BGO Blind Pig: Washington Commanders Season Opener at Tampa Bay

Maybe they should run around in circles in a group at the end of practice to get their spirits up? That seems to be working well....

I have no idea what the answer is but so far, new players and new coaches didn't change the on field product today.

And for the life of me, I can't understand recent Washington OCs. None of them seem to scheme to McLaurin where other OCs seem to try and get their best players involved early and often.

I bet a guy like Kyle Shanahan gets Terry involved in his offense. Same with O'Connell in Minny. Just doesn't happen here.
 
Christian Gonzalez shows each time he is on the field that Forbes should never have been the pick at 16 in 2023.

The last of Ron’s screw ups needs to go.

Right now the odds are there is a better prospect on another team’s practice squad, let’s go find him.

In re Daniels I think the coaches threw him to the wolves.

Unimaginative play calling lead to consistent third and long situations and all of the designed runs made me think we had redrafted Justin Fields instead of a very accurate passer as described by Peters and Quinn.
 
Galdi not holding back.

 
My quick takeaways:

Defense
1) I like the pressure our pass rush generates. I hate how they fail to finish or contain.
2) Everyone on defense seemed a step slow which I think may be why there were so many broken tackles.
3) I expected a better defensive showing. I don't like how the D seemed to pack it in in the late fourth quarter. Maybe it was the heat, but the effort really seemed awful at the end of the game.
4) Way too many wide open receivers and blown coverages.

Offense
1) The offense produced five drives that should have scored points. We missed two field goals. Twenty six points would have been respectable.
2) Daniels had a mixed game, but you can see some things that can be built on. Our best weapon today were Daniels legs.
3) Pass pro wasn't great, but was more than serviceable for much of the game.
4) Run blocking and running game had moments, but was overall subpar.

Overall, I expected us to lose and hoped we would be competitive. I'd argue we were not competitive on defense and were not, but almost were competitive on offense.

Grade C
 
Bland vanilla defense allowed Mayfield to have a very easy game.

We didn’t blitz him on critical downs or move him off his spot because we were dropping 7 deep to protect the likes of Forbes.

It was death by a thousand cuts.

Joe Whitt was supposed to present a damn the torpedoes approach to defense and instead we got the Jack Del Rio special.
 
I have a feeling the heat played a big factor, it was miserable out there today. I've been to 5 games prior in Tampa and I can't recall it being like it was today. Not an excuse but you can't practice for what today felt like, I wouldn't be surprised if they were gassed at half from the heat. Even our friends who are Bucs season ticket holders were tempted to call it quits in the 3rd quarter from the heat and head out. What I saw was a team that hasn't played together much, just really not in any rhythm and lacking that instinct that comes with live reps. I didn't expect much but we definitely didn't look like a team prepared to play 4 quarters.
 
This team came out like Ron’s teams. Missed field goals, blitzes not picked up, blown coverages in middle of field.

People can blame the heat but a lot of mistakes were made early on, and of course the 330 pound Vita Vea and others on the Bucs had to play in the conditions as well.

Gibbs or Walsh or Belichick would never put up that excuse.

We weren’t promised a victory each week but we were told this team would fight for 60 minutes, didn’t see much hard tackling in the second half of this game.
 
For those saying that if they got the two missed FGs, they'd have 26, I don't know that I give full credit for the garbage time TD. There are too many cases where Ds just let up at that stage in the game with the score really clearly saying out-of-hand. I am not saying "no credit" but that game situation does not deserve full credit, in my opinion.
 
Cade York remains unable to hit the mark.
Bulldog said:
Bland vanilla defense allowed Mayfield to have a very easy game.

We didn’t blitz him on critical downs or move him off his spot because we were dropping 7 deep to protect the likes of Forbes.

It was death by a thousand cuts.

Joe Whitt was supposed to present a damn the torpedoes approach to defense and instead we got the Jack Del Rio special.
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They must have realized this D is a "bunch of guys" and not something anchor by Micah and Trevon Diggs.
And funny enough, Micah Parsons comes out saying how he welcomes being utilized in a more versatile manner with the new Cowboys regime. Put our guys on an island, it's going to be easy pickings for the opposing O.
 
I think just about everything being said has validity. But we also have to realize, it's ONE game with a completely different regime. When we've seen 3 years of this crap, blown multiple drafts, and been inept in every offseason, then compare it to the Rivera era.
 
Yep. This likely is also what you see when you have a completely new regime with an almost completely new roster that hardly played any snaps together in preseason. I'll admit that I hoped for better especially on defense but while it fair to critique the group harshly for yesterday it's not yet time to cast judgement... except maybe on the kicker.
 
The irony is you usually see a team without a read on film be able to do MORE in that first game as the opponent has no idea what their gameplan is nor seen a number of these players before.

What exactly was this team keeping under wraps during the preseason?

And now that the cat is out of the bag in terms of personnel do we get better from here vs opponents gameplanning?

If we were going to be close to an expansion team we should have dealt a few of the holdover vets and and gotten more picks in last April’s draft.

Allen or Payne might have brought us another #2 pick and chance to take a starting outside corner as Eagles did or another OL with size to play OT.

Meanwhile we could have gotten by with a road grader like Ridgeway at DT and perhaps another middle round pick.

Spending so much draft capital at DT both holdovers and then taking Newton was a bit of overkill.

I heard Kevin say he doesn’t think Noah Brown gets activated right away as that means Dyami or Olamide would have to sit.

Is he kidding?

Olamide looked like what he was out there, a former Eagles practice squad player who had 10 catches last year.

Compared to that Browns 35 catches for 560 yards and 3-4 touchdowns looks like pro bowl numbers 😀😀😀😀😀
 
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Our biggest issue this season is going to be the secondary, just as it was last year. Forbes has got to go. He literally is bad enough to cost us games all on his own. That's unacceptable. It's not his fault that he was overdrafted. But Peters has got to realize continuing to bull forward with him in the hopes someday he becomes serviceable is a losing proposition. I said it in the pod, they should be starting Davis (and I bet they do from here on). We are incredibly thin and teams are going to exploit us on the outside until we find a decent solution. I thought St-Juste actually played pretty well in general but he got victimized on a handful of nearly perfectly thrown balls that were all but indefensible. Quan Martin was also disappointing as he got burned repeatedly or caught out of position. I'm far from sold on him as a legit safety starter.

I don't think the secondary can even begin to be fixed until next offseason and that alone could contribute to a long season for us.
 
I think there might be some tension between Adam Peters and Harris on the approach they've taken. I say that because Harris has said about a hundred times that he has full faith in Peters and Quinn but will 'hold them accountable for results'. That's code for, we'd better start winning sooner rather than later. I think that's the wrong message to send and it goes to what you are arguing Bulldog... if you are really building for a future that's 2-3 seasons from now, you flip every asset you have to get young, dominating players.

This 'tension' has also been evident when Quinn was asked early and often if he saw this team as one being in 'rebuild mode'. His response to that was 'absolutely not' and to play word games. I don't know when 'rebuild' became a dirty word, but his reluctance to commit to that is I believe a response to Harris' attitude that they need to start winning immediately or be held 'accountable'.

The problem with setting that expectation is that it starts to color GM decisions. You hold onto some players in order to give you the chance to at least win more than the previous season, get to .500, compete in a respectable manner in the short-term even though that might not be in the long-term interest of the team.

They did turnover 61% of the roster, and that can't be ignored. But maybe it needed to be more like 90%.

Maybe the most reasonable way to look at all of this (not that any of us are in the mood to be reasonable :)) is to acknowledge that it's going to take more than 1 offseason to turn the Titanic around and drastically improve this roster.
 
Like most teams this one has its preferred players and is going to go with them until it is proven over and over some can’t play at this level.

Camp and preseason favorites of staff that are questionable as guys that are going to contribute at more than replacement level:

Dyami Brown
Olamide Zacchaeus
Nick Allegretti
Emmanuel Forbes
Quan Martin
Percy Butler

Then you have the odd case of Ben Sinnott, the Swiss Army knife that we were told can line up in various sets and cause mismatches.

It’s really rare for a 4 win team coming back and having trouble getting production on offense that a healthy #2 pick doesn’t make it on the field to have a chance for at least a few targets.

Meanwhile you have Bates running intermediate pass routes where he has no speed and no YAC capability to challenge a defense?

WTF?

Time to take the blinders off on guys that stood out in camp like Zaccheus and Bates and realize what their true limitations are on an NFL field with their skill sets.
 
Bulldog said:
Like most teams this one has its preferred players and is going to go with them until it is proven over and over some can’t play at this level.

Camp and preseason favorites of staff that are questionable as guys that are going to contribute at more than replacement level:

Dyami Brown
Olamide Zacchaeus
Nick Allegretti
Emmanuel Forbes
Quan Martin
Percy Butler

Then you have the odd case of Ben Sinnott, the Swiss Army knife that we were told can line up in various sets and cause mismatches.

It’s really rare for a 4 win team coming back and having trouble getting production on offense that a healthy #2 pick doesn’t make it on the field to have a chance for at least a few targets.

Meanwhile you have Bates running intermediate pass routes where he has no speed and no YAC capability to challenge a defense?

WTF?

Time to take the blinders off on guys that stood out in camp like Zaccheus and Bates and realize what their true limitations are on an NFL field with their skill sets.
Click to expand...

We only threw it 24 times (most of them late), and the RBs got 1/3rd of the targets. Zaccheus and Bates had a combined 4 targets. I wonder if there was something going on with Sinnott that we don't know about? I think we have good receiving talent overall, but not sure what kind of a gameplan that was from Kingsbury, barely even trying to attack a Bucs secondary that should have been vulnerable.
 
My biggest disappointment, by far, is that I saw very, very few examples of what was sold to me repeatedly during the offseason. That being the characteristics of what the team would be: tough, physical, intense, violent, hard-nosed competitors. A team that I would be proud of supporting due to their effort and teamwork.

Outside of Daniels, Ekeler, and B Rob….well, meh.

I’m not sure if I am more disappointed in the players or in Quinn, Kingsbury, JWJr, and the rest of the all-star coaching staff.
 
Chris said:
My biggest disappointment, by far, is that I saw very, very few examples of what was sold to me repeatedly during the offseason. That being the characteristics of what the team would be: tough, physical, intense, violent, hard-nosed competitors.
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I felt we saw some of that in the first half on D. There was a lot of swarming to the ball. A lot of gang tackling. Too much of it happened late. Too much of it happened after broken tackles, but there was still team pursuit, and want to. They were just always a step slow.

I think what bothered me was what I should have expected. That in game speed, against a live opponent, miscommunication still seemed to play too big a role, too often. I saw players fill the wrong hole too often and saw players doubled up in one spot while leaving an area vacant too often. So, I'm not sure it was a lack of toughness or violence, but that it was about being wrong. I don't know if that's more a result of playcalling, players not communicating on the field, or just inexperience in the system.

Still, I left the game feeling much worse about the D than I did going in and that's not good. I don't feel like if they clean stuff up they'll get it. I feel like the holes are holes.

Hope I'm wrong.
 
At least Tom Brady's broadcast debut spared us from being the worst football-related thing on TV yesterday. :)

On a serious note, I've only seen highlights but a lot of what I see reflects two things:
1. We turned over 61% of the roster in the off-season.
2. Because of how teams now handle the NFL pre-season, our starters have little to no experience on the field as a unit yet. Most of them still wear name tags in the huddle so they can identify who is who.

I believe it will get better but I think yesterday also highlighted some of the potential weaknesses we were all worried about - like the OL and Secondary.

Smart money says everyone in Ashburn knows this team is roughly a .500 team at best this year. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain part of the game plan yesterday was to put players in tough situations early to see what they really have in game conditions and to see how they respond following the game.

If Peters and Quinn are who we think they are, then they are already evaluating for next year.
 
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Tampa made the playoffs last year, albeit squeaked in, we had the second pick of the draft, as others have stated we turned over 60% of the roster, this is a full rebuild. Again I have stated I don't expect this team to win more than 6 games this year, I'm ok with that as we need to build for consistency and not a playoff spot every ten years. For those discounting the heat, I live here, I wasn't running around and it was a miserable experience. Tampa plays here and practices in the heat and oh yeah had a playoff team last year. Hell I'm a bit negative sometimes but ffs all of sudden people expected the second coming of the 91 team?? Relax, have a beer.
 
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