Point Blank – October 12
McCoy/Kubiak – who has the bigger headache…On trying to change the football culture at Iowa State (it may be time to start liking Matt Campbell)…
So you wanna be a big-league manager, huh? The MLB Diamonds put some challenging settings in front of the guys in charge yesterday, which made for a high level of drama, and now brings us the added opportunity of a Game #5 in Washington. I will get to that as one of Thursday’s lead topics, but today we focus on the NFL game that night, with Broncos/Chargers also bringing as much emphasis on the guys on the sidelines calling the shots as the players on the field. It is also time to take another dive into the Survivor Pool, and to pay a little more attention to what is going on at Iowa State.
Gary Kubiak and Mike Mike McCoy both have headaches this week, Kubiak literally. Let’s get to them.
Item: The age-old conundrum – Energy vs. Efficiency
It isn’t just Kubiak not making the trip to San Diego on Thursday, he will not be with the team at all until next Monday. It will be special teams coordinator Joe DeCamillis in the role of acting HC, but fortunately for the Broncos there is one particular guy that has been on this stage before, and can be trusted not just as a team leader but also to have the defensive game plan in the right place – Wade Phillips.
It is in the way that Phillips sets the game up that we get to one of the age-old conundrums in sports, that notion of playing with an added passion because of a motivational factor, which is generally read as a positive across the Betting Markets, but also of losing a layer of efficiency, which is not as visible.
Let’s start with the lead from Phillips, and in this case I believe the added emotion for the defense can be a genuine plus factor - “We’re going to miss him. And we’re going to play for him. I’m going to talk to the defense and we’re going to dedicate this game to him. He’s meant so much to this team, and the reason we won the Super Bowl is because of him. We’re going to do something for him.”
But there is a flip side. Kubiak has a big hand in the offense, and the offense needs that hand right now, with such little experience at QB. When can experience matter most? When having to prepare to play on a short week, especially for a road game. That is made an even bigger issue by Trevor Siemian not having played last week, although he is projected as the starter for Thursday. Will Kubiak have his hand in this in any way? Not according to OC Rick Dennison – “I’m not calling him. I’m telling you that. I went over and saw him that night. He started talking about the game and I told him just rest. Just relax, get better.'”
Dennison does have a good feel for the Kubiak playbook – he was also the OC for him at Houston for four seasons. The question is how much feel Dennison has for the particular group of players he is coaching – it isn’t just the inexperience at QB, but also the OL being over-hauled, and that blocking cast had a dismal time of it on Sunday (Donald Stephenson did not play in that one but looks like a go for Thursday).
So the Broncos will dedicate the game to Kubiak, and will come out and play hard. The defense can use that added emotion in a positive way. But will the offense perhaps miss some tactical opportunities by not having the HC there for this short prep week? Making that even more delicate for the handicapper is that the offenses matches up against a make-shift LB/DB rotation for San Diego, which has simply become business as usual for Mike McCoy.
Item: What if Mike McCoy has actually been doing a decent job?
The pressure on McCoy is getting to be immense now, and the spotlight of the national cameras and the talking heads of the Sports Mediaverse cannot help but make that one of the prime focus points for Thursday. That is going to happen when a team is 1-4, but was in the position to have been 5-0 with just a few bounces.
The issue for the serious handicapper is different – was it bad coaching that led to those close defeats, or was it good coaching that had a patched-up roster in position to win those games?
San Diego sits at #11 on the Football Outsiders adjusted charts for net team efficiency. That is a rather lofty place to be for a team that has lost so many key cogs – not just Keenan Allen at WR and Danny Woodhead at RB, but their back-ups Stevie Johnson and Brandon Oliver as well; then LB Mante Te’o, CB Jason Verrett and TE Jeff Cumberland also for the remainder of the season. Not done for the duration, but having missed significant time, are TE Antonio Gates, OT King Dunlap, CB Brandon Flowers and S Jahleel Addae.
Consider the mess at ILB, where not only is Te’o gone, but Denzel Perryman could not go at Oakland, and now Nick Dzunbar has been diagnosed with a torn ACL, and his 2016 is done. So who got most of the snaps at those two positions against the Raiders? Rookie Jatavis Brown, an under-sized (5-11/221) fifth-round pick out of Akron, was on the field for 65 plays, and Korey Toomer played 50 of them. Toomer had just been signed off of the Raiders practice squad two weeks ago.
In truth, I believe McCoy has done an admirable job of patching this team together to get them to compete. His game management in the opener at Kansas City was poor, and was written about here at the time, but so many of those other end-game failures did not come down to a coaching decision.
Hunter Henry fumbled with a little over a minute remaining when the Chargers were trying to put a game-winning drive together at Indianapolis. Melvin Gordon and Travis Benjamin lost fumbles on the first play of back-to-back possessions to turn a 34-21 lead into a 35-34 loss vs. New Orleans. This past Sunday it was a mishandled snap on a FG attempt that would have had the Chargers tied with Oakland at the two-minute warning.
Philip Rivers perhaps stated it best - "If I didn't have my faith or my family, I don't know how people do it. I would literally be a lunatic. I know I get crazy some, but I would be out of my mind. Because I was having these thoughts of coming in here and screaming and hollering and saying things I don't say."
The individual details can often get lost in an overall flood of events, which will likely doom McCoy. But for those digging deeply inside the numbers, and looking in detail at that San Diego depth chart, he grades out much differently.
Survivor Pool Week #6
Last week was simply a matter of holding serve in riding out the Patriots while so many others were doing the same. This week there is more of a thought process involved, with Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Tennessee and Arizona all in the mix, but the Steelers and Cardinals get eliminated because they can be held back for other settings. Both the Bills and Titans face teams that are not likely to break through on the road, in particular because of unsettled QB situations, but I am giving the nod to Tennessee, an underachieving team that put their best all-around game in a couple of seasons together on Sunday, and it is something that provides the Titans with a foundation that can build off of.
Week #1 – Kansas City
Week #2 – Carolina
Week #3 – Miami
Week #4 – Washington
Week #5 – New England
Week #6 – TENNESSEE TITANS
Item: Time for a Cyclone warning at Iowa State
I wasn’t sure what to make of Iowa State hiring Matt Campbell. Campbell did a decent job in working his way up the ranks at Toledo, starting out as running game coordinator, then OC, then HC, where he went 35-15. But the Rocket team that he inherited was a good one, and he just seemed to continue a flow that was already there. In some ways I also wondered if he might have made a lateral move, because winning at Ames is not easy, instead of building his resume more in Toledo until something better came along.
As noted as part of the Monday review, the Big 12 has become a conference of speed, featuring fast offensive tempos and outstanding skill players. You are not going to get enough of those athletes to come to Iowa State to have much chance of ever competing for a conference championship, and for the current fifth-year seniors it has been 14 Big 12 losses by 20 points or more.
But in doing this week’s post-mortem there was a different sense coming from the program. Iowa State has been in position to win outright as a major underdog each of the last two week’s, leading Baylor 42-28 into the fourth quarter (ISU was +17 ), and then Oklahoma State 31-21 into the fourth quarter (ISU was +14). The depth was not there to finish it off, which is the on-going problem, but what brought a different feel was how Campbell addressed those losses.
In the past, under the likes of Gene Chizik and Paul Rhoads, it would have been something along the lines of “I was so glad to see our kids bring the fight that they brought, and have a chance to win”, but Campbell would not settle for that. One of the major handicapping themes each season is how new coaches put their stamp on a program, something that we can learn from, and there may well be something to see here from Campbell.
It starts with something not all that out of the ordinary - “Well, I’m ticked. I think I kind of made that known. I hope our kids are ticked, too. I know I would be if I was a player.”
But then he gets to the heart of the matter, and how a losing culture gets changed - “The competitor in me says, yes, we’re really close. but I also know what it takes to make those plays and do the little things that it takes to be successful. Those are things that continue, and I told our kids, you win stuff like that in the off-season. You win stuff like that with how your process is in January and February and March and April and May and June and July and August.
“You make those catches, you make those tackles. You do that because of repetition and detail. I do feel at times we’re still playing catch-up because we’re still teaching and instilling our program, but you’ve seen these kids make so much strides in such a short amount of time because I think there is a great want-to from those young men.”
Campbell may indeed get his players to buy in, although it is going to take some outright scoreboard wins, and not just close calls, for that to happen. His openness on this front puts him under the microscope as a coach we may want to begin respecting ahead of the curve, although the harsh realities of having to recruit enough players to win with this program will continue to shadow over the results.
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