Game Overview ::
By hilow >>
- Jordan Love had the league’s fifth deepest intended air years per attempt (9.2) in Week 1, something I expect will shrink drastically with Malik Willis under center.
- Expect more schemed usage to the team’s primary “YAC” players – Jordan Reed, Josh Jacobs, and potentially tight end Tucker Kraft.
- Both teams are coming off an opening weekend loss and really need to notch something in the win column in Week 2.
- The Colts came out of Week 1 with some poorly timed injuries, as all of S Julian Blackmon (shoulder), DT DeForest Buckner (back), and DE Kwity Paye (hamstring) did not practice on Wednesday.
- While this game clearly has the individual talent to ignite a game environment, the likeliest scenario leaves both teams starting with more reserved tendencies.
How Indianapolis Will Try To Win ::
Head coach Shane Steichen is going to place this team in position to be competitive all season and Anthony Richardson has that dawg in him. As long as Richardson remains healthy, this team is going to be fun to watch. That said, their offense looked way worse on tape than their box score would indicate. The team managed just seven points in the first half in their Week 1 game against the Texans, the passing yardage totals were a bit fluky, and they held possession of the football for only 20 minutes. Furthermore, 171 of Richardon’s 212 pass yards came on three insanely unrepeatable deep plays – a 60-yard touchdown heave to Alec Pierce from his back foot that Richardson might be the only quarterback alive who can make, a 54-yard touchdown on a crosser route over the middle of the field to Ashton Dulin, who shook off the defender at the point of reception and outran the safeties for the score, and then 57-yard “throw it up and pray” completion to Alec Pierce on the team’s final possession. Yes, splash plays count and this team should generate them with Richardson at quarterback, but the rest of the game looked fairly mundane from this offensive unit. Richardson had a few bad overthrows, one of which was intercepted at the end of the first half, and a couple of others that were bad misses to his primary target in Michael Pittman. With Richardson having so few starts on his ledger dating back to high school, and really only three starts with Steichen, the offense should improve as the season progresses, but we might be waiting on that team-wide upside to develop.
Against a Packers team that continues to get bullied on the ground, and with a quarterback that has such an extreme range of outcomes from play to play, it would make sense for the Colts to bias their attack to a ground game on the back of Jonathan Taylor. The problem is that the offensive line did not look good on tape and Taylor struggled with consistency in the team’s first game. His 48 rush yards are accentuated by zero missed tackles forced, a weak 1.81 yards after contact per attempt, and a game-long of just seven yards. What was most interesting to me with his performance in Week 1 was that 15 of his 16 carries came behind zone run-blocking principles. This offensive line is supposed to be one of the strengths of this team after it returned all five starters from a team that found immense success in that area a season ago, but I didn’t see it on tape. Taylor is no stranger to running behind zone concepts so this might be a case of poor situational play calling and continuous long down-and-distance to-go situations, something that can change from week to week. The Packers utilized an interesting mix of defensive alignments in Week 1 against the Eagles, with 35.8% played from Cover-4/quarters and Cover-6, 30.8% played from Cover-3, and a very un-Packers-like 25.6% Cover-1. It will be up to Steichen to keep this team out of predictable situations that lead to an expected decrease in efficiency.
Forget the box score, this pass offense left a lot to be desired in Week 1. One of the most glaring “tip of the hand” examples that I saw from the Colts tape was the directional personnel tendencies. For example, almost every play in the game run from 11-personnel was a pass play while almost every play run from jumbo was a rush. Adonai Mitchell served as the WR3 and played just 64% of the offensive snaps yet was in a route at a 95% clip. You simply can’t be that predictable in the NFL. Michael Pittman also ran a predictable route tree largely comprised of the 4-6 routes. I wanted to see more layering and unpredictability in route structure, which is concerning after Richardson was healthy throughout the preseason (making it less likely that the route structure was due to limited repetitions). In any case, the Colts have a lot of work to do to become more consistent, not only from game to game but from drive to drive. Enough with the negative because some of their play designs were schemed well. They had a solid amount of pre-snap motion and play action, but they will need their run game to be more effective before those tendencies truly matter. The good news is their opponent in Week 2 could provide the launching pad for that to be the case.
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