FOXBOROUGH - CoachSpeak is back again with yours truly. They use words, and I am here to interpret them in my own unique way.
Today, it's all Bill O'Brien all the time. To his credit, the man remained upbeat, a stark contrast to how we've seen him look on the sidelines several times during this three-game losing streak.
What about the offensive line? “Look, they're fighting, you know, I think that there's been some injuries up front. There's some young guys playing there - these aren't excuses - these are facts. And so those guys there's times where, you know, the run game look really clean, like really good. You know, the first run of the second half, Rhamondre’s run, was a very well blocked play. There were certain times where the protection is great. Other times, you know, we all have to do a better job of making sure that we're more consistent in how we perform. So the consistency is the big key, and that's what we're working on.
On that front is that eliminating maybe some of the things that you can do because you have younger players and inexperienced players that maybe have to work around that a little bit? “I think one of the big things is we have a system in which there's a lot of different things we can do. We have a lot of tools in the toolbox and every week we have to pick out the right tools. So I think that's that is really more to do with like I was saying before the coaches and the players working together ‘ ‘Hey, this is the plan,’ this is how we want to attack these guys this week and go out there and do it. I don't think we really think about, hey, we can't do this. We can't - we think about what we can do. And we think about that a lot. Like this is what we can do. Let's go do it.
Giardi interpretation: O'Brien is saying the right things about this group, trying to make sure he doesn't air them out publicly because that's no way to win over a young group that featured two rookies starting at guard (Atonio Mafi and Sidy Sow) and 2nd-year right tackle Vederian Lowe, who barely played for Minnesota as a rookie, in Las Vegas. But it's pretty clear that this group has hamstrung the offense as a whole, from pass protection to inconsistent work in the run game to the dumb penalties happening weekly. It dug the team a hole on the opening drive, then again helped to hamper their last chance in the final quarter. It's not September anymore. Improve or get out. The only problem with that? Where do they turn? These young players are getting opportunities because of injuries to Cole Strange, Michael Onwenu, and Riley Reiff (who made it back for one game before bowing out again). It is hard to enforce change when you don't have the bodies to do it.
As for the overall plan Sunday, the Pats game was dumbed down to such a level that they could have run any of their four quarterbacks in there and not lost too much (except for Mac's ability to change plays). That's damning. It was the quick game, with Jones not trusting the protection because they've given him no reason to believe they'll keep him clean. It's messy.
Will Malk Cunningham be the backup quarterback going forward?
“That'll be week to week depending on different things that go on. I mean, you could see him at different spots throughout the offense, obviously other than offensive line. He can play a lot of different places. So it'll be week to week based on the game plan. And we're pretty early in this week. So I would say I don't think we have any idea where that would be this week.”
How do you balance wanting to use him in a variety of ways and also not maybe overloading his plate?
“You put together a package of plays and you try not to overload them, and they’re plays within our system. So you're not like - these aren't brand new plays - they're plays within our system and we try to do a good job. He's a very bright guy. He does a good job. He knows the plays, and he's gotten better every week.”
What have you seen from Malik in terms of like, what made you want to make that decision to bring him up?
“He can do a lot of different things. And so I think that was a decision that Bill and Matt made. I don't make those decisions to bring him up. They they make all those decisions in the best interest of the team, where the team is at at the moment, and and that's why they made the decision.”
Giardi interpretation: You'll notice that O'Brien made clear he didn't make the decision to put Cunningham on the active roster as the number two QB. Considering how little he had practiced at the position until the week prior, it would have been asking a lot to put Cunningham in the game for anything other than a small package of plays, which is what makes that decision so damning - to Bailey Zappe, the usual backup - and also about the entire operation. Like, what the hell would have gone down had Mac gone down in the first series? Wildcat? O'Brien has to be off the headset when the play clock strikes 15 seconds. Do you know how much a defense changes and can change from 15 to the snap? EVERYTHING. Yes, the word from inside the building is Cunningham is an intelligent kid, but that could have been setting him up for abject failure. If they want to go this route, he needs to get out of the wide receiver room and be with O'Brien, QB coach Evan Rothstein, and whoever else deals with the signal callers. I do not favor this right now, for what it's worth. If you want him in there, give him all the snaps leading up to the game, perhaps after the bye, leading to a game against the dreadful New York Giants.
The fact that Malik was the backup - did that that suggest you have confidence in him that if something happened to Mac that you were comfortable with him taking over? Given Bailey was the emergency quarterback? Is that a fair assessment?
“Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, for that week, you know for that game, that's what we decided to do in that game. I think it's week to week, doesn't mean we haven't I think what, you know, maybe you're asking is that we lost confidence in Bailey. We haven't lost any confidence and Bailey, we felt like That was the best way to go about it for the Raider game based on where we were, where we were from an injury standpoint and things like that. How do we get Malik Cunningham into the game and that was the best way to get them into the game? So that'll be from week to week. And you know, we have a lot of confidence in the players that we have on game day and you know, the guys that are inactive, maybe they're inactive because of injury or whatever. We got a lot of confidence in the guys that we're working with.”
Giardi translation: I touched on this above. In talking to a couple of sources within the building, they've said Zappe has yet to remotely look like the same guy this year and what he did when we saw him play 2-plus games in the regular season last year. Bad spring. Bad summer. Bad fall. Another draft pick - he was a 4th rounder - that is going in the wrong direction. Not great, Bob (or Bill, in this case).
Asked about the Parker drop and maybe that could have been the difference. Is it as simple say that, hey, guys, we're really close with one play away, or do you have to look at it more than fidelity?
“I think that's a fair question. That's kind of what I was saying in the beginning. Like there's a very small margin for error. It wasn't just about that play. I mean, there were several plays that went on in the game that we either made the play, we didn't make the play, and if we can make the plays and make the right coaching decisions and understand that maybe, usually, there's about let's just call it six to eight plays in an NFL football game that make the difference in the game and we're not making those plays right now. And we've got to eliminate that. We have to make those plays. And I think if we do that, we'll turn it around.”
Giardi translation: Too often, the six or eight plays are disasters - Mac turnovers that end up in the end zone as they did twice versus the Cowboys and once versus the Saints. Or the interception in Vegas that likely took points off the board. But it goes much deeper than that, that there are sometimes double and triple the amount of plays that have gone awry. No team can overcome that, let alone this team, which is talent-deficient in far too many areas, fight through just a handful of miscues, let alone double or triple that. This group has many error repeaters. If you had depth, O'Brien and the coaches could make changes. They don't. So they have to live and die with their personnel, and as the record suggests, there's a lot more of the latter than the former.