Playing Down to Inferior Opponents

actually it did not work. They did have 200 plus rushing yards in the first half. ONLY after the team went away from the inital game plan did it begin to stop them. One that they should have started the game with. 8 men in the box shoulda been a given considering who their QB is.

 

There was a clear decision to be conservative offensively, and it absolutely fits a pattern during the Philbin years.

If Tannehill makes some sort of early mistake, they'll go ultra conservative and turtle for the rest of the half. They'll come out in the 3rd quarter and give it another shot, and it'll frequently work quite well, until something else invariably occurs, and they'll again attempt to simply keep it close until the end of the game, where there's no margin for error at all. It's such an incredibly anti-productive philosophy it's ridiculous, and it absolutely ties into the defense.

 

there were a couple times where I saw the defender just kinda stand there while the RB ran past them. I was screaming DO SOMETHING!

 

How did we win with no margin for error? We played far from perfect.

 

That's a fair point, to a certain degree. But the offense really wasn't any more conservative than it usually is. It failed to score due to lack of execution and a few nice plays by the Jets, not because of anything the Dolphin defense was doing or not doing. But I do agree that a strategy to allow the Jets to control the clock and keep the game close was not a good one for the Dolphins.

 

But they hardly have an alternative. They don't have the quick-strike, Peyton Manning-esque, "you-score-a-FG-in-8-minutes-and-we'll-score-a-TD-in-2" sort of offense. If a team controls the clock with the run, the Dolphins' answer can still be only the run game itself, coupled with the short passing game. That's what they're limited to, I'm afraid.

 

We actually move the ball down the field fairly quickly..

I wonder.. do you have access to the stats that actually show the number of balls we have completed at each depth. I feel like we complete a lot of mid range 15-20 yards balls as well.

 

I don't think it was normally conservative, so much as it was the kind of game management the team frequently lapses into when Philbin feels "queasy"

 

But I think he's queasy much of the time. At least he looks it.

 

I think about this possibility a lot, and I come up with a chicken/egg dilemma: does crappy execution make Philbin get queasy or does Philbin's queasiness trickle down to the players, who then execute like crap?