Problem is the Dolphins aren't playing the HUNH. If they were I might actually be for that. They should have enough talent to make it work. Lazor is talking big about speeding up the process from huddle to snap. We don't know how much of that is just talk. Sort of like when a coach preaches "urgency". Sometimes it's just talk. When it becomes more than talk is when you sacrifice something for the sake of the tempo being fast. They're not sacrificing a huddle and they're not sacrificing taking the play clock down. Lazor has already stated that. So if they're REALLY doing anything different then what he must have in mind to be sacrificing is the ability of the offense to make adjustments as they approach the line and while they're on the line. What I keep arguing with DJ about is he keeps trying to sneak that ability back in through the back door. It's so easy, right? You just take a couple of play calls with you to the line of scrimmage and have them in your "back pocket" and then just make one little hand wave and everyone knows what the play is. That'll work, right? No, not really. You either have the ability to change the calls or you don't. The Dolphins have been operating with a dual-play-call system for two years where Ryan Tannehill can "kill" the first play call by making a kill call at the line. That's already been happening. So DJ's idea is already what's been going on. No real change will have occurred if that's all they have in mind. On the other hand maybe they do have in mind making a play call in the huddle and running the call regardless of the defensive look. That's a possibility. It's a cost-benefit. If doing that allows you to snap the football fast enough that the defense is less effective perhaps you feel the benefit outweighs the cost of being unable to get yourself out of bad plays. Personally I don't imagine any NFL offense surviving like that. We will just have to see what they have in mind. Talk is cheap. If we see that they're really giving something up in order to speed up the tempo specifically from huddle to snap, that'll be interesting and we will see if it works.
WIthout getting too technical, I will say it would be nice to have a faster paced offense. I would argue that traditionally, our offense is one of the slowest paced attacks in football. Almost unwatchable at times. So many of the passing plays took too long develop which was another reason we took so many sacks. The 2 minute offense was horrendous. It's hard to suddenly try and play fast when you are always playing so slow. We got fooled into thinking Philbin was installing a fast paced offense when he came and it ended up a huge let down. When we finally got to see the "new" offense in action, it was the same fricken speed that we have been doing for the past 15 years. I can't help but be excited about Lazor. There is a good reason to believe that we will at least be a faster pace offense than we were. I'm not expecting a Patriots/Eagles pace but anything faster will be a plus.
When you are in the spread, you can run or pass out of the formation..if it's first down, and the offense comes out of the huddle in very quick fashion( kinda like what Brady does sometimes near the goal line), how is the defense gonna committ to anything but their base defense?, their not, if we can catch up to the tempo this guy is preaching, I don't see why we can't do the same thing on 2nd down, regardless of down and distance, if they happen to guess right and deploy a formation that fits with what were trying to do, then have your audible, if they don't, then win for us right? Just trying to understand what this guy is going for, there has to be a reason why he said what he said.
I'm just excited we're actually talking about offense. I just want points. I don't want to be bored when watching Phins games this year. I don't know how much more i can take.
What they are wanting, is what Payton and Brady are doing. They want a smart QB to control the offense and catch the D off guard, weather it be by tempo, audible, or fake audible. It doesn't matter what you call it, it comes down to the QB being able to quickly recognize what the D is doing and the players executing a complex play design. I'm skeptical because I don't think Tannehill is there yet. He showed little recognition, command or presence last year. Granted he didn't have very much help from the coaches or players.
I don't get why it's one side or the other. There can be many aspects to "speeding things up" rather than just huddle to snap.and it's not like there can't be any audibles. We're not coaches and we don't exactly know the details of his plan. If people like Chip Kelly can be known or considered to run a "fast paced offense", than others can as well. If a defense is completely overloaded to one side, I'm sure there will be a way to quickly audible to another option. They're not idiots....I hope. On the other hand, it could just be coach speak. Like whenever a team hires a new D Coordinator, that said coordinator will always say "we're going to be a tough and aggressive D. We're going to attack the football", etc, etc, etc. That always cracks me up. What's he going to say?.."we're going to play slow, wimpy and scared", etc.
Your saying some of the things I'm trying to articulate, like I said, I ain't no D -Pate, but I'm confident in what I see and feel. I heard what I heard, I'm very confident in what he meant, and I see the benefits of trying to make it work, now whether it's been done before for long stretches of games, no, it has never happened at this level, but maybe the mother is crazy enough to think it can, what I'm doing is trying to figure out why it can't, and none of the reasons I've heard deter me from thinking differently. Using the clock from within the huddle, breaking it at warp speed, lining up and dictating to the defense is something that I think hasn't been tapped into, now you have given me reasons why it won't sustain, which are, because no one else has done it, well, that's not good enough, unprecedented things happen all the time. Some of the quotes from our defenders are seemingly right in order of what he's trying to do..I really don't think when finnegan says "the tempo is something he's never seen before","and how good it is for them", or, " there are players running around trying to find their assignments"I don't think he's talking about some traditional two minute offense, I actually think he's talking about how they break the huddle, line up, and snap the ball.
so take what I'm saying, and sprinkle some of what your saying, and that's what I'm saying, know what I'm sayin.
Watching Lazor's interview again specifically where he stated the meaning of tempo to him and this is what he said, paraphrasing a bit: What I got from hearing that is: 1) I think the main focus in this is speeding up the processing time pre-snap so that the defense will get caught off guard. I don't think he wants the offense to come out of the huddle and snap the ball instantly without even looking at what the defense has laid out in front of them . IMO the most important thing he wants is that the players get lined up quickly, motion quickly and everyone to know their assignments. 2) That last sentence (and pretty much the whole quote) leads me to believe that there will be some no-huddle sprinkled on depending on the situation they come across.
You think the reason playing blind football won't sustain is just because nobody's doing it??? Heaven help you. You're proposing that the offense dial back the hands of time and play blind to what the defense is doing. The play call is the play call, no matter what. There's a reason teams have moved away from that over the last few decades.
This is exactly right, IMO. What DJ is proposing (which is different from what you're describing) would be turning the hands of the clock back on football a number of decades to times when the play call was the play call and teams ran it regardless. Football IQ has developed so much since then that I'm surprised anyone would propose that. Again exactly right. But there was no-huddle last year too. The Eagles and Dolphins both ran a lot of plays in the 1st and 2nd quarters and those play counts declined sharply in the 3rd and 4th quarters as both teams tried to take the clock down with leads in hand.
"We won't be flying to the ball, we will be deliberate. We need to avoid forcing turnovers." I can imagine the terrible press conference.
The problem with the no-huddle we ran last year is that the players seemed do it with very little urgency. I remember there were a lot of times where I was yelling at the TV when the players were walking nonchalantly up to the LOS. This is probably something Lazor saw in the tape and noticed that he needed to fix it, and hence the big emphasis on tempo.
That remains to be seen. A lot of that is a choice. Some teams run the no-huddle but they're not necessarily in hurry up. The HUNH is still a scary choice for some coaches. You're either committed to it or you're not. If you're committed to it I think you usually have to structure your whole team around it. You can't just stick your toe in the water. The hurry up on the other hand is a way for you to increase tempo (without necessarily increasing it to a blinding speed) AND to get it so that the other team can't put in their personnel sub packages. It doesn't sound yet like the Dolphins will be committed to HUNH football. Sounds more like marginal increases in tempo when they're in huddle mode, but that doesn't necessarily mean that when they're in no-huddle mode they're going to full HUNH. Their no-huddle could still primarily be what I've heard dubbed a "sugar huddle", "muddle huddle" or "honey huddle". It sounds like Lazor wants all of the players to play with "urgency" (which most coaches want) and so he's going to keep harping on them for their speed as they go from huddle to snap. But he still wants them to make their presnap reads, to get into their motions, etc. He's not sacrificing anything. He just wants the players to play fast. He also wants the ball to come out of Tannehill's hand faster which would be borderline absurd considering how he held the football among the shortest average times in the league last year. I'm going to file this stuff into the "talk is cheap" file until we see evidence of things that they're actually sacrificing in order to increase the pace.
Am I crazy here, is this not what I've been trying to get across? He's saying exactly what I've been trying to tell to y'all, from the break of the huddle to the snap of the ball, he wants to expedite that process ASAP..with the goal of snapping the freakin ball before they have time to align their players.
what I think is, that there's room for variation, I'm not saying every time, I've said in this thread to have variables, some outlets, and to just talk about the concept, can it be done in some fashion..it happens situationally, but apparently suggesting and agreeing that our offensive coordinator is thinking on a larger scale me and I need help..lol
I'm confused, are the fins playing the no huddle this year or not? I would assume a Philbin team with a former Chip Kelly employed qb coach would use it. What killed the the Dolphins last year was the lack of a reliable run game. It doesn't matter how fast you're going if it's 3rd and long all the time.
I think that many were missing the point. Finnegan said. ” I've never seen anything this fast (me - snd he's been around the NFL some). It’s great. It’s going to be great for us as an offense and defense. To go against one another, compete at this level and do it with this many bullets flying and people running around. So I’m enjoying it.” Finnegan says the Dolphins’ defense can’t help but get better with the way the Dolphins’ offense is practicing. “I think it’s great what the offense is giving us. It’s going to help us game time. Game speed’s going to definitely be slowed down for us and we appreciate it...” With the new CBA and shorter and less practices this may be a way of getting them into better shape and slowing the game down as he said. Anything they can do to get the team more mentally and physically prepared is a plus in my book. As someone said, the 2 minute offense wasn't that great. Hopefully this helps in that preparation. If you see a weakness you need to as a coach install some type of reps in practice to address this. This could be a way of stressing and reinforcing that phase of the game.
I'm always surprised that offenses don't come up and snap the ball when defenses aren't set. You get a D lineman squatting, doesn't even have his weight forward or maybe even not have a hand down, and you can blow that guy up. It doesn't have to happen a lot, but if early in the game you do it a few times the defense is forced to hustle a little more, and stay in their stance longer too.
I think it comes down to being aggressive and in attack mode on offense - and that doesn't mean pass all the time, but balanced. One huge variable in the tempo and the pace of the offense is Tannehill having the confidence to make the right read and release the ball on time. He has had a tendency to hold onto the ball a bit too long and double pump a bit. As Lazor has emphasized, he needs to time his steps and throw in rhythm with the offense. That will speed things up as long as a) protections are not immediately breaking down; b) receivers are getting open; c) RT makes a good read; and d) he has the courage to pull the trigger. He really has to not fear the INT but trust the offense and his own reads. While I'd have liked to have added a better weapon or two, I think the offense, with everyone healthy, has enough weapons to be effective and impactful.
The offensive players clearly have the advantage in knowing where their going to line up, if practiced even more, maybe there is something there to go deeper into and try to exploit, we've seen it done situationally, but maybe on a bigger scale, idk, that's what I'm trying to figure out if that's what Lazor is thinking.
If you do this early in the game with sucess, it can force a couple of offside penalties later on if you take a little longer to snap the ball. Keep the defense guessing, when they think they've got us figured out, come out of the huddle, call audibles, fake the snap, and run the clock down.
I do think there is room to gain an edge by snapping the ball quickly and not letting the defense get a good handle on the offensive formation before the snap. That said, there is some tension between doing that and using a lot of players in motion, which I am also hearing. They are both designed to do the same thing, but conflict in a sense in that you can't snap it that quickly if you have multiple guys in motion. Lazor worked under Joe Gibbs for a while and a major feature of the Gibbs offense was running relatively few plays but each from multiple different formations/looks. For example, they would run the counter trey from a variety of different alignments. One of the major benefits of that is that the offense can focus on and "perfect" a limited number of plays but the defense will be kept guessing as to which one it is. I think the read option plays into that quite well. I expect well see some no-huddle and some quick snap/no motion stuff too.
This up tempo stuff is way over blown, I'm guessing it has more to so w getting as many snaps as possible on film and speeding the install of the offense than planning for September & beyond.
If I'm Lazor I'm thinking there are a very limited number of practices so Id better use the time I have as efficiently as possible. I doubt he's even thought about the regular season yet. Jmo.
