I was watching NBC's Sunday Night Football Pregame show and Dan Patrick, Tony Dungy and Mr. HGH were talking about how we ran the ball for over 200 yards with a first time starter at QB. They were confounded at how we ran the ball so well, because the obvious strategy would be to stack the box and make Henne beat you with his arm. They went so far as to ask whether the Bills "lost" rather than the Dolphins won. How could they allow Miami to run the ball so well?
The answer is that Dan Henning and the staff devised a great plan to run the ball effectively even though the Bills did the "right" thing by stacking the box. In the first half, we almost never ran the ball up the gut. We ran sweeps and end-arounds and killed 'em with the Wildcat. We got our running yards through excellent play-calling. I was impressed.
And on the Defensive side of the ball, we let our CBs do their thing and it paid serious dividends. We had faith that Allen and the two rookies could hang with TO and Lee Evans. We left them on their respective "islands" and allowed our safeties to help in run-support. Yet again, we completely shut down the run.
Nice job coaching staff!
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siciliansith, huck1974, muscle979 and 10 others like this.
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It was a great call. I saw Ronnie going around the edge a lot more than in the past.
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The only real problem I had with the play-calling was the pass on third and goal from the 1-foot line. As well as we were running the ball, just plow it up the middle. Obviously we ended up getting the TD on 4th down. But that 4th down play should have been the 3rd down play IMO.
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i agree :up:
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I'm talking on a macro-level. Oh, and I don't hear you crying about the Hartline TD. Should we have run it there too?
Its so refreshing to have competent coaching and a competent FO.opfinistic and mbmonk like this. -
Maybe Sparano knew it was 4th down territory? I thought for sure we were going to run it. And we did.. just 1 down later :)DolfanCole likes this.
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I'm sure they considered it 4 down territory. I suspect, the thought was to get Henne another easy TD, keep his confidence high.
I see no problem. I don't care who the defense is, we weren't getting denied that TD.DolfanCole likes this. -
I think Sparano was going to go all out and not settle for FGs. I think when you are 0-3 you go and take more chances and thats what they did.
Only complaint I have about yesterday was we seemed to really pull back with the last 9 mins and got very conservative. I wish we just kept the game plan going and would have loved to see another 7 on the board. -
Yea. They did seem to go into conservative mode, but that could have been to just try and get the game over as quickly as possible to lessen the chance of injuries. That would seem to jive with putting in the backup players on the last drive. Also, you don't want to run the score up on them.
Just guessing :) -
When you're up by 4 scores in the 4th quarter, you're supposed to get conservative.
opfinistic likes this. -
I let out a groan too. Yeah, it was probably the right thing to do this time, but it brought back bad memories of Wannyball, trying to sit on 7 point, or even a 3 point lead. Plus, I'll never forget watching Buffalo score three touchdowns in about a minute against the Broncos way back when.
Both of these thoughts made me nervous...........for a couple seconds anyway. :lol: -
That's what I had to think as well -- Sparano had already decided that it was 4-down territory.Fin D likes this.
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Totally different situation. Hartline's TD was on 1st down at the 5-yard line. Quite different from having 3rd down on the 1-foot line.
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The other nice thing the coaching staff did was call a lot of passes early to (a) loosen Henne up and (b) set up the run.
DolfanCole likes this. -
This really surprised me. They must have had a lot of confidence in Henne to do that. And it definitely paid off.
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Tell that to Bill Belichick and the Patriots. Remember the year they lost the Superbowl he was trying to run up the score on everybody. Some games when they had a big lead with under two minutes to go in the game they would still be trying to score touchdowns instead of running out the clock. Some people may not see a problem with that but thats trying to beat, humiliate and demoralize a team and IMO dirty football. :tantrum:
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I remember that.
If I was the opposing head coach getting blown out, I would send a player over to Belichick and tell him if he doesn't pull Brady and his stars out of the game, we are going to late him them/take cheap shots until he does.
Nobody ever did that, and that is probably a good thing. -
Going for it on 4th down instead of kicking a FG when you're ahead 21 isn't conservative.
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I don't think we are on the same page. Not sure what you are saying here. I think you are confused on when that play happened and what the score was.
Not that I really care, but we didn't go for it on fourth down in the 4th quarter, it was the 2nd quarter. We were speaking of the last half of the 4th quarter not the entire game.
http://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/20091...:analyze/analyze-channels:cat-post-playbyplay -
The point I was making was that generally speaking, we weren't conservative. I realize the way I was quoting was confusing, however.