FALCONS AND RAMS PROVE COACHING MATTERS IN NFL
Playoff opponents’ offences went opposite directions after changing play callers
Never believe anyone who says coaching and scheming don’t matter in the NFL — that success rests almost entirely on the quality of players on hand. That’s just bull.
Both the Los Angeles Rams and Atlanta Falcons have convincingly proved otherwise the past two seasons. Having talented players matters. Having effective coaching matters more. You can field a team of all-pros, but unless someone smart knows how to summon the most out of that talent, through coaching and scheming, forget it.
In 2016, the Rams ranked dead last in scoring offence, averaging a horrible 14 points per game. Case Keenum and Jared Goff were the quarterbacks and performed terribly. Both threw more interceptions than touchdowns.
This past season — after the replacement of head coach Jeff Fisher and offensive co-ordinator Frank Cignetti Jr. with Sean McVay and Matt LaFleur, respectively — the Rams shot up to No. 1, scoring 30 points per game.
An incredible turnaround. No NFL team had risen in one year from last to first in scoring offence in the Super Bowl era.
In contrast, look at the Atlanta Falcons. They rolled to the NFC championship in 2016 behind an offensive juggernaut that far and away led the NFL in scoring, averaging 34 points per outing under offensive co-ordinator Kyle Shanahan.
But Shanahan left last February to become head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. His replacement, former Southern Cal head coach Steve Sarkisian, has struggled to get anything remotely as prolific out of pretty much the same offensive players. The Falcons this past season averaged 22 points per game to rank 15th in the league. A huge drop-off.
As it happens, the Falcons play Saturday at the Rams in one of four weekend NFL wild-card playoff games.
Did Atlanta’s Matt Ryan suddenly regress this season into a lesser quarterback? Of course not.
Look at Jared Goff. The 2016 No. 1 overall draft pick was a rookie who quarterbacked so terribly under Fisher and Cignetti that most pre-season magazines last summer wondered whether he could avoid being one of the biggest draft busts ever. Now he’s become one of the league’s most prolific, efficient passers at the helm of the highest-scoring attack in 2017.
It’s because coaching and scheming really do matter. When it’s good, good players shine. When it’s not so good, good players struggle.
A closer look at these 2016-17 contrasts:
LOS ANGELES
The Rams’ offence was so bad in 2016 that in more than half their games — nine — they failed to score as many as 11 points. Nine times! And they tallied more than 21 only twice. That’s as bad as it gets for an NFL offence.
McVay, LaFleur, Goff and co. wasted little time informing the NFL that massive improvement was coming this season. The Rams crushed the Indianapolis Colts 46-9 in their season opener. Last year’s L.A. team scored 54 combined points over its final five games.
L.A. won the NFC West with an 11-5 record. McVay, at 31, is the youngest NFL head coach to take a team to the playoffs. He has been asked all season long to explain the Rams’, and Goff’s, offensive turnaround.
McVay deflected credit and explained it this way:
“Any time that you see success from the quarterback position, I think it’s a credit to him and his teammates,” said McVay, who from 2014-16 was Jay Gruden’s offensive co-ordinator in Washington and eventually took over play-calling, he was so good at it.
The play structures that McVay and his offensive coaches have drawn up and implemented, and the way they’ve done it, has resonated with players, especially Goff.
ATLANTA
The Falcons started fairly well, with three wins in which they scored 23, 34 and 30 points. Then the problems began, and really never went away.
In Week 4, Atlanta scored 17 points in a home-field loss to Buffalo. They scored 17 in a loss at Miami, seven in a loss at New England and 17 two weeks later in a loss at Carolina. Thereafter, only twice in eight games did the Falcons score more than 27 points.
Remember, this was a team that averaged 34 points per outing a year ago.
What happened?
Don’t blame it on the run game. The Falcons averaged 121 yards a season ago and 115 this season, a negligible drop. It’s the passing attack that saw production plummet, from 295 yards per game to 249, an 18 per cent drop.
The consensus at mid-season seemed to be that while Sarkisian implemented an attack whose tendencies closely mirrored Shanahan’s — NFL Research reported Atlanta’s percentage of run plays, shotgun snaps, deep-pass frequency, Julio Jones targeting, running-back targeting and running backs split wide all were roughly the same — the total number of snaps were down. And touchdowns scored dropped big time.
Mathematicians might be able to add up all those tiny percentage drops to explain the large overall drop-off.
The deep-ball success seems to be the biggest issue. That in part explains why Jones — arguably the most dangerous big-play receiver in the league the past few seasons, along with Pittsburgh’s Antonio Brown — caught three TD passes all season. Nothing screams “something’s wrong with Atlanta’s offence” more than that glaring figure.
And this one: In 2016 the Falcons scored 58 offensive touchdowns. In 2017 they scored 33.
Like we said at the top, good coaching isn’t easy.
It’s easier to muck up a good thing than vice versa.