Official “The Athletic” thread
- Thread starter Anerdyblackguy
- Start date
-
- Tags
- the athletic
Just as he did precisely a calendar year earlier, James Borrego slid into the chair behind the podium, his face and beard illuminated by the bright lights inside Spectrum Center’s interview room.
But unlike in his rookie season as the Hornets’ coach, when he had nervous energy zipping through his veins, there was a certain coolness wafting around him. Borrego seemed in complete command and prepared to get the most out of a team that will not have Kemba Walker to bail it out for the first time in eight years.
“I feel like it’s slowed down a tremendous amount for me,” Borrego said Monday. “After you’ve done it one year, I know what to expect. I feel much more comfortable right now as we head into camp, ready to grow, ready to learn again this season. I couldn’t be more excited with this group, ready to go.”
Before they truly tip off things at training camp at Dean Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Tuesday, here’s what’s important to know from the Hornets’ media day.
1. Rozier has had enough with the Walker analogies
From the moment talk first surfaced of a potential sign-and-trade with Boston for Terry Rozier following Kemba Walker’s departure, it hasn’t died down much. Rozier is growing a bit weary of it.
There are, of course, inevitable comparisons — pro and con — of Walker and Rozier.
Although Rozier can appreciate Walker’s style of play and what he brought to the Hornets, he’s getting tired of the lazy narrative.
“It’s annoying because I’m not him, and I don’t look to be him and I’m not,” Rozier said. “And I get it. He is Kemba. He did a lot for this organization. Leading scorer, that’s hard to replace, and being me, I’m looking to push this organization in a different way.”
Expect that to be Rozier’s main theme in his first season with the Hornets.
“I’m just different,” he said. “I’m competitive as hell. I’m not saying that he’s not. I’m talking about me. We are two different players, two different guys. I’m just as competitive as hell. I want to win. I play both sides of the ball and I’m just going to go out there and have some fun. I don’t have all the answers. I just want to play ball. I don’t want to do all the extra.”
Terry Rozier is set out to prove he’s a different player than the departed Kemba Walker. (Jeremy Brevard / USA Today)
2. MKG isn’t happy
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was a man of few words.
Well, at least to the media. He had a couple of choice ones for Marvin Williams after they passed each other in the interview room, tossing a verbal grenade at Williams’ feet when he asked why he didn’t hit him back Sunday after he reached out. Kidd-Gilchrist knew there was no need because he was sure why Williams was dialing him up.
“How ’bout them Redskins? shyt,” Kidd-Gilchrist shot at Williams, eliciting laughter in the room, thanks to Washington’s 0-4 record. “I don’t answer the phone on Sundays because I’m a Redskins fan and we are terrible right now, so I bet that’s what he was talking about.”
Kidd-Gilchrist, however, wasn’t in much of a mood to talk about his situation.
As The Athletic reported this offseason, with the Hornets’ youth movement in full effect, Kidd-Gilchrist will be the odd man out of the rotation. He pretty much confirmed that when asked where he believes he fits in with the team.
“I don’t know,” Kidd-Gilchrist said.
Kidd-Gilchrist also hinted he thought about a change of scenery when mulling over whether to exercise his one-year, $13 million player option before deciding to return. Family, he indicated, was the determining factor.
“My kids, my son and my family,” he said. “I had thought about the fact of opting out for day in and day out, and my two kids helped play a big role in me opting in. And that’s the truth.”
It would be beyond shocking if it isn’t Kidd-Gilchrist’s last season with the team. When asked if wants wanted to be with Charlotte long term, Kidd-Gilchrist skirted around the query.
“I love MJ,” he said, referring to Hornets owner Michael Jordan. “To think that this is my eighth year here is crazy to me and I have no further answer to that question.”
3. Bacon is excited to get down to business
Pegged as the likely starter at shooting guard, Dwayne Bacon’s time in the spotlight has arrived.
Those flashes he displayed at the tail end of last season got the organization excited, thinking if he put in a nice offseason, he could pick up where he left off after posting 12.6 points in 13 games as a starter. He focused on the tasks asked of him by the staff, and it has positioned Bacon as a go-to guy.
That is something he isn’t taking lightly.
“It’s special for me,” Bacon said. “A lot of people still don’t think I can do what I do. But I feel like I showed that toward the end of the year and I feel like it only gets better. I put in a lot of work this summer, did a lot of things, was here pretty much all summer and I’m just ready to play now.”
Bacon has gained Borrego’s trust and it’s given him confidence to show and prove that in a fashion the organization not have thought was possible.
“I don’t look at it as people missed what I can do,” he said. “They just weren’t sure, I feel like. And after you saw my end of the year last year, I feel like a lot more people are sure but still have questions. So, with a full year of me exploring what I can do, showing people what I can really do, then they will get the picture. By next year, I won’t have any questions, doubters. You’ll see.”
Dwayne Bacon (Jeremy Brevard / USA Today)
4. Batum is prepared to shoulder more responsibility offensively
Fresh off his performance with France in the FIBA World Cup, Nic Batum said he is in solid playing shape. That’s probably a good thing considering the extra burden he will have to shoulder.
With Walker and Jeremy Lamb gone, the Hornets have to somehow replace their scoring, which is where Batum comes in. They need him to get closer to the 14.9 and 15.1 point-per-game averages he posted in his first two seasons in Charlotte. He’s netted 11.6 and 9.3 points per game in his past two seasons and he’s aware he has to look to score more without Walker.
“Yes,” Batum said. “I think we all have to do that, but yes, I have to. We lost (another) guy that carried us, Jeremy Lamb. You have to replace those moments. I think they were close to more than 40, 42 points combined. Something like that. So, you have to find guys to do it if you can. You can’t say, ‘OK, we replaced Kemba with Terry so Terry is going to be 25 for sure a game.’ I hope he will, but we can’t put that on him and just put pressure on this guy.
“So, I think all of us as a team, we have to do more and we will do more because we all got better this summer, and it’s going to be an interesting season.”
5. Monk already feels stronger
When his second season ended in April and offseason goals were established, Malik Monk had one at the very top of his list: bulk up.
That he has.
Echoing what Borrego said at last week’s media luncheon, Monk looks somewhat bigger. He said he’s increased his weight from 182 pounds last season to 205 pounds. His arms aren’t as frail and he thinks the increased mass has already assisted in keeping him from getting bumped off his spot and allowing him to better finish through contact on drives to the basket.
“That was my biggest key of the summer — put on some pounds, put on muscle,” Monk said. “I think I did a good job of that and I’m looking forward to the season.”
Monk’s main goal is to not only get on the court and stay out there, but to be consistent in his approach. That’s been one of his issues in his first two seasons, and although he can’t predict how things will go for him, he insisted he’s fully equipped to make it happen.
“I’ve been preparing myself, my whole career for this right here, this big ol’ opportunity,” Monk said. “The last two years, I’ve been preparing myself for this opportunity, too. I’ve been waiting patient. It’s annoying, but I’ve been waiting, and that’s what you’ve got to do sometimes is wait on your opportunity. But like I said, I’m ready this year.”
He knows it’s important to follow Borrego’s directives so he doesn’t get the quick hook he’s received over the previous two seasons.
“Just whatever Coach wants me to do, really,” Monk said. “Coach runs the team and we’ve just got to listen and see what he wants from us. I’m here to do whatever he wants me to. If it’s scoring, I’m going to do it at a high clip, try to. I’ve been getting a lot of shots up and so I’ve been preparing myself. Like I said, I’ve been preparing myself my whole life and these last two years, especially with this opportunity right here.”
Malik Monk says he weighs 205 pounds. (Jeremy Brevard / USA Today)
6. Zeller is as healthy as he’s been in a while
After failing to log 82 games since his rookie year in 2013-14, is this the year Cody Zeller avoids the dreaded injury bug that’s gnawed at him more than a pesky mosquito?
That’s his hope, anyway.
Whether it happens remains to be seen, but Zeller appears to be past the left knee soreness that sidelined him for the final 16 games of 2018-19.
“I feel good,” he said. “It’s been a long summer of trying to get healthy and stay healthy throughout the season. Yeah, it’s been good. I’m healthy right now, so my fingers crossed, there will be no freak injuries like my hand last year. Knock on wood, I’m healthy now and worst of it is behind me.
“I’ve just had some bad luck,” he later said. “It’s very well documented, all my injury past. Like I said, I feel good right now, and hopefully, it can stay that way.”
Keeping Zeller healthy is a goal of the staff and they will likely give him time off on occasion. It could be on one end of a back-to-back, a practice, a shootaround — whatever it can do to preserve him.
“We started to do that a little bit last year,” Zeller said. “Obviously, I want to be as healthy and as available for as many minutes as possible for the games. So, it’s a little bit of a balance when we are playing games and I’m trying to get my rhythm, and practice, try to work on my game a little bit but also rest up enough that I’m able to play at the highest level in the games. So, we started to do that a little bit last year, but we are kind of going with the same plan this year.”
7. Williams: Walker will always be the ‘greatest Hornet ever’
Marvin Williams was close to Walker and hated to see him leave. Even though Walker will be wearing a different uniform when the teams meet in their preseason openers Sunday in Boston, that doesn’t mean Williams won’t be breaking bread with his good buddy.
“I will eat his food on Saturday night,” Williams said. “But nah, man. It’s business. It’s business. People should appreciate the time that they had in this organization and in this city with Kemba. I feel like he’s going to be the greatest Hornet ever. I think he will be remembered that way and he deserves his. He’s worked really hard. He put in a lot of work for this community and this organization.”
Still, he acknowledged seeing Walker take his talents elsewhere was tough to stomach.
“It’s hard. Obviously, it’s hard,” Williams said. “To lose Kemba the basketball player is going to be extremely difficult. But I just think the locker room, off the court away from the gym, to not see him every day, talk to him every day, it will be tough, personally. It will be tough for a lot of the younger guys that he developed a relationship with. But the one thing I will say is, I understand professional sports. This is my 15th year and I have been in a lot of situations like this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out the way you kind of plan it sometimes and obviously everybody here wishes Kemba the best. We’ll stay in close touch with him.”
8. Washington’s foot is fine
Any fears about the possibility of rookie P.J. Washington’s foot injury lingering have apparently been put to rest.
The Hornets’ first-round pick proclaimed himself healthy and said the left foot injury from the NCAA Tournament is no longer an issue. He’s good to go and has been for a while.
“Once I got here after Summer League, it took like a couple of weeks,” Washington said. “After Summer League, once I started working out and everything, I didn’t feel any pain. So, I was definitely excited about that and it I just feel like I am back to normal now.”
Since he sat out Summer League for precautionary reasons to let his foot completely heal, Washington hasn’t played in a game since Kentucky was eliminated in the Elite Eight. That has him behind the curve a bit and it’s why he could begin the season with the G League’s Greensboro Swarm.
He said he hasn’t been told yet if he’ll be in Greensboro at the outset, but if he is assigned to the Swarm, he promised he will take advantage of the playing time, experience and lessons learned on the fly.
“I feel like it’s great,” Washington said. “As a player, it’s definitely great to improve your game. I mean, that’s what everybody tries to do. So, playing in Greensboro would be nothing but great for me. A great opportunity, and I’m excited if I do get the opportunity to go there.”
But unlike in his rookie season as the Hornets’ coach, when he had nervous energy zipping through his veins, there was a certain coolness wafting around him. Borrego seemed in complete command and prepared to get the most out of a team that will not have Kemba Walker to bail it out for the first time in eight years.
“I feel like it’s slowed down a tremendous amount for me,” Borrego said Monday. “After you’ve done it one year, I know what to expect. I feel much more comfortable right now as we head into camp, ready to grow, ready to learn again this season. I couldn’t be more excited with this group, ready to go.”
Before they truly tip off things at training camp at Dean Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Tuesday, here’s what’s important to know from the Hornets’ media day.
1. Rozier has had enough with the Walker analogies
From the moment talk first surfaced of a potential sign-and-trade with Boston for Terry Rozier following Kemba Walker’s departure, it hasn’t died down much. Rozier is growing a bit weary of it.
There are, of course, inevitable comparisons — pro and con — of Walker and Rozier.
Although Rozier can appreciate Walker’s style of play and what he brought to the Hornets, he’s getting tired of the lazy narrative.
“It’s annoying because I’m not him, and I don’t look to be him and I’m not,” Rozier said. “And I get it. He is Kemba. He did a lot for this organization. Leading scorer, that’s hard to replace, and being me, I’m looking to push this organization in a different way.”
Expect that to be Rozier’s main theme in his first season with the Hornets.
“I’m just different,” he said. “I’m competitive as hell. I’m not saying that he’s not. I’m talking about me. We are two different players, two different guys. I’m just as competitive as hell. I want to win. I play both sides of the ball and I’m just going to go out there and have some fun. I don’t have all the answers. I just want to play ball. I don’t want to do all the extra.”
Terry Rozier is set out to prove he’s a different player than the departed Kemba Walker. (Jeremy Brevard / USA Today)
2. MKG isn’t happy
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was a man of few words.
Well, at least to the media. He had a couple of choice ones for Marvin Williams after they passed each other in the interview room, tossing a verbal grenade at Williams’ feet when he asked why he didn’t hit him back Sunday after he reached out. Kidd-Gilchrist knew there was no need because he was sure why Williams was dialing him up.
“How ’bout them Redskins? shyt,” Kidd-Gilchrist shot at Williams, eliciting laughter in the room, thanks to Washington’s 0-4 record. “I don’t answer the phone on Sundays because I’m a Redskins fan and we are terrible right now, so I bet that’s what he was talking about.”
Kidd-Gilchrist, however, wasn’t in much of a mood to talk about his situation.
As The Athletic reported this offseason, with the Hornets’ youth movement in full effect, Kidd-Gilchrist will be the odd man out of the rotation. He pretty much confirmed that when asked where he believes he fits in with the team.
“I don’t know,” Kidd-Gilchrist said.
Kidd-Gilchrist also hinted he thought about a change of scenery when mulling over whether to exercise his one-year, $13 million player option before deciding to return. Family, he indicated, was the determining factor.
“My kids, my son and my family,” he said. “I had thought about the fact of opting out for day in and day out, and my two kids helped play a big role in me opting in. And that’s the truth.”
It would be beyond shocking if it isn’t Kidd-Gilchrist’s last season with the team. When asked if wants wanted to be with Charlotte long term, Kidd-Gilchrist skirted around the query.
“I love MJ,” he said, referring to Hornets owner Michael Jordan. “To think that this is my eighth year here is crazy to me and I have no further answer to that question.”
3. Bacon is excited to get down to business
Pegged as the likely starter at shooting guard, Dwayne Bacon’s time in the spotlight has arrived.
Those flashes he displayed at the tail end of last season got the organization excited, thinking if he put in a nice offseason, he could pick up where he left off after posting 12.6 points in 13 games as a starter. He focused on the tasks asked of him by the staff, and it has positioned Bacon as a go-to guy.
That is something he isn’t taking lightly.
“It’s special for me,” Bacon said. “A lot of people still don’t think I can do what I do. But I feel like I showed that toward the end of the year and I feel like it only gets better. I put in a lot of work this summer, did a lot of things, was here pretty much all summer and I’m just ready to play now.”
Bacon has gained Borrego’s trust and it’s given him confidence to show and prove that in a fashion the organization not have thought was possible.
“I don’t look at it as people missed what I can do,” he said. “They just weren’t sure, I feel like. And after you saw my end of the year last year, I feel like a lot more people are sure but still have questions. So, with a full year of me exploring what I can do, showing people what I can really do, then they will get the picture. By next year, I won’t have any questions, doubters. You’ll see.”
Dwayne Bacon (Jeremy Brevard / USA Today)
4. Batum is prepared to shoulder more responsibility offensively
Fresh off his performance with France in the FIBA World Cup, Nic Batum said he is in solid playing shape. That’s probably a good thing considering the extra burden he will have to shoulder.
With Walker and Jeremy Lamb gone, the Hornets have to somehow replace their scoring, which is where Batum comes in. They need him to get closer to the 14.9 and 15.1 point-per-game averages he posted in his first two seasons in Charlotte. He’s netted 11.6 and 9.3 points per game in his past two seasons and he’s aware he has to look to score more without Walker.
“Yes,” Batum said. “I think we all have to do that, but yes, I have to. We lost (another) guy that carried us, Jeremy Lamb. You have to replace those moments. I think they were close to more than 40, 42 points combined. Something like that. So, you have to find guys to do it if you can. You can’t say, ‘OK, we replaced Kemba with Terry so Terry is going to be 25 for sure a game.’ I hope he will, but we can’t put that on him and just put pressure on this guy.
“So, I think all of us as a team, we have to do more and we will do more because we all got better this summer, and it’s going to be an interesting season.”
5. Monk already feels stronger
When his second season ended in April and offseason goals were established, Malik Monk had one at the very top of his list: bulk up.
That he has.
Echoing what Borrego said at last week’s media luncheon, Monk looks somewhat bigger. He said he’s increased his weight from 182 pounds last season to 205 pounds. His arms aren’t as frail and he thinks the increased mass has already assisted in keeping him from getting bumped off his spot and allowing him to better finish through contact on drives to the basket.
“That was my biggest key of the summer — put on some pounds, put on muscle,” Monk said. “I think I did a good job of that and I’m looking forward to the season.”
Monk’s main goal is to not only get on the court and stay out there, but to be consistent in his approach. That’s been one of his issues in his first two seasons, and although he can’t predict how things will go for him, he insisted he’s fully equipped to make it happen.
“I’ve been preparing myself, my whole career for this right here, this big ol’ opportunity,” Monk said. “The last two years, I’ve been preparing myself for this opportunity, too. I’ve been waiting patient. It’s annoying, but I’ve been waiting, and that’s what you’ve got to do sometimes is wait on your opportunity. But like I said, I’m ready this year.”
He knows it’s important to follow Borrego’s directives so he doesn’t get the quick hook he’s received over the previous two seasons.
“Just whatever Coach wants me to do, really,” Monk said. “Coach runs the team and we’ve just got to listen and see what he wants from us. I’m here to do whatever he wants me to. If it’s scoring, I’m going to do it at a high clip, try to. I’ve been getting a lot of shots up and so I’ve been preparing myself. Like I said, I’ve been preparing myself my whole life and these last two years, especially with this opportunity right here.”
Malik Monk says he weighs 205 pounds. (Jeremy Brevard / USA Today)
6. Zeller is as healthy as he’s been in a while
After failing to log 82 games since his rookie year in 2013-14, is this the year Cody Zeller avoids the dreaded injury bug that’s gnawed at him more than a pesky mosquito?
That’s his hope, anyway.
Whether it happens remains to be seen, but Zeller appears to be past the left knee soreness that sidelined him for the final 16 games of 2018-19.
“I feel good,” he said. “It’s been a long summer of trying to get healthy and stay healthy throughout the season. Yeah, it’s been good. I’m healthy right now, so my fingers crossed, there will be no freak injuries like my hand last year. Knock on wood, I’m healthy now and worst of it is behind me.
“I’ve just had some bad luck,” he later said. “It’s very well documented, all my injury past. Like I said, I feel good right now, and hopefully, it can stay that way.”
Keeping Zeller healthy is a goal of the staff and they will likely give him time off on occasion. It could be on one end of a back-to-back, a practice, a shootaround — whatever it can do to preserve him.
“We started to do that a little bit last year,” Zeller said. “Obviously, I want to be as healthy and as available for as many minutes as possible for the games. So, it’s a little bit of a balance when we are playing games and I’m trying to get my rhythm, and practice, try to work on my game a little bit but also rest up enough that I’m able to play at the highest level in the games. So, we started to do that a little bit last year, but we are kind of going with the same plan this year.”
7. Williams: Walker will always be the ‘greatest Hornet ever’
Marvin Williams was close to Walker and hated to see him leave. Even though Walker will be wearing a different uniform when the teams meet in their preseason openers Sunday in Boston, that doesn’t mean Williams won’t be breaking bread with his good buddy.
“I will eat his food on Saturday night,” Williams said. “But nah, man. It’s business. It’s business. People should appreciate the time that they had in this organization and in this city with Kemba. I feel like he’s going to be the greatest Hornet ever. I think he will be remembered that way and he deserves his. He’s worked really hard. He put in a lot of work for this community and this organization.”
Still, he acknowledged seeing Walker take his talents elsewhere was tough to stomach.
“It’s hard. Obviously, it’s hard,” Williams said. “To lose Kemba the basketball player is going to be extremely difficult. But I just think the locker room, off the court away from the gym, to not see him every day, talk to him every day, it will be tough, personally. It will be tough for a lot of the younger guys that he developed a relationship with. But the one thing I will say is, I understand professional sports. This is my 15th year and I have been in a lot of situations like this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out the way you kind of plan it sometimes and obviously everybody here wishes Kemba the best. We’ll stay in close touch with him.”
8. Washington’s foot is fine
Any fears about the possibility of rookie P.J. Washington’s foot injury lingering have apparently been put to rest.
The Hornets’ first-round pick proclaimed himself healthy and said the left foot injury from the NCAA Tournament is no longer an issue. He’s good to go and has been for a while.
“Once I got here after Summer League, it took like a couple of weeks,” Washington said. “After Summer League, once I started working out and everything, I didn’t feel any pain. So, I was definitely excited about that and it I just feel like I am back to normal now.”
Since he sat out Summer League for precautionary reasons to let his foot completely heal, Washington hasn’t played in a game since Kentucky was eliminated in the Elite Eight. That has him behind the curve a bit and it’s why he could begin the season with the G League’s Greensboro Swarm.
He said he hasn’t been told yet if he’ll be in Greensboro at the outset, but if he is assigned to the Swarm, he promised he will take advantage of the playing time, experience and lessons learned on the fly.
“I feel like it’s great,” Washington said. “As a player, it’s definitely great to improve your game. I mean, that’s what everybody tries to do. So, playing in Greensboro would be nothing but great for me. A great opportunity, and I’m excited if I do get the opportunity to go there.”
Part One
I absolutely love doing this series of analysis on the Cowboys offense and find myself getting more and more into it every season. The fact that so many of you speak highly of it inspires me to search even harder for answers, especially in weeks like these where so many people are looking for them.
Let’s be honest: This was an awful Cowboys performance by almost any measure. After seeing them exceed 30 points and 470 yards in each of the first three weeks, this Sunday featured 10 points and 257 yards of lousy offense. Nothing went right, and people want to know who to hang the blame on.
We are not here to find sacrificial lambs. We are here to seek explanations and reasons for what goes right or wrong. We try to be fair and allow for the fact that sometimes we are offering our best, semi-educated guesses. No, we are not in the huddle or the meeting rooms. I have a laptop, two eyes and a willingness to search and learn. I am not infallible.
With that being said, why did the night in New Orleans go so wrong?
I think the answer is both simple and complicated this week. Every single offensive player seemed to hold part of the rope of this stinker. It is difficult to go through the wreckage and find anyone who was just awesome amidst the issues. There were some nice plays, but overall, this was one of those days. Nothing looked good, and nothing went smoothly.
The late, great Joe Avezzano would always remind me that “the other team pays their players, too,” when the Cowboys played poorly. He knew from his decades in the game that it isn’t always as simple as what wedid. Sometimes, they made us play poorly. Sometimes, we run into a freight train.
As I examined this offensive performance, I saw some issues, but it starts with the basic premise that the Cowboys got their butts handed to them by a Saints defense that was fired up and ready to roll. Dallas did not match New Orleans’ physicality and lost far too many one-on-one battles. The Cowboys were simply never able to work their way out of the mess.
Full marks should go to the Saints for a masterful effort at making the Cowboys struggle to follow their preferred gameplan.
Let’s show you some of that:
The picture above shows a normal pre-snap look on 1st-and-10 for the Cowboys offense. They want to look at the Saints safeties — you can see both are 15 yards off the line — and decide if they would rather run or pass into this look. If you have played Madden or football at any level, you know that the Saints are sitting on the pass. They essentially have four defensive backs assigned to the Cowboys’ two wide receivers. That means, by our arithmetic, the line of scrimmage provides Dallas a 9-on-7 edge. This is a mathematical advantage that tells us even with the ball carrier and the QB subtracted, the Cowboys have a hat for a hat in a 7-vs.-7 blocking situation. This screams run.
If the defense moves a safety down in this exact situation, the math changes. You then see seven blockers for eight men in the box, and you see one safety over two corners vs two wide receivers. You cannot help both corners, and this math tells an offense that they should pass.
These fundamental truths are as old as the game. Sunday night, the Saints elected to sit on the pass in running situations and dare the Cowboys to run, even feeding them mathematical advantages to make it more desirable. And that was the challenge. Could the Cowboys make New Orleans bring that safety down by dominating the numerical advantage? If they could win that 9-on-7 with enough regularity early, New Orleans would have to adjust, and that is when you kill them with the pass downfield – where the explosive plays and touchdowns are found.
But if the Saints could win even while giving up numbers against the run, Dallas would be in for a very long night.
I think you know which way that went on Sunday. Even though they were playing against the league’s highest-paid running back, who ran behind the league’s highest-paid offensive line, the Saints plugged up Dallas’ ground game all night long to the tune of 2.3 yards per carry. 20 times, the Cowboys ran the football, and they found a mere 45 yards. It was ugly.
Here is how Ezekiel Elliott’s 18 carries looked according to Next Gen Stats:
Yuck. Basically, he did nothing on the ground. It wasn’t just his fault, of course; his friends up front were defeated too often and too easily. But the numbers went on his ledger, and he was not able to change the math.
The Cowboys usually do very well when they have a numerical advantage, but credit the Saints front and maybe even the crowd noise for making sure they held that advantage in the secondary and still won at the line of scrimmage to take all appealing options from the Cowboys.
Dallas, meanwhile, embraced the unappealing idea of running over and over into a brick wall.
Here are the many first-down runs the Cowboys attempted against the Saints. We will look at many of them below in Film Study, but here they all are. As you can see, there are 11 in all, and just three were what we would call “Successful Plays” which require four yards or more:
Elliott has played 44 games with the Cowboys and won 31 of them. 31-13 is a fantastic mark, so their recipe normally ends in smiles, but when it doesn’t work, they look very poor.
The magic numbers seem to be 70 yards and 3.6 yards a carry for Elliott to correlate with winning. When Elliott reaches 70 yards, the Cowboys are 30-6. When he is held below 70, they are 1-7.
When he has a day of 3.6 yards per carry or more, they are 29-7. When he is below that mark, Dallas is just 2-6.
On Sunday, he had 35 yards and 1.9 yards a carry.
When you can’t run even into a six-man box, they do not react to your play-action. (I swear, analytical friends, the Saints safeties did not budge.). And that leaves nobody open down the field.
So, you can’t run the ball, the play-action dries up and you face third-and-long. And, yes, Dennis Allen and the Saints had a plan for that, too.
They would rush just three men and drop eight. They were hardly trying for sacks, instead making Dak fit the ball into tiny windows. He did sometimes, but just missed at others.
It was that kind of night – an overall disaster.
There are many things to look at in the above data box, but you can simply go with 257 yards and 10 points. The Cowboys are 5-69 all time when they put those two numbers together. It is somewhat shocking they have managed to win five times with that production, including four times between 1969-1976, when the NFL really had some wild games. Additionally, there was the 2003 game vs. Buffalo at Texas Stadium, when the Cowboys managed to take down the Bills, 10-6, in a game where Bill Parcells picked up one of his first wins and Dan Campbell caught the lone touchdown from Quincy Carter.
Regardless of what the defense does, you generally aren’t going to win games in which your offense accomplishes next to nothing.
PERSONNEL GROUPINGS
As we look at the Personnel Groupings, we can see that nearly everything that was accomplished happened out of Shotgun 11, meaning that just about everything else was just lousy. Add to that an overall mark on the ground, and you can see that the 2019 Cowboys offenses has involved three feasts and a famine. Nothing close to inside the normal range of 300 to 400 yards. The Cowboys have been over 470 yards. This time, they were under 260
Let’s be honest: This was an awful Cowboys performance by almost any measure. After seeing them exceed 30 points and 470 yards in each of the first three weeks, this Sunday featured 10 points and 257 yards of lousy offense. Nothing went right, and people want to know who to hang the blame on.
We are not here to find sacrificial lambs. We are here to seek explanations and reasons for what goes right or wrong. We try to be fair and allow for the fact that sometimes we are offering our best, semi-educated guesses. No, we are not in the huddle or the meeting rooms. I have a laptop, two eyes and a willingness to search and learn. I am not infallible.
With that being said, why did the night in New Orleans go so wrong?
I think the answer is both simple and complicated this week. Every single offensive player seemed to hold part of the rope of this stinker. It is difficult to go through the wreckage and find anyone who was just awesome amidst the issues. There were some nice plays, but overall, this was one of those days. Nothing looked good, and nothing went smoothly.
The late, great Joe Avezzano would always remind me that “the other team pays their players, too,” when the Cowboys played poorly. He knew from his decades in the game that it isn’t always as simple as what wedid. Sometimes, they made us play poorly. Sometimes, we run into a freight train.
As I examined this offensive performance, I saw some issues, but it starts with the basic premise that the Cowboys got their butts handed to them by a Saints defense that was fired up and ready to roll. Dallas did not match New Orleans’ physicality and lost far too many one-on-one battles. The Cowboys were simply never able to work their way out of the mess.
Full marks should go to the Saints for a masterful effort at making the Cowboys struggle to follow their preferred gameplan.
Let’s show you some of that:
The picture above shows a normal pre-snap look on 1st-and-10 for the Cowboys offense. They want to look at the Saints safeties — you can see both are 15 yards off the line — and decide if they would rather run or pass into this look. If you have played Madden or football at any level, you know that the Saints are sitting on the pass. They essentially have four defensive backs assigned to the Cowboys’ two wide receivers. That means, by our arithmetic, the line of scrimmage provides Dallas a 9-on-7 edge. This is a mathematical advantage that tells us even with the ball carrier and the QB subtracted, the Cowboys have a hat for a hat in a 7-vs.-7 blocking situation. This screams run.
If the defense moves a safety down in this exact situation, the math changes. You then see seven blockers for eight men in the box, and you see one safety over two corners vs two wide receivers. You cannot help both corners, and this math tells an offense that they should pass.
These fundamental truths are as old as the game. Sunday night, the Saints elected to sit on the pass in running situations and dare the Cowboys to run, even feeding them mathematical advantages to make it more desirable. And that was the challenge. Could the Cowboys make New Orleans bring that safety down by dominating the numerical advantage? If they could win that 9-on-7 with enough regularity early, New Orleans would have to adjust, and that is when you kill them with the pass downfield – where the explosive plays and touchdowns are found.
But if the Saints could win even while giving up numbers against the run, Dallas would be in for a very long night.
I think you know which way that went on Sunday. Even though they were playing against the league’s highest-paid running back, who ran behind the league’s highest-paid offensive line, the Saints plugged up Dallas’ ground game all night long to the tune of 2.3 yards per carry. 20 times, the Cowboys ran the football, and they found a mere 45 yards. It was ugly.
Here is how Ezekiel Elliott’s 18 carries looked according to Next Gen Stats:
Yuck. Basically, he did nothing on the ground. It wasn’t just his fault, of course; his friends up front were defeated too often and too easily. But the numbers went on his ledger, and he was not able to change the math.
The Cowboys usually do very well when they have a numerical advantage, but credit the Saints front and maybe even the crowd noise for making sure they held that advantage in the secondary and still won at the line of scrimmage to take all appealing options from the Cowboys.
Dallas, meanwhile, embraced the unappealing idea of running over and over into a brick wall.
Here are the many first-down runs the Cowboys attempted against the Saints. We will look at many of them below in Film Study, but here they all are. As you can see, there are 11 in all, and just three were what we would call “Successful Plays” which require four yards or more:
Elliott has played 44 games with the Cowboys and won 31 of them. 31-13 is a fantastic mark, so their recipe normally ends in smiles, but when it doesn’t work, they look very poor.
The magic numbers seem to be 70 yards and 3.6 yards a carry for Elliott to correlate with winning. When Elliott reaches 70 yards, the Cowboys are 30-6. When he is held below 70, they are 1-7.
When he has a day of 3.6 yards per carry or more, they are 29-7. When he is below that mark, Dallas is just 2-6.
On Sunday, he had 35 yards and 1.9 yards a carry.
When you can’t run even into a six-man box, they do not react to your play-action. (I swear, analytical friends, the Saints safeties did not budge.). And that leaves nobody open down the field.
So, you can’t run the ball, the play-action dries up and you face third-and-long. And, yes, Dennis Allen and the Saints had a plan for that, too.
They would rush just three men and drop eight. They were hardly trying for sacks, instead making Dak fit the ball into tiny windows. He did sometimes, but just missed at others.
It was that kind of night – an overall disaster.
There are many things to look at in the above data box, but you can simply go with 257 yards and 10 points. The Cowboys are 5-69 all time when they put those two numbers together. It is somewhat shocking they have managed to win five times with that production, including four times between 1969-1976, when the NFL really had some wild games. Additionally, there was the 2003 game vs. Buffalo at Texas Stadium, when the Cowboys managed to take down the Bills, 10-6, in a game where Bill Parcells picked up one of his first wins and Dan Campbell caught the lone touchdown from Quincy Carter.
Regardless of what the defense does, you generally aren’t going to win games in which your offense accomplishes next to nothing.
PERSONNEL GROUPINGS
As we look at the Personnel Groupings, we can see that nearly everything that was accomplished happened out of Shotgun 11, meaning that just about everything else was just lousy. Add to that an overall mark on the ground, and you can see that the 2019 Cowboys offenses has involved three feasts and a famine. Nothing close to inside the normal range of 300 to 400 yards. The Cowboys have been over 470 yards. This time, they were under 260
Part two
DAK PRESCOTT NEXT-GEN THROW CHART
You will see in Film Study that the Saints were determined not to get beaten deep. They had safeties playing back so nothing got over their heads. The idea that Prescott should not force the action and take what was given meant plenty of underneath throws and passes under 10 yards. He actually made several very difficult throws work on Sunday, so I think we should be careful how carried away we get about his game. The big miss was to Randall Cobb in the end zone, and a few other times he could have made a better throw. But I still thought he was mostly decent.
SUCCESS RATES BY DOWN
Here is a reminder of what we are looking for: “A play is successful when it gains at least 40% of yards-to-go on first down, 60% of yards-to-go on second down and 100% of yards-to-go on third or fourth down.”
My friend James Brantley assists us with a chart depicting success rate by down. If you study this chart, you will see that Sunday featured the worst day on first down, the worst day on second down and the worst day on third down. As you might imagine, that is both an indicator of how good they have been through three weeks and how poor they were on Sunday. You simply cannot have that many holes in your production and expect to win. Yet they almost did.
PLAY-ACTION LOG
COMP ATT YDS YPA Passer Rate
Wk 1 – NYG 14 15 207 13.8 158.3
WK 2 – WAS 11 12 126 10.5 138.2
Wk 3 – MIA 5 10 76 7.6 35.8
Wk 4 – NO 6 7 65 9.3 105.4
TOTALS 36 44 474 10.8 132.4
There are two things to consider here. First, you can see the diminishing use of play-action passing as teams begin to play further and further back and decide what they want to defend against the most. Second, the Cowboys somewhat stopped using it on Sunday Night. Are these two factors related? Of course.
What frustrates fans so much, of course, is that most do not want to hear that they are not running it as much because defenses are waiting for it. Should Dallas be stubborn and run play-action into the teeth of defenses that seem ready for it? Well, they were stubborn enough about running Zeke into the teeth of the Saints defensive line, so I guess we are often just talking about degrees of obstinance.
But, things that have worked — like play-action passing and asking Dak to use his legs to help a struggling offense — were in short supply on Sunday Night.
Let’s look at 10 plays or so from this game and try to discover what the coaches were seeing.
FILM STUDY
1Q – 13:17 – 1st-and-10
The Cowboys’ first three plays moved the ball to their 47. These next three set the tone for the evening, and I wanted to show you all three of them here in succession to get this film study going. Here is a 1st-and-10 run that went nowhere because 56-Davis ran right through the A-Gap untouched and jumped Zeke in the backfield. This looks like Travis Frederick’s responsibility, and I will tell you that was a bit of a theme on Sunday. Frederick is a fan favorite and a great story as he returns in 2019, but this game was a telling example that he is not yet right. While he is probably playing his way back up to speed, it isn’t very close to what he was. I would say that I believe in the player, but this league is merciless, and if you want to know how the Cowboys looked so poor on Sunday, I would start with their pillars inside. Frederick and the great Zack Martin both looked very poor by their lofty standards. As you can see, Zeke never had a prayer.
1Q – 12:45 – 2nd-and-10
Here’s the next play, and what I believe is the first play-action attempt of the night. Watch the safeties. They are not going to give any concern to the running game. This is a clear game-plan initiative to not fall for play-action and so when the fake happens, the Cowboys are running into a secondary that is sitting on their two-man route. Is there a throw? Possibly to Cooper up top on the corner, but by then, Cameron Jordan is breaking through a Jason Witten block, and the play is breaking down. Once Prescott spins away, he can just throw it into the bench area. 3rd-and-10.
1Q – 12:37 – 3rd-and-10
The Cowboys have been great at converting third downs, so the Dolphins and now the Saints have done the same thing on 3rd-and-long: Use a three-man pass rush and drop eight into coverage at the sticks. There is nothing deep and nothing terribly attractive for Prescott. So he has time, but probably not enough space to run and no targets that will get the first down. Teams can convert these with precise and somewhat risky throws, but you will not see many QBs taking chances on the first drive of the game. The best way to deal with this is to stay out of 3rd-and-long, but you just saw how poorly first and second down went. The drive stalls, and the punt team runs on.
1Q – 5:20 – 3rd-and-9
Drive No. 2 is going better, but in the red zone, the Cowboys have another poor sequence: Bad run, incomplete pass and another third-and-long. Again, the Saints see empty, so they show a big blitz and then back off, leaving eight in coverage and three rushing. The Saints show him that he can try to run, but won’t get there, so he stays alive and finally Cobb pops sort of free. This, by the way, is one of Cobb’s greatest gifts. He has helped Aaron Rodgers late in downs by figuring out a way to get open, and this has already made him a Prescott favorite, too. The throw, however, is just off. It is about a 25-yard throw on the run and across the body, but Dak would like another shot at that one. The Cowboys settle for three points, which will prove quite costly.
2Q – 7:13 – 3rd-and-4
Drive No. 4 starts well, and the Cowboys are in a 3rd-and-4. When the yardage is manageable, you see that Dak has a few more options (including a run) and finally sees a window for a throw to Witten. This is a big play — until Witten is stripped of the ball, and it turns into a very costly turnover. Good work from AJ Klein to rally back in this spot, and we see that 82 can still get open. I know this isn’t the time or place to suggest he has been pretty good so far, but he really looks fresher. His numbers are on pace to return where they were in 2014, when he was 32 years old. We shall see if he can sustain this pace and, of course, never fumble.
2Q – 4:39 – 1st-and-10
Drive No. 5. This is pretty rough to see, but another example of why the Cowboys aren’t running the football against the New Orleans interior. First, you can see that the whole line (except for maybe Tyron) all look pretty poor on this snap. Malcom Brown destroyed plenty in this game, and here he blows through the line (across from Martin on his inside shoulder, which makes Collins have to really work to reach him), and Connor Williams cannot get the edge on his guy. This causes all sorts of chaos. 92-Davenport blows up Frederick right in the path of the traffic and bodies start hitting the floor in concert. Again, if Connor can get his guy, I think Zeke is out the gate to the left, but since he can’t, 21 is cornered. It is a real mess, and as you can see, running plays are almost always a product of an offensive line — which is why so many teams don’t want to pay a running back. There is only so much he can do.
3Q – 9:18 – 1st-and-10
This cannot happen. You simply have to crush your opponent if they are only putting six in the box on 1st-and-10 to match your 11 personnel. But watch 90-Brown beat Martin and Frederick inside to kill the play. It looks like Martin believes Frederick has him and is off to go get his linebacker after the combo block, but Frederick simply doesn’t have him and may have been stepped on by Williams. Once the A-Gap is lost on the front side of the play, Elliott has no chance, and the Cowboys are losing confidence in their ability to block even a six-man box. I feel I need to emphasize this fact: This is not a play-calling problem. They called the right play here. If you cannot find success with the highest-paid offensive line and running back in the league running a simple inside run on 1st-and-10, your play sheet is pretty useless. This is a personnel problem. They lost these plays all night, and it is simply unacceptable. This running game is their foundation, and Malcom Brown and friends were not having it on this occasion.
You will see in Film Study that the Saints were determined not to get beaten deep. They had safeties playing back so nothing got over their heads. The idea that Prescott should not force the action and take what was given meant plenty of underneath throws and passes under 10 yards. He actually made several very difficult throws work on Sunday, so I think we should be careful how carried away we get about his game. The big miss was to Randall Cobb in the end zone, and a few other times he could have made a better throw. But I still thought he was mostly decent.
SUCCESS RATES BY DOWN
Here is a reminder of what we are looking for: “A play is successful when it gains at least 40% of yards-to-go on first down, 60% of yards-to-go on second down and 100% of yards-to-go on third or fourth down.”
My friend James Brantley assists us with a chart depicting success rate by down. If you study this chart, you will see that Sunday featured the worst day on first down, the worst day on second down and the worst day on third down. As you might imagine, that is both an indicator of how good they have been through three weeks and how poor they were on Sunday. You simply cannot have that many holes in your production and expect to win. Yet they almost did.
PLAY-ACTION LOG
COMP ATT YDS YPA Passer Rate
Wk 1 – NYG 14 15 207 13.8 158.3
WK 2 – WAS 11 12 126 10.5 138.2
Wk 3 – MIA 5 10 76 7.6 35.8
Wk 4 – NO 6 7 65 9.3 105.4
TOTALS 36 44 474 10.8 132.4
There are two things to consider here. First, you can see the diminishing use of play-action passing as teams begin to play further and further back and decide what they want to defend against the most. Second, the Cowboys somewhat stopped using it on Sunday Night. Are these two factors related? Of course.
What frustrates fans so much, of course, is that most do not want to hear that they are not running it as much because defenses are waiting for it. Should Dallas be stubborn and run play-action into the teeth of defenses that seem ready for it? Well, they were stubborn enough about running Zeke into the teeth of the Saints defensive line, so I guess we are often just talking about degrees of obstinance.
But, things that have worked — like play-action passing and asking Dak to use his legs to help a struggling offense — were in short supply on Sunday Night.
Let’s look at 10 plays or so from this game and try to discover what the coaches were seeing.
FILM STUDY
1Q – 13:17 – 1st-and-10
The Cowboys’ first three plays moved the ball to their 47. These next three set the tone for the evening, and I wanted to show you all three of them here in succession to get this film study going. Here is a 1st-and-10 run that went nowhere because 56-Davis ran right through the A-Gap untouched and jumped Zeke in the backfield. This looks like Travis Frederick’s responsibility, and I will tell you that was a bit of a theme on Sunday. Frederick is a fan favorite and a great story as he returns in 2019, but this game was a telling example that he is not yet right. While he is probably playing his way back up to speed, it isn’t very close to what he was. I would say that I believe in the player, but this league is merciless, and if you want to know how the Cowboys looked so poor on Sunday, I would start with their pillars inside. Frederick and the great Zack Martin both looked very poor by their lofty standards. As you can see, Zeke never had a prayer.
1Q – 12:45 – 2nd-and-10
Here’s the next play, and what I believe is the first play-action attempt of the night. Watch the safeties. They are not going to give any concern to the running game. This is a clear game-plan initiative to not fall for play-action and so when the fake happens, the Cowboys are running into a secondary that is sitting on their two-man route. Is there a throw? Possibly to Cooper up top on the corner, but by then, Cameron Jordan is breaking through a Jason Witten block, and the play is breaking down. Once Prescott spins away, he can just throw it into the bench area. 3rd-and-10.
1Q – 12:37 – 3rd-and-10
The Cowboys have been great at converting third downs, so the Dolphins and now the Saints have done the same thing on 3rd-and-long: Use a three-man pass rush and drop eight into coverage at the sticks. There is nothing deep and nothing terribly attractive for Prescott. So he has time, but probably not enough space to run and no targets that will get the first down. Teams can convert these with precise and somewhat risky throws, but you will not see many QBs taking chances on the first drive of the game. The best way to deal with this is to stay out of 3rd-and-long, but you just saw how poorly first and second down went. The drive stalls, and the punt team runs on.
1Q – 5:20 – 3rd-and-9
Drive No. 2 is going better, but in the red zone, the Cowboys have another poor sequence: Bad run, incomplete pass and another third-and-long. Again, the Saints see empty, so they show a big blitz and then back off, leaving eight in coverage and three rushing. The Saints show him that he can try to run, but won’t get there, so he stays alive and finally Cobb pops sort of free. This, by the way, is one of Cobb’s greatest gifts. He has helped Aaron Rodgers late in downs by figuring out a way to get open, and this has already made him a Prescott favorite, too. The throw, however, is just off. It is about a 25-yard throw on the run and across the body, but Dak would like another shot at that one. The Cowboys settle for three points, which will prove quite costly.
2Q – 7:13 – 3rd-and-4
Drive No. 4 starts well, and the Cowboys are in a 3rd-and-4. When the yardage is manageable, you see that Dak has a few more options (including a run) and finally sees a window for a throw to Witten. This is a big play — until Witten is stripped of the ball, and it turns into a very costly turnover. Good work from AJ Klein to rally back in this spot, and we see that 82 can still get open. I know this isn’t the time or place to suggest he has been pretty good so far, but he really looks fresher. His numbers are on pace to return where they were in 2014, when he was 32 years old. We shall see if he can sustain this pace and, of course, never fumble.
2Q – 4:39 – 1st-and-10
Drive No. 5. This is pretty rough to see, but another example of why the Cowboys aren’t running the football against the New Orleans interior. First, you can see that the whole line (except for maybe Tyron) all look pretty poor on this snap. Malcom Brown destroyed plenty in this game, and here he blows through the line (across from Martin on his inside shoulder, which makes Collins have to really work to reach him), and Connor Williams cannot get the edge on his guy. This causes all sorts of chaos. 92-Davenport blows up Frederick right in the path of the traffic and bodies start hitting the floor in concert. Again, if Connor can get his guy, I think Zeke is out the gate to the left, but since he can’t, 21 is cornered. It is a real mess, and as you can see, running plays are almost always a product of an offensive line — which is why so many teams don’t want to pay a running back. There is only so much he can do.
3Q – 9:18 – 1st-and-10
This cannot happen. You simply have to crush your opponent if they are only putting six in the box on 1st-and-10 to match your 11 personnel. But watch 90-Brown beat Martin and Frederick inside to kill the play. It looks like Martin believes Frederick has him and is off to go get his linebacker after the combo block, but Frederick simply doesn’t have him and may have been stepped on by Williams. Once the A-Gap is lost on the front side of the play, Elliott has no chance, and the Cowboys are losing confidence in their ability to block even a six-man box. I feel I need to emphasize this fact: This is not a play-calling problem. They called the right play here. If you cannot find success with the highest-paid offensive line and running back in the league running a simple inside run on 1st-and-10, your play sheet is pretty useless. This is a personnel problem. They lost these plays all night, and it is simply unacceptable. This running game is their foundation, and Malcom Brown and friends were not having it on this occasion.
Part three
occasion.
3Q – 8:49 – 2nd-and-12
On the very next play, the Cowboys get back into play-action and find their biggest gain of the evening. Prescott makes a nice fake and you can see they have Cobb and Jarwin both running down the middle. (Spacing?) The throw to Jarwin is beautifully placed between the triangle of coverage with two deep safeties. Here, we see how much trouble Davenport was giving Tyron Smith up top, as he gets pushed right into Dak. Jarwin is certainly an example of the Cowboys developing a player who can provide them with something they didn’t have elsewhere. I am sure they wanted this for Rico Gathers, but it never happened. Instead, Jarwin looks like a guy who can do this fairly often. Get down the seams and find an explosive play from a tight end.
4Q – 6:16 – 2nd-and-1
Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, here is another run into a six-man box where both guards lose, and there is no chance for Elliott to do much. David Onyemata absolutely is too much for Connor Williams frontside, while Malcom Brown beats Zack Martin on the backside. I am not sure if this play had much to work with either way, but if both of your guards lose to penetration, you can’t even get a 2nd-and-1 into a six-man box. Yeesh. Again, what play can you call if this one is not available to your coaches?
4Q – 1:39 – 1st-and-10
I don’t know what to say about this play, where the Saints came up with their only sack and Tyron Smith was injured. The Cowboys have a 1st-and-10 and plenty of time. All they need is a field goal. The three interior linemen have two guys to deal with, and they are in a good spot, but on the exchange after a twist, Frederick loses badly to Onyemata and gives up pressure when it seemed there were no problems at all. After watching this game tape, I am starting to grow concerned about 72. He is not near his normal level. This is a sack you cannot afford to take, but it is a lot to ask Prescott to anticipate his three linemen losing to those two that quickly. Poor protection for sure. And it might cost them Tyron for a bit.
4Q – 0:17 – 3rd-and-20
Through all of this, you still had a real chance to win the game. Do you know how close this was to a 84-yard touchdown? First, they have now converted a 3rd-and-20 on consecutive weeks after going 80 games without converting one before Miami. But here is Prescott’s amazing find of Cobb that perhaps beats three deep safeties if he can just avoid Marcus Williams. Williams, as you may recall, was the victim of the Minneapolis Miracle, so he knew he had to make this play and did so quite well. But how close was Cobb to breaking it?
One more angle and maybe the best throw of his career – with Frederick in his lap. That, my friends, is a dime, and Cobb almost wriggled free. Heck of a pass and catch, but too little and too late.
We didn’t even mention that Amari Cooper and Devin Smith were locked down almost the entire night because there was so much to study. As you can probably surmise, however, I think the issues that most held them back probably go back to the offensive line’s failure to beat favorable defensive formations. Yes, we will extend plenty of credit to the New Orleans front and plenty of understanding to Frederick and Martin, who are both recovering from different ailments on the fly. The youthful left guard, too, is continuing to improve, but this is the NFL and this was a showdown game against a team that might be the NFC’s best Super Bowl contender. You had a chance to grab the steering wheel in that race and any tiebreaker, too, while facing them without their best player. But despite those advantages, there was not enough quality from the Cowboys. Blaming Kellen Moore and Jason Garrett for those problems is not fair to anyone.
Yes, more play-action and different concepts might have narrowly won this battle. Sure. But this team built an offense with players of top quality up front and they entered the Superdome with the plan of sending a message of physicality and dominance. Instead, they saw some pretty big issues where their running game was shut completely down at just the wrong time.
They are better than this, and I anticipate very few defensive fronts can do what New Orleans did, but this one has to rest on the individual players who lost too many battles. They must be better to win a road game like this one.
3Q – 8:49 – 2nd-and-12
On the very next play, the Cowboys get back into play-action and find their biggest gain of the evening. Prescott makes a nice fake and you can see they have Cobb and Jarwin both running down the middle. (Spacing?) The throw to Jarwin is beautifully placed between the triangle of coverage with two deep safeties. Here, we see how much trouble Davenport was giving Tyron Smith up top, as he gets pushed right into Dak. Jarwin is certainly an example of the Cowboys developing a player who can provide them with something they didn’t have elsewhere. I am sure they wanted this for Rico Gathers, but it never happened. Instead, Jarwin looks like a guy who can do this fairly often. Get down the seams and find an explosive play from a tight end.
4Q – 6:16 – 2nd-and-1
Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, here is another run into a six-man box where both guards lose, and there is no chance for Elliott to do much. David Onyemata absolutely is too much for Connor Williams frontside, while Malcom Brown beats Zack Martin on the backside. I am not sure if this play had much to work with either way, but if both of your guards lose to penetration, you can’t even get a 2nd-and-1 into a six-man box. Yeesh. Again, what play can you call if this one is not available to your coaches?
4Q – 1:39 – 1st-and-10
I don’t know what to say about this play, where the Saints came up with their only sack and Tyron Smith was injured. The Cowboys have a 1st-and-10 and plenty of time. All they need is a field goal. The three interior linemen have two guys to deal with, and they are in a good spot, but on the exchange after a twist, Frederick loses badly to Onyemata and gives up pressure when it seemed there were no problems at all. After watching this game tape, I am starting to grow concerned about 72. He is not near his normal level. This is a sack you cannot afford to take, but it is a lot to ask Prescott to anticipate his three linemen losing to those two that quickly. Poor protection for sure. And it might cost them Tyron for a bit.
4Q – 0:17 – 3rd-and-20
Through all of this, you still had a real chance to win the game. Do you know how close this was to a 84-yard touchdown? First, they have now converted a 3rd-and-20 on consecutive weeks after going 80 games without converting one before Miami. But here is Prescott’s amazing find of Cobb that perhaps beats three deep safeties if he can just avoid Marcus Williams. Williams, as you may recall, was the victim of the Minneapolis Miracle, so he knew he had to make this play and did so quite well. But how close was Cobb to breaking it?
One more angle and maybe the best throw of his career – with Frederick in his lap. That, my friends, is a dime, and Cobb almost wriggled free. Heck of a pass and catch, but too little and too late.
We didn’t even mention that Amari Cooper and Devin Smith were locked down almost the entire night because there was so much to study. As you can probably surmise, however, I think the issues that most held them back probably go back to the offensive line’s failure to beat favorable defensive formations. Yes, we will extend plenty of credit to the New Orleans front and plenty of understanding to Frederick and Martin, who are both recovering from different ailments on the fly. The youthful left guard, too, is continuing to improve, but this is the NFL and this was a showdown game against a team that might be the NFC’s best Super Bowl contender. You had a chance to grab the steering wheel in that race and any tiebreaker, too, while facing them without their best player. But despite those advantages, there was not enough quality from the Cowboys. Blaming Kellen Moore and Jason Garrett for those problems is not fair to anyone.
Yes, more play-action and different concepts might have narrowly won this battle. Sure. But this team built an offense with players of top quality up front and they entered the Superdome with the plan of sending a message of physicality and dominance. Instead, they saw some pretty big issues where their running game was shut completely down at just the wrong time.
They are better than this, and I anticipate very few defensive fronts can do what New Orleans did, but this one has to rest on the individual players who lost too many battles. They must be better to win a road game like this one.
AUBURN, Ala. — As his wife, Kristi, stood a few feet away cracking jokes with players who had wrapped up interview sessions Sunday night, Auburn coach Gus Malzahn hung back for a few minutes to explain some of the finer points of offensive scheme to curious reporters. Malzahn smiled at the thought of how beautifully Oklahoma blocks the counter trey — an old play made even more effective by a newer offense around it. Malzahn beamed as he explained how Tigers freshman quarterback Bo Nix made the correct choice on a play against Mississippi State by tucking the ball and gaining positive yardage when the Bulldogs shut down all other aspects of the play’s design.
Malzahn looked completely at ease. That’s understandable after a 56-23 win that showcased exactly how dominant Auburn’s defense and offense can be. But Malzahn and the Tigers are making a trip to Florida this week for a matchup of top-10 teams that he knows won’t be so easy. In the previous three seasons, that might have soured the mood. But it didn’t Sunday because Malzahn is back in his comfort zone.
Malzahn looked like a different person from the guy who tried to explain a baffling loss to Tennessee 49 weeks ago. Following that game, Malzahn was asked how he felt about his coaching staff. He didn’t bite. “Right now, my feelings are I’m disappointed for our team,” he said. “I’m not ready to sit here and make any kind of talk about staff or players other than I’m disappointed.”
That loss inspired a chorus of malcontents who suggested that Auburn should consider parting ways with Malzahn even though the school signed the coach to a massive contract extension following an SEC West title in 2017. The buyout — more than $30 million — did its job and kept that talk from getting too serious. But those discussions did inspire Malzahn to make one key change.
He decided to bet on himself.
He would call plays again. “It’s who I am,” Malzahn said Sunday night when asked how different this season feels from the past few years.
Since Malzahn started calling plays again in last year’s Music City Bowl, the Tigers are 6-0. The offense, with a true freshman quarterback and receivers who are just now all getting healthy, isn’t perfect. But a loaded defense provides a massive safety net, and if the offense improves in the way that Malzahn’s best Auburn offenses have, this could be a magical season that doesn’t require as much actual magic as the 2013 team that needed two November miracles to win the SEC. If the offense stagnates, Auburn could get shredded by the teeth of one of the nation’s toughest schedules and the school could wind up writing Malzahn a big check to go away. No matter how it goes the rest of the way, Malzahn will make his stand doing the thing that got him here in the first place.
Imagine telling Jerry Seinfeld that he could make a better TV show if he didn’t tell so many jokes.
Imagine telling John Grisham that he might sell more books if he stopped writing about lawyers.
Imagine if someone convinced Garth Brooks to stop making country songs so he could record an album as an angsty alt-rocker named Chris Gaines.
OK, so that last one actually happened. And the results were predictable. When talented people stop doing the thing that rocketed them to stardom in the first place, their job performance usually suffers.
So imagine if someone asked Gus Malzahn, who rose from Arkansas high school coach to multimillionaire SEC head coach because of his play-calling acumen, to stop calling plays. Well, that actually happened, too. And the results were predictable.
In 2016, after Auburn had lost on the road to eventual national champion Clemson and at home to Texas A&M, Malzahn abdicated play calling to protégé Rhett Lashlee. The fact Lashlee decamped to Connecticut after that season tells you all you need to know about how fun that arrangement was for both men. After Lashlee left, Malzahn hired Chip Lindsey and claimed he was “retiring” his offensive clipboard. “I fully understand our fan base is disappointed, and they should be,” Malzahn said at the news conference announcing Lindsey’s hiring. “The bottom line is we’ve got to coach our players better, and that starts with me.”
Malzahn probably knew it was a mistake then, but he was under pressure. Auburn is a huge job, and the message from on high was that the Tigers would get better if Malzahn had more time to focus on the other aspects of the gig. In other words, the people in charge wanted one of the most inventive football play callers of this century to focus less on play calling and more on being an administrator.
The result was a miserable head coach. And once tailback Kerryon Johnson wasn’t there to make just about any play call correct, the result was a miserable offense that wasted the efforts of a fantastic defense in 2018. When the Tigers could throw — as they could in a skin-of-the-teeth win against Texas A&M — they couldn’t run. When they could run, they couldn’t throw. It never came together anywhere near as perfectly as it did this past Saturday against Mississippi State, when it felt like everything worked and Auburn averaged 4.8 yards a rush and 15 yards a pass attempt.
The best Malzahn offenses run so they can pass or so that they can run in a more explosive way. Malzahn is at his best when he stacks concepts atop one another, running multiple plays out of the same formation until — bang — he hits you with the deep shot or the reverse to a receiver moving toward the side of the field the defense has abandoned to chase the back who went the same way the previous three times Auburn showed that look. This is part science and part art. The science can be learned by anyone. The art is innate. Only a few people can see the field this way. Steve Spurrier at his best saw things no one else could. Dan Mullen, the coach Malzahn will face Saturday, has some of this same stuff in him. It is this part that makes Malzahn special, and after Malzahn allowed that part to get taken away, he became a pretty good recruiter and motivational speaker but not a great all-around coach.
When Malzahn interviewed for Auburn’s head-coaching job in December 2012 after a season as Arkansas State’s head coach, he kept repeating the same phrase to then-athletic director Jay Jacobs.
We’ve lost our edge.
What Malzahn meant by that, and what Pat Dye-era player Jacobs understood immediately, is that at some point in the final year of the Gene Chizik era, Auburn stopped being Auburn. The toughness that had defined the program — win or lose — had evaporated as the Tigers had gone 0-8 in the SEC in 2012. Malzahn promised to bring that back. He made good on that promise, winning the SEC and coming within a play of winning the national title in his first season as head coach.
But when he stopped calling plays, Malzahn stopped being Malzahn. Or at least the Malzahn Auburn had hired. Some of the blame for that goes on the people who pressed Malzahn into giving up play calling. Some of the blame goes on Malzahn for allowing that to happen.
When Lincoln Riley took over at Oklahoma in 2017, he got a lot of questions about how he’d handle the rigors of calling plays and running Oklahoma’s entire operation. He laughed these off repeatedly. He would put people in place to help him succeed on the administrative end, but by God he would keep calling plays and coaching quarterbacks because that was what allowed him to become Oklahoma’s head coach in the first place. The results? Two Big 12 titles. Two playoff trips. Two Heisman Trophies for two different QBs. Two No. 1 draft picks. Riley, who was a 60-year-old when he was a 30-year-old, knew exactly who he was, and he wasn’t going to let anyone talk him out of it.
Malzahn has now rectified the mistake of getting talked out of calling plays. If this season goes the way Auburn’s talent level suggests it could, he’ll have enough juice to ensure no one ever suggests he retire that clipboard again.
Gus Malzahn has brought true freshman starting QB Bo Nix (right) along patiently and deployed the legs of backup Joey Gatewood (left) with deadly effect. (John Reed / USA Today)
The defense is a major reason Malzahn should feel so comfortable. In Kevin Steele, Malzahn has a coordinator who can handle that side of the ball completely. Malzahn can trust Steele to formulate the correct plan for each opponent and execute it; Malzahn doesn’t need to look over Steele’s shoulder. It also helps that Steele has at his disposal a set of weapons that few teams can match. Tackle Derrick Brown is the nation’s best interior defensive lineman. Bulking up may hurt Nick Coe’s sack numbers, but it allows him to play multiple positions and allows him to team with Brown to produce pressure directly up the middle. Senior safety Jeremiah Dinson can play all over the field. Noah Igbinoghene, who came to Auburn as a receiver, can lock down the people who play his old position now that he has grown comfortable at cornerback.
With this kind of safety blanket, the Tigers had time to find the right formula on offense. Going into the Mississippi State game, they still hadn’t proved they’d found it. Nix played a great second half of the fourth quarter against Oregon and paired a gutsy fourth-down conversion with a brilliant touchdown throw to Seth Williams to beat the Ducks, but that performance probably wouldn’t be good enough to compete with some of the monsters further down the schedule. Auburn dominated Texas A&M in College Station for most of the game, but Nix only averaged five yards per pass attempt. He was cautious with the ball (two TD passes, no interceptions, 61.9 percent completion rate), but the Tigers weren’t explosive in the passing game. They didn’t need to be, though. The defense was going to keep the Aggies bottled up.
In 2010, when Malzahn was Auburn’s offensive coordinator and Cam Newton was the quarterback, it took until the South Carolina game (game No. 4) for Malzahn to formulate what we now remember as that national champion’s offense. In 2013, the light bulb clicked on in the second half of a loss at LSU (also game No. 4). Afterward, Malzahn understood what he had in quarterback Nick Marshall and built an offense around Marshall’s running ability.
Although it happened a little later — game No. 5 — it felt as if Saturday was that night for this Auburn offense. Williams, who had missed time because of a shoulder injury suffered at Tulane, finally looked like the alpha receiver Auburn has been missing for five years. He caught eight passes for 161 yards and two touchdowns. Receiver Anthony Schwartz, the fastest player in college football, had been limited in practice since August because of a broken hand. Schwartz finally got to work full speed with the offense prior to the Texas A&M game, and against Mississippi State it appeared Nix had gotten enough reps to get in sync with a player who simply moves differently from everyone else on the field. Schwartz caught two passes for 67 yards, and he carried three times for 25 yards and a touchdown. More importantly, he gave future opposing defenses more reasons to worry about him. Because no one on the field can outrun him, a defense must have a plan for Schwartz every time he’s on the field.
“We finally have all the pieces of the puzzle in the field,” Malzahn said. “We hadn’t had that until last week. And so now, you know, we can start getting some consistency. Especially in practice, our quarterback hadn’t had time to develop the timing that you really need. So we’re kind of doing that as the season goes. So now that we have the pieces of the puzzle, it really gives you more flexibility to call what you want to call.”
Malzahn will call what he wants because he’ll either rise or fall doing what he does best. The schedule is brutal. Florida, LSU, Georgia and Alabama are still undefeated at this point. All of those are losable games. But unlike last year, they’re all winnable as well.
Auburn has a reputation as a volatile place because a coach’s fortunes can turn so rapidly. One moment a high-powered trustee and the president are trying to oust Tommy Tuberville. The next moment Tuberville is going undefeated. Chizik wins a national title and then gets fired two years later because his team can’t win a game in SEC play. Malzahn has been somewhat inconsistent, but not enough to land on the hot seat as often as he has. The issue at Auburn for most of Malzahn’s tenure is that Auburn people must deal emotionally with the fact their rival is on the best run in the history of the sport. It doesn’t matter that Malzahn has beaten Alabama twice in the midst of this run — and that he’s the only sitting SEC coach with a head-to-head win against Nick Saban — the series is supposed to be more competitive. Sure, 125 fan bases would trade Auburn’s past 10 seasons for their team’s past 10 seasons, but that’s not good enough because Alabama is one of the fan bases that wouldn’t. This isn’t meant to portray Auburn fans and power brokers as delusional; it’s an attempt to explain to everyone else why Auburn people seem to have so little patience. If Alabama were more normal, Malzahn probably wouldn’t be under such intense pressure.
But the Crimson Tide are what they are, so Malzahn must coach to a higher standard. He may do that well enough to satisfy his constituency. He may not.
No matter what happens, at least he’ll do it his way
Malzahn looked completely at ease. That’s understandable after a 56-23 win that showcased exactly how dominant Auburn’s defense and offense can be. But Malzahn and the Tigers are making a trip to Florida this week for a matchup of top-10 teams that he knows won’t be so easy. In the previous three seasons, that might have soured the mood. But it didn’t Sunday because Malzahn is back in his comfort zone.
Malzahn looked like a different person from the guy who tried to explain a baffling loss to Tennessee 49 weeks ago. Following that game, Malzahn was asked how he felt about his coaching staff. He didn’t bite. “Right now, my feelings are I’m disappointed for our team,” he said. “I’m not ready to sit here and make any kind of talk about staff or players other than I’m disappointed.”
That loss inspired a chorus of malcontents who suggested that Auburn should consider parting ways with Malzahn even though the school signed the coach to a massive contract extension following an SEC West title in 2017. The buyout — more than $30 million — did its job and kept that talk from getting too serious. But those discussions did inspire Malzahn to make one key change.
He decided to bet on himself.
He would call plays again. “It’s who I am,” Malzahn said Sunday night when asked how different this season feels from the past few years.
Since Malzahn started calling plays again in last year’s Music City Bowl, the Tigers are 6-0. The offense, with a true freshman quarterback and receivers who are just now all getting healthy, isn’t perfect. But a loaded defense provides a massive safety net, and if the offense improves in the way that Malzahn’s best Auburn offenses have, this could be a magical season that doesn’t require as much actual magic as the 2013 team that needed two November miracles to win the SEC. If the offense stagnates, Auburn could get shredded by the teeth of one of the nation’s toughest schedules and the school could wind up writing Malzahn a big check to go away. No matter how it goes the rest of the way, Malzahn will make his stand doing the thing that got him here in the first place.
Imagine telling Jerry Seinfeld that he could make a better TV show if he didn’t tell so many jokes.
Imagine telling John Grisham that he might sell more books if he stopped writing about lawyers.
Imagine if someone convinced Garth Brooks to stop making country songs so he could record an album as an angsty alt-rocker named Chris Gaines.
OK, so that last one actually happened. And the results were predictable. When talented people stop doing the thing that rocketed them to stardom in the first place, their job performance usually suffers.
So imagine if someone asked Gus Malzahn, who rose from Arkansas high school coach to multimillionaire SEC head coach because of his play-calling acumen, to stop calling plays. Well, that actually happened, too. And the results were predictable.
In 2016, after Auburn had lost on the road to eventual national champion Clemson and at home to Texas A&M, Malzahn abdicated play calling to protégé Rhett Lashlee. The fact Lashlee decamped to Connecticut after that season tells you all you need to know about how fun that arrangement was for both men. After Lashlee left, Malzahn hired Chip Lindsey and claimed he was “retiring” his offensive clipboard. “I fully understand our fan base is disappointed, and they should be,” Malzahn said at the news conference announcing Lindsey’s hiring. “The bottom line is we’ve got to coach our players better, and that starts with me.”
Malzahn probably knew it was a mistake then, but he was under pressure. Auburn is a huge job, and the message from on high was that the Tigers would get better if Malzahn had more time to focus on the other aspects of the gig. In other words, the people in charge wanted one of the most inventive football play callers of this century to focus less on play calling and more on being an administrator.
The result was a miserable head coach. And once tailback Kerryon Johnson wasn’t there to make just about any play call correct, the result was a miserable offense that wasted the efforts of a fantastic defense in 2018. When the Tigers could throw — as they could in a skin-of-the-teeth win against Texas A&M — they couldn’t run. When they could run, they couldn’t throw. It never came together anywhere near as perfectly as it did this past Saturday against Mississippi State, when it felt like everything worked and Auburn averaged 4.8 yards a rush and 15 yards a pass attempt.
The best Malzahn offenses run so they can pass or so that they can run in a more explosive way. Malzahn is at his best when he stacks concepts atop one another, running multiple plays out of the same formation until — bang — he hits you with the deep shot or the reverse to a receiver moving toward the side of the field the defense has abandoned to chase the back who went the same way the previous three times Auburn showed that look. This is part science and part art. The science can be learned by anyone. The art is innate. Only a few people can see the field this way. Steve Spurrier at his best saw things no one else could. Dan Mullen, the coach Malzahn will face Saturday, has some of this same stuff in him. It is this part that makes Malzahn special, and after Malzahn allowed that part to get taken away, he became a pretty good recruiter and motivational speaker but not a great all-around coach.
When Malzahn interviewed for Auburn’s head-coaching job in December 2012 after a season as Arkansas State’s head coach, he kept repeating the same phrase to then-athletic director Jay Jacobs.
We’ve lost our edge.
What Malzahn meant by that, and what Pat Dye-era player Jacobs understood immediately, is that at some point in the final year of the Gene Chizik era, Auburn stopped being Auburn. The toughness that had defined the program — win or lose — had evaporated as the Tigers had gone 0-8 in the SEC in 2012. Malzahn promised to bring that back. He made good on that promise, winning the SEC and coming within a play of winning the national title in his first season as head coach.
But when he stopped calling plays, Malzahn stopped being Malzahn. Or at least the Malzahn Auburn had hired. Some of the blame for that goes on the people who pressed Malzahn into giving up play calling. Some of the blame goes on Malzahn for allowing that to happen.
When Lincoln Riley took over at Oklahoma in 2017, he got a lot of questions about how he’d handle the rigors of calling plays and running Oklahoma’s entire operation. He laughed these off repeatedly. He would put people in place to help him succeed on the administrative end, but by God he would keep calling plays and coaching quarterbacks because that was what allowed him to become Oklahoma’s head coach in the first place. The results? Two Big 12 titles. Two playoff trips. Two Heisman Trophies for two different QBs. Two No. 1 draft picks. Riley, who was a 60-year-old when he was a 30-year-old, knew exactly who he was, and he wasn’t going to let anyone talk him out of it.
Malzahn has now rectified the mistake of getting talked out of calling plays. If this season goes the way Auburn’s talent level suggests it could, he’ll have enough juice to ensure no one ever suggests he retire that clipboard again.
Gus Malzahn has brought true freshman starting QB Bo Nix (right) along patiently and deployed the legs of backup Joey Gatewood (left) with deadly effect. (John Reed / USA Today)
The defense is a major reason Malzahn should feel so comfortable. In Kevin Steele, Malzahn has a coordinator who can handle that side of the ball completely. Malzahn can trust Steele to formulate the correct plan for each opponent and execute it; Malzahn doesn’t need to look over Steele’s shoulder. It also helps that Steele has at his disposal a set of weapons that few teams can match. Tackle Derrick Brown is the nation’s best interior defensive lineman. Bulking up may hurt Nick Coe’s sack numbers, but it allows him to play multiple positions and allows him to team with Brown to produce pressure directly up the middle. Senior safety Jeremiah Dinson can play all over the field. Noah Igbinoghene, who came to Auburn as a receiver, can lock down the people who play his old position now that he has grown comfortable at cornerback.
With this kind of safety blanket, the Tigers had time to find the right formula on offense. Going into the Mississippi State game, they still hadn’t proved they’d found it. Nix played a great second half of the fourth quarter against Oregon and paired a gutsy fourth-down conversion with a brilliant touchdown throw to Seth Williams to beat the Ducks, but that performance probably wouldn’t be good enough to compete with some of the monsters further down the schedule. Auburn dominated Texas A&M in College Station for most of the game, but Nix only averaged five yards per pass attempt. He was cautious with the ball (two TD passes, no interceptions, 61.9 percent completion rate), but the Tigers weren’t explosive in the passing game. They didn’t need to be, though. The defense was going to keep the Aggies bottled up.
In 2010, when Malzahn was Auburn’s offensive coordinator and Cam Newton was the quarterback, it took until the South Carolina game (game No. 4) for Malzahn to formulate what we now remember as that national champion’s offense. In 2013, the light bulb clicked on in the second half of a loss at LSU (also game No. 4). Afterward, Malzahn understood what he had in quarterback Nick Marshall and built an offense around Marshall’s running ability.
Although it happened a little later — game No. 5 — it felt as if Saturday was that night for this Auburn offense. Williams, who had missed time because of a shoulder injury suffered at Tulane, finally looked like the alpha receiver Auburn has been missing for five years. He caught eight passes for 161 yards and two touchdowns. Receiver Anthony Schwartz, the fastest player in college football, had been limited in practice since August because of a broken hand. Schwartz finally got to work full speed with the offense prior to the Texas A&M game, and against Mississippi State it appeared Nix had gotten enough reps to get in sync with a player who simply moves differently from everyone else on the field. Schwartz caught two passes for 67 yards, and he carried three times for 25 yards and a touchdown. More importantly, he gave future opposing defenses more reasons to worry about him. Because no one on the field can outrun him, a defense must have a plan for Schwartz every time he’s on the field.
“We finally have all the pieces of the puzzle in the field,” Malzahn said. “We hadn’t had that until last week. And so now, you know, we can start getting some consistency. Especially in practice, our quarterback hadn’t had time to develop the timing that you really need. So we’re kind of doing that as the season goes. So now that we have the pieces of the puzzle, it really gives you more flexibility to call what you want to call.”
Malzahn will call what he wants because he’ll either rise or fall doing what he does best. The schedule is brutal. Florida, LSU, Georgia and Alabama are still undefeated at this point. All of those are losable games. But unlike last year, they’re all winnable as well.
Auburn has a reputation as a volatile place because a coach’s fortunes can turn so rapidly. One moment a high-powered trustee and the president are trying to oust Tommy Tuberville. The next moment Tuberville is going undefeated. Chizik wins a national title and then gets fired two years later because his team can’t win a game in SEC play. Malzahn has been somewhat inconsistent, but not enough to land on the hot seat as often as he has. The issue at Auburn for most of Malzahn’s tenure is that Auburn people must deal emotionally with the fact their rival is on the best run in the history of the sport. It doesn’t matter that Malzahn has beaten Alabama twice in the midst of this run — and that he’s the only sitting SEC coach with a head-to-head win against Nick Saban — the series is supposed to be more competitive. Sure, 125 fan bases would trade Auburn’s past 10 seasons for their team’s past 10 seasons, but that’s not good enough because Alabama is one of the fan bases that wouldn’t. This isn’t meant to portray Auburn fans and power brokers as delusional; it’s an attempt to explain to everyone else why Auburn people seem to have so little patience. If Alabama were more normal, Malzahn probably wouldn’t be under such intense pressure.
But the Crimson Tide are what they are, so Malzahn must coach to a higher standard. He may do that well enough to satisfy his constituency. He may not.
No matter what happens, at least he’ll do it his way
VegetasHairline
Veteran
yardman
Mad movements!
Could you post this article for me @SJUGRAD13 Inside the revolution: how Arsenal plan to reclaim place...
My bad guys. I got a email about content sharing so I was nervous for awhile.
Part 1
And so, as the Vancouver Canucks lose a game in which they probably deserved better, falling 3-2 to the Edmonton Oilers in regulation, we begin a new season and launch a new version of The Athletic Vancouver’s Canucks postgamer.
The format will feel familiar, but obviously, tragically, the voice behind it will be different.
The Athletties were Jason Botchford’s singular masterpiece. It was the Vancouver hockey zeitgeist, self-contained and electric.
It can’t be replaced. It can never be recreated.
That’s the thing about a towering achievement of hockey reporting and entertainment like The Athletties — it deserves to be remembered as such.
It also deserves to be retired: to remain Jason’s forevermore.
And yet we’ve committed to carrying on the type of obsessive, unique, irreverent, fun, collectivist postgame content experience the VIPs demand and expect from The AthleticVancouver.
We’re calling it The Armies, because there’s no one person who can come in and do this job. Like rebuilding an NHL team, it’s going to take an army.
Thankfully in Wyatt Arndt, Harman Dayal, me and you, the VIPs who faithfully read Jason’s work, we believe we have that army.
We’ll be collaborating throughout the season, working together to create something distinct, but recognizable. Something that pays tribute to what came before, but that’s durable enough to pave its own way.
Welcome to The Armies.
Ultimate game breaker, breaks games
Connor McDavid is basically Game Genie. A human cheat code.
Over the past three seasons, McDavid has outscored the second closest NHL player, Nikita Kucherov, by 27 points at even-strength. He’s literally leaps and bounds more lethal than any other hockey-playing human on the planet.
Now, look, Vancouver would want the tail end of the lengthy defensive shift that resulted in McDavid smashing through their defence and scoring the game-winner back. There were several compounding mistakes by a variety of Canucks skaters that lead to the goal. Still, this was a goal that only McDavid could score.
Let’s start with the bad. Brandon Sutter, who otherwise had a pretty decent game, coming out even on the shot clock despite being Vancouver’s preferred matchup for Leon Draisaitl and spending six additional minutes checking McDavid and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. After Quinn Hughes blocked a shot, Sutter thought he had an open outlet pass to a streaking — streaking being a relative term here — Loui Eriksson on the left flank.
He didn’t. Matt Benning squeezed, the puck was quickly turned over and McDavid went the other way.
“We managed to get it at least out of the zone and they made a nice play in the neutral zone,” Sutter said of how he viewed the sequence. “Their (defenceman) quick upped (a pass) to maybe Draisaitl and he bumped it to Connor and he was coming full steam and we just didn’t quite have the close in the middle, but … we were just maybe half a step too late.”
He’s dead on, but still, when you watch this, that neutral zone turnover will drive you crazy:
There’s a bit more to this play than first meets the eye though.
Yes, the Canucks are tired here. Most of the skaters were on the ice for a minute when McDavid scored.
They also, to a man, started to change. Watch it again and you’ll see Josh Leivo jump off the ice while Brock Boeser jumps on to eat the empty dash.
You’ll also see Chris Tanev drift out of position, drift too far wide to get properly back for more than a stick lift against a physics-defying bullet train like McDavid — a man who seems to bend space and time the way you or I put one foot in front of the other.
Hughes told the media postgame that he was also looking toward the bench.
“I think that can happen to you at any level,” Hughes said of him and Tanev both looking to change, once Sutter got the puck out of the zone. “Guys come down on you fast and hard and it’s a pretty routine play off of turnovers. It was kind of a weird play.”
Sutter obviously needs to do better with the pass, and it’s probably worth noting that he didn’t play another shift in the game after this goal.
And even with all of that, Tanev was still able to disrupt McDavid with a stick lift. Hughes even managed to play the puck away from McDavid, before the Oilers captain roofed the puck over Jacob Markstrom.
“I felt like I got a piece of my stick on the puck there and then I think he got a good bounce there (to retain possession),” Hughes said.
Sometimes errors compound and you get burned, especially when you’re facing the best offensive talent in the world.
Just, wow
“He’s got a lot of speed and you know he’s coming at you and he’s gonna make a play,” Hughes said of how he viewed the McDavid goal. “Honestly I don’t really expect anything else from him.”
“Not anyone else in the world to be honest with you (moves the way he does),” Horvat said. “It’s pretty crazy to see his top-end speed and even how fast he gets there, and there’s a reason why he’s the fastest guy out there and the best player in the league.”
Sometimes video doesn’t even do the pace at which McDavid moves proper justice.
For example, here’s McDavid one stride after receiving the puck in the neutral zone. Tanev is a bit too far out, but Hughes is still back there and he’s level with the centre.
Except another half a stride later, McDavid has already burned that centre and it’s now clear just how much trouble Tanev — a top-end skater in his own right — is in.
Half a stride later, Sutter is completely out of the play, Tanev is cooked and Hughes’ best last-ditch effort to get his stick on the puck seems like an improbable desperation play.
That Hughes actually got as close as he did to knocking the puck away from McDavid is a testament to the quality of his stick.
This is just superhuman stuff:
The format will feel familiar, but obviously, tragically, the voice behind it will be different.
The Athletties were Jason Botchford’s singular masterpiece. It was the Vancouver hockey zeitgeist, self-contained and electric.
It can’t be replaced. It can never be recreated.
That’s the thing about a towering achievement of hockey reporting and entertainment like The Athletties — it deserves to be remembered as such.
It also deserves to be retired: to remain Jason’s forevermore.
And yet we’ve committed to carrying on the type of obsessive, unique, irreverent, fun, collectivist postgame content experience the VIPs demand and expect from The AthleticVancouver.
We’re calling it The Armies, because there’s no one person who can come in and do this job. Like rebuilding an NHL team, it’s going to take an army.
Thankfully in Wyatt Arndt, Harman Dayal, me and you, the VIPs who faithfully read Jason’s work, we believe we have that army.
We’ll be collaborating throughout the season, working together to create something distinct, but recognizable. Something that pays tribute to what came before, but that’s durable enough to pave its own way.
Welcome to The Armies.
Ultimate game breaker, breaks games
Connor McDavid is basically Game Genie. A human cheat code.
Over the past three seasons, McDavid has outscored the second closest NHL player, Nikita Kucherov, by 27 points at even-strength. He’s literally leaps and bounds more lethal than any other hockey-playing human on the planet.
Now, look, Vancouver would want the tail end of the lengthy defensive shift that resulted in McDavid smashing through their defence and scoring the game-winner back. There were several compounding mistakes by a variety of Canucks skaters that lead to the goal. Still, this was a goal that only McDavid could score.
Let’s start with the bad. Brandon Sutter, who otherwise had a pretty decent game, coming out even on the shot clock despite being Vancouver’s preferred matchup for Leon Draisaitl and spending six additional minutes checking McDavid and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. After Quinn Hughes blocked a shot, Sutter thought he had an open outlet pass to a streaking — streaking being a relative term here — Loui Eriksson on the left flank.
He didn’t. Matt Benning squeezed, the puck was quickly turned over and McDavid went the other way.
“We managed to get it at least out of the zone and they made a nice play in the neutral zone,” Sutter said of how he viewed the sequence. “Their (defenceman) quick upped (a pass) to maybe Draisaitl and he bumped it to Connor and he was coming full steam and we just didn’t quite have the close in the middle, but … we were just maybe half a step too late.”
He’s dead on, but still, when you watch this, that neutral zone turnover will drive you crazy:
There’s a bit more to this play than first meets the eye though.
Yes, the Canucks are tired here. Most of the skaters were on the ice for a minute when McDavid scored.
They also, to a man, started to change. Watch it again and you’ll see Josh Leivo jump off the ice while Brock Boeser jumps on to eat the empty dash.
You’ll also see Chris Tanev drift out of position, drift too far wide to get properly back for more than a stick lift against a physics-defying bullet train like McDavid — a man who seems to bend space and time the way you or I put one foot in front of the other.
Hughes told the media postgame that he was also looking toward the bench.
“I think that can happen to you at any level,” Hughes said of him and Tanev both looking to change, once Sutter got the puck out of the zone. “Guys come down on you fast and hard and it’s a pretty routine play off of turnovers. It was kind of a weird play.”
Sutter obviously needs to do better with the pass, and it’s probably worth noting that he didn’t play another shift in the game after this goal.
And even with all of that, Tanev was still able to disrupt McDavid with a stick lift. Hughes even managed to play the puck away from McDavid, before the Oilers captain roofed the puck over Jacob Markstrom.
“I felt like I got a piece of my stick on the puck there and then I think he got a good bounce there (to retain possession),” Hughes said.
Sometimes errors compound and you get burned, especially when you’re facing the best offensive talent in the world.
Just, wow
“He’s got a lot of speed and you know he’s coming at you and he’s gonna make a play,” Hughes said of how he viewed the McDavid goal. “Honestly I don’t really expect anything else from him.”
“Not anyone else in the world to be honest with you (moves the way he does),” Horvat said. “It’s pretty crazy to see his top-end speed and even how fast he gets there, and there’s a reason why he’s the fastest guy out there and the best player in the league.”
Sometimes video doesn’t even do the pace at which McDavid moves proper justice.
For example, here’s McDavid one stride after receiving the puck in the neutral zone. Tanev is a bit too far out, but Hughes is still back there and he’s level with the centre.
Except another half a stride later, McDavid has already burned that centre and it’s now clear just how much trouble Tanev — a top-end skater in his own right — is in.
Half a stride later, Sutter is completely out of the play, Tanev is cooked and Hughes’ best last-ditch effort to get his stick on the puck seems like an improbable desperation play.
That Hughes actually got as close as he did to knocking the puck away from McDavid is a testament to the quality of his stick.
This is just superhuman stuff:
Part 2
Best tribute to ‘The Shift’
It almost felt like one of those three-on-three overtimes from last season, the way Hughes & Co. had the puck on a string at the end of the first period.
They put the Oilers’ defence into a Sedin-like torture chambre for 2:04 and saw a partial line change that was enabled while Vancouver’s two most exciting players, Hughes and Elias Pettersson, played catch.
Hughes was dynamic throughout, and drove the entire play by activating down from the point, beating a defender wide and firing a shot attempt from in tight.
Hughes’ ability to keep the puck alive on multiple occasions was pretty stunning, but the real magic began at the tail end of the above video after he batted a clearing attempt out of mid-air to keep the possession alive.
Hughes receives the puck by the half-wall, completes a 180-degree turn, walks the length of the blue line and does another 180-degree turn to fend off Colby Cave before resetting the puck back to the point for Pettersson who whips it across for Tanev with time and space.
“He’s a special player and he does a lot of special things out there,” said Bo Horvat when asked about Hughes’ shift. “Deking guys out, he’s such an efficient skater so it doesn’t take him much to get around guys and it’s encouraging for sure having a young guy lead the charge like that. Having shifts like that and having guys like that to turn the tide and young guys that are gonna push the pace is huge for our group.”
“We had them on the ropes that shift for sure,” summarized Green.
Moments and shifts like these, where talented players are able to express their offensive creativity is not just exciting for the fans watching, but for the young guns involved too.
“It’s really fun, there was a moment in the third period when I thought to myself ‘this is pretty fun’ and the moment to start the game where the crowd was going crazy, I was saying to myself ‘I haven’t seen anything like this yet’ so it was pretty cool,” said Hughes.
What’s perhaps most exciting though, is that Hughes thinks the Canucks’ core is just getting started.
“There’s gonna be shifts like that throughout the year for sure because there’s a lot of good players on the team, a lot of smart players and I think you’re only going to see us get better. I told someone this morning, I think by game 30 you’re really going to see us be at our best. Not that we’re not (at our best) right now, but I think as the season goes on we’ll get better and better and I think that’s just us making plays and using our creativity in the o-zone.”
Best trolling
You know you’re committed to trolling when you put on a rival Western Canadian franchise’s sweater for the purpose of mocking fans of that team. True excellence requires sacrifice.
Best stamina
What’s arguably most impressive about that play is Hughes dances the zone with his series of turns and pivots really late into his shift. In fact, he’d been on the ice for well past a minute when he decided to change sides and dipsy doodle around Colby Cave.
“(That’s) probably conditioning from the last month and at the same time, just work and I think it’s pretty easy for me to skate so I think that also plays into it too,” Hughes rationalized.
He certainly looks like he can play all day. After logging over 23 minutes in the Canucks’ season opener, it seems I may have been too conservative in my prediction that he’d lead the club in ice time over the last 30 games or so.
That might come even sooner.
Best playmaking
It’s the ultimate compliment you can give a player: we expect Horvat to take noticeable steps forward with his game on an annual basis.
There’s been nothing but a linear progression with Horvat’s development. Whether he’s rounding out his offensive game or steadily improving his two-way game, Horvat’s progress as a player marches forward inexorably.
Which is perhaps why we need to look at his vision and playmaking on Wednesday night and wonder if this might be the next area that Horvat really steps it up.
After all, Horvat set up at least four excellent chances that could have all led to goals.
It began with a waist-high saucer pass to spring JT Miller on a breakaway in the first period.
“I had to get it up and get it there quickly and it had to be a hard pass so kudos to him for handling it,” said Horvat.
This sequence was a sweet hook-pass to hit a streaking Tanner Pearson on the weak side. It wasn’t the only example of Horvat’s lateral vision tonight, though.
Horvat’s always been a strong north-south player, particularly when he can use his speed and size in transition, but with space taken away on this occasion, he made a slick feed across the slot to Miller who almost set up Pearson. One is left to wonder if it might’ve been a game-sealing goal had it not been for Mike Smith grabbing Pearson’s stick.
Later, there was a play from Gretzky’s office behind the net where he perfectly saw, timed and executed a pass to Pearson for a one-timer just as he was attacking the slot — Smith making three incredible saves.
You don’t want to read too much into one game, but could this be the first sign of Horvat diversifying his offensive game further?
We know he can take the puck to the net, but the ability to create chances when the middle is well-protected could be a big development for the Canucks second line.
“I think confidence is the best word to use in that situation and just being confident in yourself and confident in your abilities that you’re going to make the plays,” explained Horvat. “I felt more and more comfortable out there, especially with my linemates and knowing each others’ games we were snapping around pretty good and had some really good offensive zone shifts and that’s an encouraging sign.”
Speaking of his linemates, Miller and Pearson did a great job of finding the right seams and making themselves available in the right positions. After all, a playmaker is only as good as the skaters he’s setting up.
“They know where to be on the ice all the time and so they’re hitting holes and screaming for pucks and making my job a lot easier to try and find them,” Horvat said.
Eight alternate captains??!!?
As we await the announcement of the Canucks’ 80-game captain for the 2019-20 season at the club’s home opener on Wednesday, the delayed captaincy decision has caused confused speculation in the Vancouver market.
Obviously the Canucks tweet on the matter confused people, but all hell really broke loose when Baby Dragon got his wires crossed in a text message exchange with Canucks PR, causing a proper Canucks Twitter meltdown.
Following up on Wednesday morning, in an attempt to clarify the situation, the following amicable exchange resulted
Drance: Travis, some confusion in the Vancouver market after the four As were announced. Not looking for state secrets, but will the captain be picked from that group?
Travis: Guess you’ll have to be at the game on Wednesday night to find out. Might be four As still after that game, there might not be.
Drance: Are you able to do four As?
Travis: Yeah, you can do eight As, you just rotate them around. Whatever you want.
Drance: But you haven’t made a decision on the rotations for home and away?
Travis: I’ve made a decision.
Drance: Who will be wearing As tonight?
Travis: You’ll find out when you get to the game.
P.J.: Did you consider doing eight As?
Travis: No. We done?
Reading the captaincy tea leaves
Now here’s the thing, as we look to get to the bottom of this: we all think we know who the next Canucks captain is. And we may have got a pretty significant indication of how the alternate captains will rotate on Wednesday night too.
You see NHL rules limit a club with a captain, which the Canucks have said they will have for the latter 80 games of the season, to two alternate captains per game. If you don’t have a captain you can have three alternates for a game.
So on Wednesday night the Canucks had Horvat wearing an A, Edler wearing an A and Tanev wearing an A.
Sutter didn’t have a letter, but perhaps he will at home.
As it stands we have no confirmation about who the captain will be. The Canucks won’t even confirm for us if the players all know — though surely they do.
But from how the Canucks leadership group adorned their sweaters on Wednesday, I’d probably suggest that if Horvat has his letter modified next week, Edler may be a full-time alternate, while Tanev and Sutter rotate between home and away games.
That’s my bet, anyway.
The LTI thing
There’s an important distinction that’s worth noting when discussing the technical state of the Canucks roster, particularly as it pertains to injured forward Antoine Roussel.
Let’s start with what’s simple: as of this writing, the Canucks have 22 men on their active roster: 13 forwards, 7 defensemen, 2 goaltenders.
When they submitted their 23-man roster list ahead of Tuesday’s 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT deadline, their roster was frozen until after they played a game. Now that they’ve done so, they’re able to recall and reassign players again.
On Wednesday, the club placed Tyler Motte on regular injured reserve (IR). He continues to count against the salary cap, but he has to miss at least a week worth of games — which was his timeline anyway, according to Travis Green’s comments on Tuesday.
Which brings us to Roussel. Roussel is, in fact, “on” long-term injured reserve (LTI). The Canucks, however, haven’t replaced his spot on the roster.
And so, as it stands, Roussel is “on” LTI, but the Canucks aren’t “in” LTI – in that they’re below the accruable limit and are still tolling daily space.
That could change in the days and weeks ahead. It could change in the hours ahead.
It almost felt like one of those three-on-three overtimes from last season, the way Hughes & Co. had the puck on a string at the end of the first period.
They put the Oilers’ defence into a Sedin-like torture chambre for 2:04 and saw a partial line change that was enabled while Vancouver’s two most exciting players, Hughes and Elias Pettersson, played catch.
Hughes was dynamic throughout, and drove the entire play by activating down from the point, beating a defender wide and firing a shot attempt from in tight.
Hughes’ ability to keep the puck alive on multiple occasions was pretty stunning, but the real magic began at the tail end of the above video after he batted a clearing attempt out of mid-air to keep the possession alive.
Hughes receives the puck by the half-wall, completes a 180-degree turn, walks the length of the blue line and does another 180-degree turn to fend off Colby Cave before resetting the puck back to the point for Pettersson who whips it across for Tanev with time and space.
“He’s a special player and he does a lot of special things out there,” said Bo Horvat when asked about Hughes’ shift. “Deking guys out, he’s such an efficient skater so it doesn’t take him much to get around guys and it’s encouraging for sure having a young guy lead the charge like that. Having shifts like that and having guys like that to turn the tide and young guys that are gonna push the pace is huge for our group.”
“We had them on the ropes that shift for sure,” summarized Green.
Moments and shifts like these, where talented players are able to express their offensive creativity is not just exciting for the fans watching, but for the young guns involved too.
“It’s really fun, there was a moment in the third period when I thought to myself ‘this is pretty fun’ and the moment to start the game where the crowd was going crazy, I was saying to myself ‘I haven’t seen anything like this yet’ so it was pretty cool,” said Hughes.
What’s perhaps most exciting though, is that Hughes thinks the Canucks’ core is just getting started.
“There’s gonna be shifts like that throughout the year for sure because there’s a lot of good players on the team, a lot of smart players and I think you’re only going to see us get better. I told someone this morning, I think by game 30 you’re really going to see us be at our best. Not that we’re not (at our best) right now, but I think as the season goes on we’ll get better and better and I think that’s just us making plays and using our creativity in the o-zone.”
Best trolling
You know you’re committed to trolling when you put on a rival Western Canadian franchise’s sweater for the purpose of mocking fans of that team. True excellence requires sacrifice.
Best stamina
What’s arguably most impressive about that play is Hughes dances the zone with his series of turns and pivots really late into his shift. In fact, he’d been on the ice for well past a minute when he decided to change sides and dipsy doodle around Colby Cave.
“(That’s) probably conditioning from the last month and at the same time, just work and I think it’s pretty easy for me to skate so I think that also plays into it too,” Hughes rationalized.
He certainly looks like he can play all day. After logging over 23 minutes in the Canucks’ season opener, it seems I may have been too conservative in my prediction that he’d lead the club in ice time over the last 30 games or so.
That might come even sooner.
Best playmaking
It’s the ultimate compliment you can give a player: we expect Horvat to take noticeable steps forward with his game on an annual basis.
There’s been nothing but a linear progression with Horvat’s development. Whether he’s rounding out his offensive game or steadily improving his two-way game, Horvat’s progress as a player marches forward inexorably.
Which is perhaps why we need to look at his vision and playmaking on Wednesday night and wonder if this might be the next area that Horvat really steps it up.
After all, Horvat set up at least four excellent chances that could have all led to goals.
It began with a waist-high saucer pass to spring JT Miller on a breakaway in the first period.
“I had to get it up and get it there quickly and it had to be a hard pass so kudos to him for handling it,” said Horvat.
This sequence was a sweet hook-pass to hit a streaking Tanner Pearson on the weak side. It wasn’t the only example of Horvat’s lateral vision tonight, though.
Horvat’s always been a strong north-south player, particularly when he can use his speed and size in transition, but with space taken away on this occasion, he made a slick feed across the slot to Miller who almost set up Pearson. One is left to wonder if it might’ve been a game-sealing goal had it not been for Mike Smith grabbing Pearson’s stick.
Later, there was a play from Gretzky’s office behind the net where he perfectly saw, timed and executed a pass to Pearson for a one-timer just as he was attacking the slot — Smith making three incredible saves.
You don’t want to read too much into one game, but could this be the first sign of Horvat diversifying his offensive game further?
We know he can take the puck to the net, but the ability to create chances when the middle is well-protected could be a big development for the Canucks second line.
“I think confidence is the best word to use in that situation and just being confident in yourself and confident in your abilities that you’re going to make the plays,” explained Horvat. “I felt more and more comfortable out there, especially with my linemates and knowing each others’ games we were snapping around pretty good and had some really good offensive zone shifts and that’s an encouraging sign.”
Speaking of his linemates, Miller and Pearson did a great job of finding the right seams and making themselves available in the right positions. After all, a playmaker is only as good as the skaters he’s setting up.
“They know where to be on the ice all the time and so they’re hitting holes and screaming for pucks and making my job a lot easier to try and find them,” Horvat said.
Eight alternate captains??!!?
As we await the announcement of the Canucks’ 80-game captain for the 2019-20 season at the club’s home opener on Wednesday, the delayed captaincy decision has caused confused speculation in the Vancouver market.
Obviously the Canucks tweet on the matter confused people, but all hell really broke loose when Baby Dragon got his wires crossed in a text message exchange with Canucks PR, causing a proper Canucks Twitter meltdown.
Following up on Wednesday morning, in an attempt to clarify the situation, the following amicable exchange resulted
Drance: Travis, some confusion in the Vancouver market after the four As were announced. Not looking for state secrets, but will the captain be picked from that group?
Travis: Guess you’ll have to be at the game on Wednesday night to find out. Might be four As still after that game, there might not be.
Drance: Are you able to do four As?
Travis: Yeah, you can do eight As, you just rotate them around. Whatever you want.
Drance: But you haven’t made a decision on the rotations for home and away?
Travis: I’ve made a decision.
Drance: Who will be wearing As tonight?
Travis: You’ll find out when you get to the game.
P.J.: Did you consider doing eight As?
Travis: No. We done?
Reading the captaincy tea leaves
Now here’s the thing, as we look to get to the bottom of this: we all think we know who the next Canucks captain is. And we may have got a pretty significant indication of how the alternate captains will rotate on Wednesday night too.
You see NHL rules limit a club with a captain, which the Canucks have said they will have for the latter 80 games of the season, to two alternate captains per game. If you don’t have a captain you can have three alternates for a game.
So on Wednesday night the Canucks had Horvat wearing an A, Edler wearing an A and Tanev wearing an A.
Sutter didn’t have a letter, but perhaps he will at home.
As it stands we have no confirmation about who the captain will be. The Canucks won’t even confirm for us if the players all know — though surely they do.
But from how the Canucks leadership group adorned their sweaters on Wednesday, I’d probably suggest that if Horvat has his letter modified next week, Edler may be a full-time alternate, while Tanev and Sutter rotate between home and away games.
That’s my bet, anyway.
The LTI thing
There’s an important distinction that’s worth noting when discussing the technical state of the Canucks roster, particularly as it pertains to injured forward Antoine Roussel.
Let’s start with what’s simple: as of this writing, the Canucks have 22 men on their active roster: 13 forwards, 7 defensemen, 2 goaltenders.
When they submitted their 23-man roster list ahead of Tuesday’s 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT deadline, their roster was frozen until after they played a game. Now that they’ve done so, they’re able to recall and reassign players again.
On Wednesday, the club placed Tyler Motte on regular injured reserve (IR). He continues to count against the salary cap, but he has to miss at least a week worth of games — which was his timeline anyway, according to Travis Green’s comments on Tuesday.
Which brings us to Roussel. Roussel is, in fact, “on” long-term injured reserve (LTI). The Canucks, however, haven’t replaced his spot on the roster.
And so, as it stands, Roussel is “on” LTI, but the Canucks aren’t “in” LTI – in that they’re below the accruable limit and are still tolling daily space.
That could change in the days and weeks ahead. It could change in the hours ahead.