Originally posted by sra84
View Post
Shurmur was terrible calling plays last year, this season has been a different story. Sure, there’s some hiccups but that’s going to happen especially when you have some young players playing a lot of snaps this early in the season.
I agree that we won’t continue to win settling for FGs instead of TDs, but I disagree that we’re going to continue settling for FGs. The execution will continue to improve as everyone gets more reps in the system. The run blocking probably won’t drastically improve unless we make some personnel changes, but Shurmur has done a good job mixing up his runs and adjusting to what works. We couldn’t run up the middle on the Giants, we came out in the second half and started hitting the edges and had more success which softened them up for an inside zone that Gordon took all the way. The counter runs we ran against the Jets are the compliment to the inside zone, it looks the same with the TE coming across for a wham block and then Teddy switches it as they get closer to the mesh point, if the defense thinks it’s inside zone they get gashed, if we run inside zone and they think it’s going to be counter they get gashed and even if they guess right, as long as we execute they get gashed. That’s the complimentary play calling that we didn’t have last year. There’s been complimentary plays being called in the passing game too, all those wheel routes by the TEs off the playaction are all set up by the bootlegs that we run and Bridgewater dumps it off to the TE in the flat. Instead of only running deep over, there’s also a deep curl off the same look. It all sounds simple, but that’s because Shurmur is doing a good job of influencing the defense with his play calling and Bridgewater is executing the plays at a very efficient rate.
It may not be Andy Reid, Sean McVay, Kyle Shannahan creative, but it’s a lot more creative than what we’ve been seeing here the last few years. And at the end of the day creative play calling is really just complimentary plays that are successful. No one is creative when they don’t execute, then it becomes the OC getting “too cute”. Handing the ball to Noah Fant is creative, but it wasn’t successful for us so it looked dumb, but Tommy Tremble just scored off a similar play so it gets judged as creative for Tremble whereas it was “too cute” for Fant.
Leave a comment: