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I am sure it is bad form to quote yourself, but once in a while, I cannot resist. This is from last week's edition of Decoding Callahan to explain how Denver picked the less ideal way to defend the Cowboys and Tony Romo. I knew Jim Haslett, a guy who has played the Cowboys twice a year since 2010, and has figured out as good a way to attack Romo as anyone in the business, would not be as accommodating as Jack Del Rio was for the Broncos. Here is what I said last week:
"if I am designing a game-plan against this version of the Cowboys offense, I would absolutely throw pressure at Romo on a regular basis with numbers. I must blitz him and when teams have shown the willingness to send pressure, the Cowboys have had a tough time burning them in the 2011-2013 time frame."
The thing about playing QB against the blitz is that you have to understand a few fundamental truths.
1) it is going to require you to be willing to take a few hits. At lower levels of football, the defense might be happy by forcing you to your "hot route" and throwing short of the chains continuously. It seems the tactic there is simply to make you lose your patience. But on Sundays, they want you to think the hot route is there, only to slide a Linebacker underneath and try to get you to see something that isn't there and throw the football to the opponent. Therefore, the idea of the blitz at the NFL level seems to be to make you fight your first instinct. Your first instinct is find the hot receiver. The strong defensive mind is trying to make you think that - but when you act on it, they are pouncing. Therefore, you need to fight the first instinct and try to stay alive to use your second instinct. Tricky, to say the least.
2) It is going to make you move your targets for success. When they blitz, they are upping the ante on the hand. They are betting more and making you call them on it. The stakes are higher, so just like poker, when there is more in the middle, you only have to win a few hands to make your night profitable. In football terms, if they are going to blitz you all night, you only have to beat them badly a time or two and you can win the game. And while Sunday might have had such contributions from elsewhere (Dwayne Harris, Kyle Wilber) that you didn't even HAVE to beat these blitzes, this surely made your 4th Quarter more enjoyable.
More than anything, Haslett won a game in December against Romo because Romo never beat the blitz on a big hand.
Read the rest: http://sturminator.blogspot.com/2013/10/decoding-callahan-week-6-washington.html
"if I am designing a game-plan against this version of the Cowboys offense, I would absolutely throw pressure at Romo on a regular basis with numbers. I must blitz him and when teams have shown the willingness to send pressure, the Cowboys have had a tough time burning them in the 2011-2013 time frame."
The thing about playing QB against the blitz is that you have to understand a few fundamental truths.
1) it is going to require you to be willing to take a few hits. At lower levels of football, the defense might be happy by forcing you to your "hot route" and throwing short of the chains continuously. It seems the tactic there is simply to make you lose your patience. But on Sundays, they want you to think the hot route is there, only to slide a Linebacker underneath and try to get you to see something that isn't there and throw the football to the opponent. Therefore, the idea of the blitz at the NFL level seems to be to make you fight your first instinct. Your first instinct is find the hot receiver. The strong defensive mind is trying to make you think that - but when you act on it, they are pouncing. Therefore, you need to fight the first instinct and try to stay alive to use your second instinct. Tricky, to say the least.
2) It is going to make you move your targets for success. When they blitz, they are upping the ante on the hand. They are betting more and making you call them on it. The stakes are higher, so just like poker, when there is more in the middle, you only have to win a few hands to make your night profitable. In football terms, if they are going to blitz you all night, you only have to beat them badly a time or two and you can win the game. And while Sunday might have had such contributions from elsewhere (Dwayne Harris, Kyle Wilber) that you didn't even HAVE to beat these blitzes, this surely made your 4th Quarter more enjoyable.
More than anything, Haslett won a game in December against Romo because Romo never beat the blitz on a big hand.
Read the rest: http://sturminator.blogspot.com/2013/10/decoding-callahan-week-6-washington.html
