Notes from Game Charting: Texans-Dolphins, Week 16, First Half
I’ve charted a lot of bad halves of football this year, but this one gets the honor of being the absolute worst. Not only was it 27-3 at halftime, but it probably wasn’t as close as the score indicated. This wasn’t the Dolphins being a sneakily bad team, they just couldn’t do anything right. Their backup linebacker couldn’t cover Joel Dreesen in the flat. Their defensive backs completely blew an assignment in a rush to double team Andre Johnson. Their defensive line could not get penetration against the Texans’ mediocre offensive line (Vonta Leach is not an o-lineman). This is the side of the ball where they probably looked better over the course of the half, by the way. How bad was it? I charted a broken tackle for Chris Brown.
Offensively, the Dolphins running game had some booms, but they really missed Jake Grove up front. Vernon Carey had an awful half, getting schooled by Brian Cushing and being unable to hold up on some key blocks up the gut. The passing game was completely out of sync. There was a miscommunication route at the end of the half, where Brian Hartline went inside and Chad Henne threw to the sideline. That throw was typical of this half for Henne: when his receivers weren’t dropping the ball (3 of them), the throw was ending up nowhere near them. He even overthrew some checkdown passes. Had the Dolphins not gotten a very fortunate spot on their 4th & 1 attempt near the end of the half, as well as a pretty questionable offsides call on Connor Barwin, they wouldn’t even have gotten that ugly sequence of events to give them a field goal.
Given the abrupt turnaround in the second half, I find it really difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the Dolphins from this. This was by far their worst quarter of football of the entire season. One thing that struck me as odd was their end of half offense. The Dolphins had routinely gone with 3 or 4 wide receivers earlier in the half, yet instead of stretching the field at the end, they brought in two tight ends (Anthony Fasano is almost always on, but Joey Haynos in a situation where you’re driving 70 yards?) and it mostly eliminated the intermediate throws. The Dolphins run a versatile offense that can bring in solid-to-average players for any of it’s packages, but I question the usage of that particular one at that moment.
For the Texans, this was a breakout game for Jacoby Jones, who proved over the last few games what he had been proving in limited time all year: the offense is much better when he is out there. Yes, he’s going to make some dumb mistakes, and yes, he’s got a definite dose of Diva Receiver. But his combination of size and speed makes him an ideal deep threat, and he makes more guys miss in the open field than anyone else on the team. Even Johnson. When you pair Jones and Johnson on the same play-action pass, where opposing defenses basically have to commit multiple men to Johnson (and even that doesn’t work sometimes), you’ll often get Jones one-on-one against a corner, which is a total mismatch. Such was the case on his score in the second quarter, where he beat Sean Smith to the spot, broke his tackle, then juked by Chris Clemons in the open field on his way to the end zone. This is no slight on David Anderson or Kevin Walter, who are both great at what they do (and I think Walter should be kept around), but Jacoby stretches the field in a way that they simply can’t.
Ready for the words I can’t believe I’m about to type? Chris Myers played a CREDIBLE center this half, especially in the run game. He routinely got lower than Paul Soliai and drove him 3-5 yards past the line of scrimmage. No, it doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s been routinely bad for the rest of the season, but it’s nice to see that he’s not a complete donut. Antoine Caldwell looked worse than anyone else on the line. He missed a couple of key blocks on runs and looks a step slow when pulling. I wonder how much of that is him being used to center and thus knowing that he controls the timing of the snap, and how much of that is just him not being very quick. I still think he can be a key cog in the middle of the line but he didn’t make a great account of that in this half.
As big an Arian Foster fan as I’m quickly becoming, I think Ryan Moats is a perfectly acceptable change of pace back. I know there has been some talk about needing to “fix” running back, but between Moats, Foster, and Steve Slaton, I don’t think the Texans are bereft of options. You don’t need a goal line running back as much as you need an offensive line that can create a push. That’s where the Texans should be focusing their efforts on fixing things in the run game this offseason.
Aggressive defensive coordinator Frank Bush sent the troops on a grand total of four blitzes this half (okay, that’s trolling, he was working with a sizeable lead). Here is the interesting part about this, and the part that I would pray carries over to next year: three of them came during the two minute drill. Yes, instead of sitting back in the carpet zone, Frankie finally decided “well, it’s 27-0, lets see what it’s like not playing scared in the last few minutes of the half.” Yes, the Dolphins still scored, but it took them 19 plays to do so and chewed up a ton of clock, which is what I think the zone defense is supposed to do in the first place, theoretically, when run by teams that are not the Texans. Also, the three blitzes led to these results: 7 yard dumpoff completion in the flat, incomplete, incomplete. Without having charted the second half, I’m going to guess that the majority of the plays that turned this into a close game were also not blitzes.
Cushing’s interception was one of the strangest plays I’ve seen all year. It’s a very simple dumpoff pass to the running back, but Ricky Williams somehow manages to tip it up all by himself. It’s not abnormal to see a ball tipped up like this, but usually it’s a crossing route, or the receiver is being tightly defended and the ball gets pushed up because he’s being hit as he catches it. For this one, Williams was completely uncovered, standing perfectly still, and somehow still managed to miss the ball and tip it up as a floater. Cushing may not be able to cover Dallas Clark one-on-one, but he’s got terrific instincts and reaction speed, and thats where the majority of his interceptions have come from this year. Even if this one was a pretty big fluke.
