Optimus25":1zh2w1hg said:
Smellyman":1zh2w1hg said:
seahawkfreak":1zh2w1hg said:
I really enjoy jumping on the hate Bevell wagon and at times thought is was irrational cause it was so easy. (Not a fan of his) After listening to Collinsworth tonight though he really had a shining light moment though. 3 wrs on one side, Gramham on the other, make the defense choose. What a holy crap concept. Even if we did it just once a game or 50% of time, who cares.
they did do it once on 2nd 2 point conversion....
I haven't jumped on the fire Bevell threads for since they started (and they have been going on a loooong time). Enough is enough though. Can't let these Windows of winning slip away. Let alone ruin a promising qb career and the last years of ML.
Schneider or Allen will need to step in though. Pete loves Bevell
But what Seattle did wasn't in the spirit of what colinsworth was saying. He was more saying basic one on one isolation, whereas Bevell tried some cutesy dumbass read option pass thing, completely disrupting Jimmys timing to get position on the defender.
Even with Jimmy isolated, Russell has not learned how to throw to him. Passes are low, behind, or sailing wildly, and often. Maybe it's an equal share of blame, that is, Jimmy has yet to learn how to understand the scramble drill, or runs sloppy routes. But we're seeing erratic passes on routine, designed plays as well as improvised ones.
Russell's lack of precision is part of the problem.
Bevell's playcalling is part of the problem, but it's an extension of Pete's philosophy. In his book, Pete describes a pivotal moment in his coaching career. He was an assistant under Bud Grant with the Vikings. They were facing the defending champion 49ers and Grant's plan for the game was to keep it close until the 4th quarter. His belief was that the 9ers were used to winning blowouts and a team that could hang with them would wear them down and make them susceptible to mistakes. If the Vikes could stay within a score, he surmised, they would outlast their heavily favored opponent and pull out the win late. In that particular case, it worked.
Pete makes a point of saying this had a profound effect on his coaching.
I'm a massive PC fan. His ideas influence me every day. But I see a huge flaw here. Grant emphasized ONE way to take down an overly confident team. Pete took that and has made it a core tenet of his offensive philosophy – FOR EVERY GAME. It worked when we were the underdog, when teams still hadn't figured out Russell, when we had something to prove. We're not that team anymore; our approach needs to evolve along with our status in relation to our opponents.
For a guy so adaptable, whose longevity and success in coaching is attributable to that adaptability and open-door approach, Pete is stubbornly and predictably rigid in his ideas about offense and how to manage the game. Marshawn's very serious/sarcastic question in XLVIII, "Can we score more points?" hits the heart of it like an expert marksman on a windless day.
The offensive line is also part of the problem. It's more than just "they're bad" or "inexperienced" though. They are asked to block for a guy who has no "spot." Carson Palmer, both Mannings, Brees, Brady, all those "statue" guys have a spot and every single pass block reinforces for the linemen their angles and positions of leverage in relation to that spot.
This is not a mystery to anyone involved, so Cable, Carroll, and Schneider go looking for quick-footed, tough, athletic guys who are supposed to be able to move. Despite that intent, for the most part, it isn't happening on the field. Guys who are supposedly more nimble like Britt, Sweezy, and Gilliam, whiff on their blocks just as proficiently and regularly as an overweight plodder like James Carpenter.
Additionally, while these "more athletic" linemen still get turned around and out of position because of Wilson's inside-the-pocket scrambling, our opponents have 3+ years of film showing how Wilson likes to move. He can still break one now and then and he's still really good at buying time and keeping his eyes down field. But he's not making guys look ridiculous this year. He's not making talented defenders dive at the air like he used to, because they've studied his angles and his timing and they're doing a better job of containing him. They've improved at funneling Russell back into the quagmire of big bodies, where again, our linemen are being spun around, where they lunge and grab and get penalized and whiff on blocks.
The whole thing is a mess. If there were a vote, I'd like to see a fresh mind come in with the intent to maximize the talent we already have and uptick the tempo and timing just a bit. But I think that call is not necessarily the OC's to make. If Pete were willing to say, "Hey, let's go a little more killer instinct on offense. Let's see if we can give our D a nice lead to play with by stepping on the gas in the 1st half," then I'd be curious enough to allow Bevell a chance to run with that. But until that happens, I suspect any OC under Pete will exhibit many of the same flaws we're seeing now.
I've never been a Bevell apologist, but at the same time I would give any coordinator a little leeway when he has to start 5 or 6 series pinned back in his own red zone and needing 20 or 25 yards for a 1st down. That kind of undisciplined play takes the playbook right out of anyone's hands. So for this past game at least, I'd say Bevel was put behind the 8 ball way too often for us to adequately grade his gameplan and playcalling.
