One thing I’ll say in regards to the slants, which we still did not run enough of, is that the dolphins were getting their hands up and cutting off throwing lanes, Lamar had to pull down so many of those outside passes because there were pass rushers but then there were blitzers who weren’t going after Lamar but just trying to block throwing lanes. And on a quick seam to andrews where he was wide open, a rusher was in the lane and Lamar had to side arm and the refs robbed us of a catch.
our OL needed to go low on those wide blitzers when we had those routes leaking out towards the flat, that’s another high school coaching thing, when the DL goes up to try to bat passes you make them pay for it, you cut them and tip their big asses over
I mean nobody should discount that the Dolphins had a great game plan and executed it extremely well. Their defense isn't as bad as people make it seem, and they have a lot of talent. Just inconsistent week to week, which is pretty synonymous with most NFL teams at this point.
That being said, it was the perfect storm of bad execution. No ability for Roman to adjust to the blitz, no ability for the Ravens to run the football effectively (nor did we seemingly try to... 11 carries for 36 yards for our RBs), and the Oline was beaten badly all game long. Dropped passes also.
I'm not going to overreact to one game, because some of the things we saw last night we haven't seen all year long, so I'm not going to say its a tremendous issue. I seriously doubt many NFL teams are going to be as effective using a blueprint of "lets rush 7 every play and make Lamar squirm", because eventually, we'll learn how to beat it and beat it for chunk gains.
The lack of a running game outside of Lamar is the obvious issue that seems to be unsolvable at this point. Some weeks its not terrible, but when the running game gets nothing going, this is what you're left with... Lamar dropping back a ton, and defenses bringing pressure on an Oline that isn't great at holding up to it.
The 3rd down failures are well documented this year, and that has to be addressed and addressed quickly. We're dead money entirely in the playoffs if we can't convert 3rd downs, because it'll only get harder. Lack of a running game may be part of that, because in prior years, it usually took a penalty or some sort of odd play for us not to have like 3rd and 5-6 or better. Could also count on the run game to put you in favorable down/distance. That's not happening this year. We ran 14 third down plays last night, and by my count, 8 of them were at least 9+ yards to go, which means we're supremely ineffective on early downs. Only three third down plays resulted in a first down, two were 5 yards or less, and the third was on a defensive penalty.