That parallels common sense too in that they didn’t look nearly so dominant against other teams in the playoffs, including a putrid Washington offense that looked much better than Kansas City against them.
What does that mean for Dallas on Thursday? Well, for starters it means that Tampa’s defense isn’t nearly the dominant unit that we all remember last seeing. They looked so good because schematically, they changed everything… which likely won’t happen in the first game of the year. Bowles will again likely be doing what he always does. They are a good defense but they aren’t the 85 Bears, which is how they looked in the SB.
Dallas has a chance to score some points, even with Martin out. I think they will have
some success against Tampa’s defense. How much is the question.
Ultimately, it will come down to the Dallas defense against Brady’s offense and how much they can slow them down.
