Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Packer Plus
Bucs quickly need to fix their offense; Packers not contenders
Thank god for Bill O’Brien. Without him, Week 10 wouldn’t have been very fun.
There were a handful of good matchups on the docket this week, yet we really only got one memorable game out of it. That, of course, was the wild Cardinals-Bills game, which ended with DeAndre Hopkins destroying what was left of O’Brien’s reputation.
Cleveland and Houston played a tight game that nobody outside of Cleveland and Houston watched. The same goes for Detroit and Washington. The Jags kept it close in Green Bay but Jake Luton was involved, so how good could that game have possibly been? And every other game was pretty much decided by the two-minute warning.
Week 10 may not have provided us with many memorable moments but that’s not going to stop me from getting some takes off. That is, of course, why you’re here. This is the Monday Take Dump, where no take is too hot and all opinions are subject to change after further review.
Here are two of my spiciest takes after a long day of watching football:
1. Bruce Arians (and Tom Brady) are holding back what should be a historically great offense
The day after the Bucs racked up 46 points might seem like a weird time to throw a negative take out there, but the fact that Tampa Bay was able to put up so many points is a testament to how good this group of skill plays has become now that Rob Gronkowski looks like Rob Gronkowski again and Antonio Brown seems to be playing at a high level. With the new additions playing well, adding to an already loaded receiving corps, this has the makings of an alltime great passing game. Yet … even in Sunday’s dominant win over the Panthers, there were more than a few concerning developments.
First and foremost, the Buccaneers’ offensive play-calling continues to be a
problem. It’s not so much the play designs, though; it’s mostly the run-pass splits on early downs. Against Carolina, Tampa Bay was nearly 50-50 run-pass and ended up facing 16 third downs. Luckily for them, Panthers defensive coordinator Phil Snow seems to think he’s still coaching in the Big XII based on his third-down calls, and Tom Brady had no problem picking his defense apart in those situations. But living in third down is not a recipe for sustainable success, and the Bucs coaching staff ’s insistence on establishing the run is going to put the offense in those situations more often than it should.
Some will pin the deficiencies with the play-calling on offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, but if Bruce Arians had a problem with how the game was being called, he would have intervened by now. And his teams have always seemed to operate under the assumption that the run must be established in order to set up the play-action pass, a theory that has long been debunked by the nerds.
The play-calling was a concern yet again Sunday, but Brady wasn’t helping matters. His final stat line looked good — 28-of-39 for 341 yards and three touchdowns — but he missed a ton of throws, and, really, he was the only thing keeping the Panthers in the game for as long as they were in it.
There were some completed passes in that compilation of missed throws, which, along with his impressive stat line, goes to show how wide Brady and this coaching staff ’s margin for error is with this set of receivers. But we’ve seen that against the better defenses, especially those with good secondaries, this offense can struggle and there won’t be a lot of bad defenses in the playoff field come January.
This may sound like nit-picking (and it probably is) but given how thin the margins are in the postseason, those nits matter!
2. We can now dismiss the Packers as real contenders after a narrow win over the Jags
While the AFC appears to be a oneteam race, with the Chiefs just in cruise control while they wait for the playoffs, the NFC at least appears to be wide open. But after watching the Packers struggle to beat a terrible Jacksonville team, I’m ready to cross them off a shrinking list of NFC teams that have a chance at the Super Bowl.
It’s not just that Green Bay allowed the Jaguars to stick around that has me ready to cancel them. It’s how it happened. The offense was fine and only a handful of near-misses prevented them from ringing up 30-plus points on Sunday. It was the defense that was far more concerning. And, yes, the Packers were without their top two corners — though I’d argue Kevin King’s absence was actually a positive — but I’m more concerned with the fact that the Jaguars were able to move the ball reasonably well when Green Bay’s defense KNEW that the only way the do it was by running or throwing screen passes. It was very reminiscent of the Packers loss to Minnesota when Kirk Cousins didn’t throw a single pass more than 10 yards downfield.
If Jacksonville had even a competent quarterback behind center, the Packers probably lose that game. Jake Luton has no business starting games in the NFL and it showed whenever he was forced to throw the ball past the line of scrimmage. And despite that, the Jaguars’ run game was still relatively successful. The pass defense was, of course, good, but that had more to do with Luton being bad than the Packers being good.
There’s really just no margin for error for the offense. Rodgers was great once again Sunday outside of an interception — and he’ll have to be that good to give the Packers a chance against the Saints or Buccaneers. And, yes, I know Green Bay won in New Orleans earlier in the season, but that was a different Saints team than the one we’re seeing now.