After Dirk Koetter was hired to replace Lovie Smith as head

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After Dirk Koetter was hired to replace Lovie Smith as head

Сообщение liny195 20 сен 2019, 04:48

of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2016 Ryan Jensen Jersey , he hired his own former head coach Mike Smith to run the defense. They had been together in Atlanta for several seasons before being fired in favor of Dan Quinn and Kyle Shanahan. Perhaps there’s something to be said about familiarity. Perhaps there’s more to be said about nepotism and hiring friends, as opposed to the best people you can find for the job.The Bucs had struggled for years to put together a good defense. Lovie’s last defense in 2015 had finished 26th vs the pass and ninth against the rush using an antiquated base scheme that was predictable and soft. He had hired his two sons, who were arguably unqualified, along with guys who had no NFL coaching experience or had so many years they were retired before Lovie brought them on. While the national media railed agains the Bucs for terminating him, the firing was justified. In Mike “Smitty” Smith’s first year coordinating the defense, they were ranked sixth vs the pass and 26th vs the rush. But it was all smoke and mirrors, a ranking built on unsustainable turnover luck that hid a defense among the worst in giving up yards through the air. Predictably, the turnover luck ran out, and in 2017 the defense bottomed out as the worst in the NFL. They had the worst adjusted sack rate in the league, at 4.3 percent, more than two percent worse than an average defense. His quarters and cover three coverages were predictable and soft.In May 2018, Mike Smith had this to say: They had nowhere to go but up. Or so we thought. Through the first three games of 2018, not only has the defense not gotten better from its league-low mark, it has regressed even further. Whereas last season they finished 11.7 percent worse than average on a per-play basis, through three games in 2018 they have been 21 percent worse than how an average defense could be expected to perform. And that was before being gashed by pedestrian young quarterback Mitchell Trubisky on Sunday.This, despite overhauling the defense with seven new players. They signed Vinny Curry, Beau Allen, and Mitch Unrein in free agency, traded for edge rusher Jason Pierre-Paul, and drafted nose tackle Vita Vea in the first round and cornerbacks Carlton Davis and M.J. Stewart in the second round. Despite all the new players along the defensive line, through three games their adjusted sack rate was a below-average 5.5 percent, just 1.2 percent better than last season’s league-low mark and 1.5 percent lower than the current league average. In short, it is the second-worst defense in Tampa Bay history, second only to the worst pass defense of all time, the 1986 Bucs, who had a DVOA of 26.1 percent. And that was before letting Trubisky throw for six touchdowns. From the Bucs’ blowout loss to the Bears on Sunday:How could they possibly be so much worse despite adding so many better players?In 2004 the NFL changed the rules regarding pass defense, and the league experienced an explosion in passing and passing efficiency. With it had to come a change in philosophy - defenses needed to key on stopping the pass. While Adrian Peterson and Chris Johnson managed 2,000 yards rushing in 2012 and 2009 respectively, they are outliers; the last flashes of a different, now dead era. The league is, with the help of strictly enforced roughing-the-passer rules and the full-blown league-wide adoption of modern spread passing concepts, currently going through another explosion in passing efficiency in 2018. Mike Smith had this to say before the 2018 season:I get it. At least in theory. If you can stop the run on first down, you can force defenses into third-and-long passing-down situations that heavily favor defenses. And the league does, or did, have a problem with running on first down too much. That 2016 defense was good on third-downs. It’s not just Mike Smith that’s living in the past, though. Dirk Koetter is too. They both have repeatedly shown a misguided fixation on the importance of the running game. What’s so disturbing is they hold this early-2000s viewpoint right in the midst of the greatest passing explosion the league has ever seen. See, the problem is it’s now easier and more efficient than ever to pass. Teams don’t need to ever run except in short-yardage situations and inside the five-yard line. The passing game has become so extreme that when team’s run outside of those situations they are mathematically leaving yards on the field by choosing to do something less efficient. You do it for the sake of being less predictable. What’s ironic is Mike Smith’s defense would probably only be good at defending an offense being play-called by Dirk Koetter.But that doesn’t explain what the Bucs are doing, and why it’s not working Noah Spence Jersey , or how we got here. To answer that, we have to go back to what Mike Smith tried to do in Atlanta. In this 2014 article written just after Mike Smith was fired by Atlanta, Falcons owner Arthur Blank made the following illuminating comments:Vita Vea, anyone? Beau Allen? Vinny Curry? Does this sound familiar?Koetter hired Smith and gave him the go-ahead and another chance to build his scheme. And like Dimitroff, Tampa Bay general manager Jason Licht has done his job to facilitate Smitty’s philosophy. The issue is the philosophy itself. Then there’s this excellent Ringer piece from January 2017:You can build a defense front to back, reliant on a tremendous front seven to help cover a less-talented secondary, as the Panthers have done successfully for years. Or you can build back to front, with insane playmakers in the secondary. Or you can do both, like the Jacksonville Jaguars have done. What Smith ended up doing in Atlanta was take their even-front (4 defensive linemen) players and added odd-front players.The result was a unit that didn’t have enough players to run either scheme effectively.I can partially see the philosophy. He wanted Vea to be his Paul Soliai. You draft Vea to two-gap, eat blockers and space. To hold the line of scrimmage against the running game. Keep your speedy linebackers free and clean to make plays. That in theory allows more one-on-one matchups for your All-Pro 3-tech Gerald McCoy, and for Pro-Bowler Jason Pierre-Paul and QB-pressure machine Vinny Curry. That should lead to long third downs right?But despite making his NFL debut vs the Bears and playing 54 percent of the snaps, Vea has missed so much time, and his backup, Beau Allen, is also hurt. Vea looked like what he was coming out of Washington - a two-down nose tackle. And the Bucs have been decimated in the secondary with injuries as well. That might help explain Trubisky’s historic day. But it doesn’t explain being the worst defense in the league two years in a row.Smith has made the same mistakes in Tampa Bay that he did in Atlanta. Few teams run strictly two-gap schemes anymore. They are usually one-gap or hybrid gaps, which is what this Smith scheme is. That’s fine, in theory, as long as the goal is to get upfield to rush the passer. But the Bucs’ execution leaves much to be desired. The Bucs have Gerald McCoy, who is a fit for a one-gap scheme, along with linebackers Lavonte David and Kwon Alexander, and edge rusher Jason Pierre-Paul. Then they have two-gappers, like Vita Vea and William Gholston and Vinny Curry. Edge rusher Noah Spence has regressed after trying to make him a 4-3 edge rusher, then having him add weight. Controlling the line of scrimmage isn’t enough. You have to be disruptive.Add to it small off-coverage cornerbacks like the soon-to-be-retired Brent Grimes, and trying to mold 2016’s first-round pick Vernon Hargreaves III into something similar. They’ve paired them with big lengthy cornerbacks who should be playing in press-man coverage like Carlton Davis and maybe even Ryan Smith, with smaller nickel cornerbacks like M.J. Stewart. The result is even when healthy this Bucs defense is a mixed-up mismatched hodge-podge of players.Smith, in the golden age of passing, believes that having a strong run-stopping interior backed by soft coverage to prevent big plays is the key to great defensive play. He believes players can play in zone with an eye on the quarterback and break on the ball. Except turnovers are largely based on luck. The result is the Bucs can’t stop anything, or at least nothing that matters. They can’t rush the passer. They aren’t in position to contest catches. And they can’t tackle to limit yards after the catch. They can’t even defend the edge in the run game.But the idea is to get teams to third-and-long. Keep everything in front of you and rally to the football.The Bears game on Sunday is a microcosm exposing the problem of his philosophy:The running game has become irrelevant as the NFL is quickly becoming a position-less league. Safety-linebacker hybrids like Derwin James, or safety-cornerback hybrids like Minkah Fitzpatrick are being drafted to combat wide receiver-tight end hybrids like O.J. Howard and Evan Engram. Or wide receiver-running back hybrids like 100-reception players Alvin Kamara and Christian McCaffrey, who are coincidentally on the Bucs’ schedule four times a year. When even running backs are just catching passes, how important is stopping the run? Enough to base your entire defense around it? What if I told you that philosophy as a base scheme has gone the way of the Tampa 2? What if your pass defense is so bad and predictable no one needs to run against you anyway?And so Mike Smith, enabled by Jason Licht but especially Dirk Koetter, has repeated his mistakes from Atlanta. A failed experiment twice-over.It is difficult to argue someone should lose their job. That they should have to uproot their family. But Mike Smith is untenable. He has created a situation that will take years to fix. And that’s if his replacement has a clear vision, the steadfast ability to execute that vision with the rest of the front office, and only if that vision is compatible with the evolution of the NFL. Mike Smith’s tenure in Tampa Bay has failed to do any of those things. Will Dirk Koetter’s mistake doom his own tenure in Tampa Bay? We may find out this season. It appears left tackle Donovan Smith will be staying in Tampa for the 2019 season one way or another.Rick Stroud of the reports that the Buccaneers are expected to use the franchise tag on Smith before Tuesday afternoon’s deadline to put it in place. The tag comes with a salary of $14.067 million should Smith sign it and play out the year under those terms.Stroud adds that talks about a longer deal have been going well and that an agreement could come at some point after the deadline. The two sides would have until July 15 to work out a multi-year deal if the tag is in place.Smith has started all 64 games the Bucs have played since selecting him in the second round of the 2015 draft. He ranked No. 25 on PFT’s list of the top 100 free agents and taking him off the market would leave Trent Brown, Ja'Wuan James and Daryl Williams as the top impending free agent tackles.
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