I'm no expert on these matters, but to the my eye the pocket just consistently contracted around Haskins really fast. I said it in chat last night, it's startling to watch the GreenBay and Washington games back to back.
Literally 20 mins before watching Haskins get a serious case of claustrophobia, I was watching Rodgers having a lovely time standing behind his O-Line as they shuffled the D out to either side of him.
Is there somewhere that tracks the time it takes a pocket to collapse? Because I'd love to see those stats!
It really looked to me like Scott had a gameplan he wanted to execute coming out of the box, but the fast collapse of the OLine wasn't letting it happen. After the half they seemed to adjust to a more uptempo offense, getting the ball out faster, which seemed to open up things a bit. By that time we were in the hole though, and our defense had spent too much time on the field.
I honestly like Haskins, I think he does a good job protecting the ball and doesn't make rash and stupid mistakes. But he's having to hurry his process so quickly to get the ball out before the pocket collapses that his accuracy is suffering. They showed numerous replays yesterday of him having to get rid of the ball before being properly set. The fumble early in the game was from him being blindsided mid-throw, and didn't he get his arm hit on the two point conversion overthrow later too?
I REALLY want to see what he can do given a decent O-Line that gives him time.
I really thought we saw Gibson settle in a lot more this week too, but a good amount of those yards came off broken plays where he was bouncing around off the line like a pinball and making something out of nothing. I Love the way he always seems to fall forward too, getting that extra couple of yards.
The other thing I thought yesterday, was that there were a couple of times the young receivers made catches short of the first down line on crucial third downs. I wondered if, because they're inexperienced, that they weren't quite as field aware as a Vet might be. I think Sims had a catch on a third down were he was about a half yard shy of the line and was brought down before he could turn it up field.
Honestly, apart from the O-Line (which is a shambles) much of what is happening feels very much like growing pains.
But yeah... I do think that Line is going to be the anchor that drags along the seabed while we're trying to make progress moving forward. I think certainly it'll limit our ceiling as an offence.
