Dolphins at Panthers - 1st Half Notes

Ryan Tannehill in the 1st Half

First, let me get the good out of the way.

I was impressed with Ryan Tannehill. Don't let the stats fool you, he had a lot to deal with in this first half and he still got his team down the field against some odds and put them in the end zone. He didn't turn over the ball, he didn't even come that close to turning over the ball. He had blocking breakdowns, some drops, some DLs doing a damn good job getting their hands up at the line of scrimmage, ZERO ground game, some disguised coverages that surprised him after the snap, yet he stayed poised the whole time and didn't do anything stupid, made some terrific throws and some terrific NON-throws. This is our starter.

Let me repeat.

This is our starter.

There were quite a few pass deflections at the line. I had three of them. I typically blame quarterbacks for pass deflections. The very first one of the game, however, was not really his fault. That was just a good play by the defensive linemen who stabbed back with a big mitt after he had already washed out of the passing lane, and managed to get his hand on the ball. A play after that Luke Kuechly manages to crowd the exact passing lane Tannehill wants on the quick throw. This isn't a ball I expect Tannehill to pull down because of Kuechly, who was NOT facing Tannehill or reading the quarterback on the play, rather was reading the receiver but running right into the passing lane. This is Luke Kuechly, quite literally the very best I have ever seen at the college level translating film work into a feel for passing lanes on the field. Tannehill had every reason to throw that ball as Kuechly was not eyeballing him and he should have washed right past the passing lane, but Kuechly didn't and so it deflected off his shoulder pads. These two plays combined to essentially erase one of Miami's drives.

I had several drops on the day. The first was a costly one and it came on Tannehill's first pass of the second drive. Ryan Tannehill made the absolute perfect read for this defense and got the ball out with great timing and accuracy to Fasano coming out of the backfield in the left flat. There wasn't anyone around him. He's got a 7 or 8 yard gain at the very least and that's if he doesn't even break a tackle. Instead the ball dribbles off his hands and you've got 2nd & 10, a down which Jonathan Martin (more on him later) screwed up by not getting a good block which causes a 3rd & 12 which I'm not sure people realize is a pretty low percentage down. Yet on this down Ryan Tannehill made one of his best plays on the day. Martin falls on his butt and gets Tannehill MURDERED yet Ryan hangs in tough and throws the perfect check to Reggie Bush who...you know what?...actually had a decent shot at gaining this 1st down. He is Reggie Bush and this was the open field, after all. But he only gains 9 yards. C'est la vie. There goes another one of Tannehill's drives.

Ryan clearly saved his best for the third drive. The reason I say that is because like the other drives, things didn't go perfectly...but he persevered. Very first throw of the drive he tries to check down to Reggie Bush and leads him a little with the ball but Reggie just stops in his tracks and reaches for it. Looks like an off target throw by Tannehill but he was just trying to lead him a little bit which is a good thing. A run play on 2nd & 10 only nets 1 yard because of someone we'll talk about later, but Ryan follows up with a great read and throw to Davone Bess who ran a fantastic route on an unlikely 3rd & 10 conversion to keep the drive alive. On a play-action roll to the right, Roberto Wallace simply can't create the same separation against his man coverage that we saw Steve Smith create on Sean Smith, on a similar roll out by Newton. But this is Wallace's issue, and it showed up all over the place, separation. An off side penalty gets the offense back on schedule at 2nd & 5, and Tannehill throws a great play-action comeback to Roberto Wallace who this time does get the separation he needed.

The next play of the drive is one of those subtle things you really have to watch a few times in order to appreciate. You're not going to get it off the first viewing. Tannehill makes a good call at the line based on what the defense was showing and he wants to throw the slant to Roberto Wallace. The problem is right after the snap the defensive end to that side doesn't engage his pass rush and spills to the passing lane instead. Tannehill actually sees this. In Miami I'm really not used to quarterbacks that actually see things happen after the snap so forgive me for making a big deal of this. He sees the defensive end get out in front of the passing lane on the slant and pulls the football down, begins a scramble drill with Wallace who breaks off with Tannehill. Ryan throws it to him anyway, with defensive players breathing down his neck at a dead run, and I swear he came about 2 feet of ball placement away from turning that play into a big gain with Wallace off the scramble drill.

Those are the EXACT kinds of plays which take me right off the "UNDECIDED" check box and place me squarely on the "TANNEHILL" check box. I can't emphasize enough what it means that the guy is able to see the field well enough and make decisions well enough that even when things don't happen exactly as he thought they would, he does not make the costly screwup and throw the game away. In fact, he DAMN NEAR made a huge play out of it...as Wallace would have been running for quite a while.

On a 2nd & 10, Ryan tries to throw the comeback to Roberto again but I think this was just a missed connection. Either Tannehill just flat out threw it inaccurately (which has been rare in both games thus far) or he expected Wallace to cut his depth off at the sticks. Either way Wallace can't come back to the ball far enough. The next play 3rd & 10 was a Chad Henne type play. The Panthers showed aggressive blitz and I wanted to see if Tannehill could get it picked up and make the read like Henne used to. Remember it wasn't the blitz Henne sucked against. Sure enough Tannehill gets his protections in order against the aggressive blitz showing, and makes the perfect read over the middle to Jeff Fuller for a 1st down off an unlikely 3rd & 10. On the next throw, I watched closely to see if the check down to Daniel Thomas was justified. It was. Everyone was covered. Thomas did a superb job shaking a tackler and gaining 5 yards out of it.

We're now a good part into Tannehill's 3rd drive, and I'm only just now finding a play of Ryan's I could isolate and for sure say I didn't like. That's my read on his play tonight. It shows you something. What I didn't like about this little pass to Bess out in the flat was the obvious poor ball placement on Bess' back shoulder. It wasn't appropriate and it caused Bess to fall to the ground as he caught it, for no gain.

A false start later and suddenly you've got ANOTHER 3rd & 10 situation to overcome. Yet he finds a man that he can actually count on for some separation, Marlon Moore on the out route to the right side. Great read, great ball, great conversion on an unlikely 3rd & 10. Even though the ground game obviously is NO help at this point, he makes another great read and quick throw to Fasano for tough yards that puts them within a yard of a 1st down and within 2 yards of pay dirt. This is the kind of play that produces touchdowns.

Which it did...two runs later.

The next drive was killed by the combination of a sack where a certain player we'll talk about later got pistol whipped and let a defensive end come in on Ryan Tannehill. I re-watched that play several times. This was a 4-man rush. There was no cause for him to unnecessarily speed up the throw. Ryan was trying to go through his progressions, and he was trying to step up and work the pocket, but the pressure was in on him from the outside just that quickly. Another failure of the ground game results in another highly unlikely 3rd & 12 play which is well covered, the rush is on, and even if a DL doesn't do a good job deflecting the pass, the play wasn't going to net a conversion.

The first play of the next drive is the SECOND play where I was thoroughly impressed by what Ryan Tannehill decided NOT to do, which is push a bad position after the snap even though the defense isn't doing what you thought they were going to do. These are the plays that have me declaring him the starter. It looks like he expected cover two and was surprised to find cover three instead with the nickel corner having outside flat responsibility. Whether he should have recognized the disguised coverage before the snap or not is up for debate. However it's clear that he did not expect the nickel corner to his left to flatten out to the sideline after the snap, and wanted the slant to Clyde Gates off what looked like a soft coverage. After the snap he goes to load up the slant, sees the corner disengaging from the slot WR he had lined up against (Cunningham) to get to the outside, and instead of throwing the risky ball he pulls it down, looks up the field to Cunningham who is covered, then begins to scramble to his right in order to try and hit his check down option on the scramble drill. That's when he sees a defensive end in his face to that side, and under extreme duress he throws the football away. Obviously this isn't a positive play but what he did was once again show the poise to not cost his team even when something happens that he didn't expect.

Next play he didn't like his receiving options and started feeling the pressure as both Lydon Murtha and Jon Martin have turned into turnstiles at this point...and Ryan steps up into the pocket and then out, just as he's taught, to try and get away from the rush. Unfortunately for him Jon Martin's man was breathing down his neck so he couldn't get away. I won't even explain the 3rd & 15 from the shadow of his own end zone because you know he's not supposed to try and convert that.

On the next drive which starts with only 53 seconds left on his own 20 yard line, Lydon Murtha gets whipped so quickly Tannehill can't even unload the ball to the guy he wanted for a short little 6 yard gain. Yet he makes two nice completions for 21 yards to keep the chains moving. With 25 seconds left and one timeout, all Ryan really wants to do is get into long field goal range. And he damn near does it by squeezing the football 17 yards up the field to Marlon Moore right between corner and safety coverage for a ball that should have been complete as it hits Moore right on the hands. Was it tight? Were there guys around the ball? Yes and yes. Did the ball squeeze in perfectly anyway to the opposition 47 yard line to where they could run up and spike the football with 10+ seconds left and have a shot at taking one stab anywhere on the field before taking a timeout and trying the field goal? Answer is yes and that should have been what happened but Moore dropped it.

I've got a series of numbers for you. Try and guess what they represent: 2, 12, 9, 10, 10, 11, 15, 8 and 10.

Anyone guess?

Those were the distances Ryan was asked to convert on the 3rd down pass calls during the 1st half. And if you've got a rookie quarterback then that should normally scare the piss out of you as it's a recipe for turnover after turnover.

Instead we got Ryan Tannehill converting 4 out of 9 on those 3rd downs, which put the team at 5 out of 10 on converting 3rd downs in the half once you count the Jorvorskie Lane fullback dive on 3rd & 1. That's an average 3rd & 9 and you converted half of them...with NO turnovers.

That's some pretty decent quarterbacking.

The guy was certainly not perfect in this game by any means. At some point you want to see him create a big play in this game no matter what the coverage was looking like. You continue to want to see him do better creating plays with his feet considering he's such a good athlete.

But overall I thought Ryan Tannehill was very very very very very very VERY VERY VERY far down the list of problems for this Dolphins football team in the 1st half of this game against the Panthers. He was the whole reason the game wasn't 20-0 at the half, as it should have been a total steam rolling.


The Rest of the Horse Piss I Saw

Most of the rest of this team was BAD.

Jonathan Martin, I hope you get the Michael Egnew speech from Mike Sherman after this game because 32 out of 32 teams would be looking to CUT your *** if you weren't a 2nd round pick (to our shame). What in the name of **** was that? He was absolutely destroyed by Charles Johnson. I counted him put on his *** literally no less than three or four times. He could barely accomplish a god damn thing out there. Cut blocks? No. Reach blocks? No. Vertical pass protection? No. What is it you CAN do, again? Because right now I'm thinking and for the life of me I can't come up with anything.

Bench him.

That's the bottom line. You have to bench him. Lydon Murtha was really not much better. He sucked horse dick, as a matter of fact. But at least he was working the left side which is a little more difficult than the right side. It's time to get Lydon back over to the right side and move Jon Martin back over to the left where he is most comfortable so that he can be the primary backup to Jake Long. I'm not saying close the book on Martin at right tackle forever, but two games into this preseason and I'm not sure I've seen a single good block from that side. I don't care how smart and conscientious he is. He's conscientiously getting his *** handed to him with a pretty bow on it.

And Olivier Vernon? Where were you drafted again? Oh the 3rd round? Because I could swear you were just a 7th round special teams prospect. You sure? 3rd round? Really? Ok, well if you didn't have 3rd round worth of sunken cost invested in you, you'd only be on this team because a few times tonight you made some plays on special teams.

Seriously, where the hell was the pressure? I DID NOT RECORD A SINGLE WIN IN PASS RUSH THE ENTIRE FIRST HALF. Not a single one. None. Zilch. Nada. I'm not talking about pressures. I'm not talking about hits on quarterback. I'm talking about a single WIN. Any gaining of leverage over the offensive tackle to where if the play had gone on indefinitely I believe you would have gotten to the quarterback...would have qualified as a win. None. Didn't have a single one.

Oh wow this guy is SOOOO GOOD in practice! Yippeee!

And you know what Jamaal Westerman wasn't MUCH better, but he WAS better. At least that ******* could actually get off the snap with some pop in his step, maybe one out of three pass plays.

Jared Odrick experiment at left end is thus far going exactly how I feared. Does this guy make plays against the run? Absodoodleydoo. But he has NOTHING (and I emphasize the nothingness implied by that word) in pass rush from that side and when they kicked him into the interior, I saw nothing from him there, either. At least Randy Starks still got penetration. Hell, Paul Soliai was a better pass rusher than Jared Odrick tonight. Paul Soliai!!! I'm not even joking, I counted.

The brownie points Jason Trusnik scored last week by being a mad man at Koa Misi's spot...he erased them tonight. I don't want to be too hard on the dude because he was playing MIKE from what I could tell and I don't think he's destined for that spot...and that's assuming he should ever see the 1st unit at all which I don't know that he should.

At least he didn't get bukkakke'd as much as Gary Guyton tonight.

Chris Clemons did create that fumble and that was pretty keen. It really harkened back to the play he made against the Steelers on the goal line. You know, the fumble we totally recovered that the referees stole from us? Anyway, Clemons didn't even give the replacement refs the opportunity to screw this one up. It was clear cut. The problem is, I liked very little of everything else he did. He was late picking up players in his quarters zones. He missed a tackle on the first play of the game. He got bulldozed at least once.

Jimmy Wilson wasn't better. He had a perfect shot at the ball carrier on the goal line but he stuck his toe in the water and did the pee pee dance instead of engaging. Later I had him screwing up several times in his run fill assignments and then I had him playing too far off the lightning fast Kealoha Pilares on the slant and allowing the biggest LEGITIMATE play of the half.

Oh and I say LEGITIMATE because I thought that pass interference on Sean Smith's interception was complete bull ****.

Way to come back into frame, Vontae. Nice 15 yard personal foul penalty, *******. He couldn't just actually be satisfied with playing good football, could he? He couldn't make the gain on Richard Marshall (who ate a bag of ***** several times tonight in coverage and even in his vaunted run support) and then be done with it. He had to be a selfish prick. Well, that's why he won't be playing with the Dolphins in 2014.

Back on the offensive side of things...anything we can do to get a receiver...Jeff Ireland needs to be making some phone calls now. It's clear Davone Bess is the only competent guy we have out there while Hartline continues to nurse the LONGEST RECOVERING CALF STRAIN EVER. Legedu Naathere was invisible. Hey but at least he's got no holes in his game, right Omar? Roberto Wallace showed that when the defense isn't playing a soft zone and letting him find the holes between, he is indeed having trouble separating. Marlon Moore could separate but couldn't consistently catch the ball.

I mean, damn...let's get some help, please. You can't go into a football season with your own General Manager admitting that all you have are a bunch of 3's, 4's and 5's. That's pretty damn negligent.

Didn't watch the 2nd Half yet. Probably won't be able to get to it until tomorrow night, to be honest.

Anyway, sweet dreams folks. Any dream will look sweet after that half of football.

 

And people say I never give Jeff Ireland the benefit of the doubt.

 

Absolutely 100% his fault for getting involved in that. Not even a question.

 

I thought Sean Smith's penalty broke down to his sticking his arm out slightly while looking up for the ball, and that's the key in it. He was looking up the whole time. The grab you describe I am pretty sure happened before the ball was in the air and IF it is called, which it usually isn't, is no more than a 5 yard penalty. Even if you think the ball was in the air when that grab occurred, it was pretty early on the route which means a 10-15 yard DPI flag. But in my opinion the ball was not in the air. When the ball was in the air, Smith was looking back for it and played the ball while sticking his bck arm SLIGHTLY out. He didn't have it chest high, which is what the (real) officials are trained to look for. Steve Smith made a veteran savvy move knowing he wasn't going to outrun Sean (which is amazing in and of itself) and grabbed onto the arm that Sean left out there, essentially flopping. The replacement refs fell for it.