UPennChem
Hall of Famer
This just honestly hasn't been brought up yet. Let me be clear here as well. I don't think outside of maybe 5 total plays this whole season that Roman's SITUATIONAL play calling has been bad. In fact I think he's been pretty good overall.
With that being said the season has been (ignoring the defense entirely) a tale of two of two offenses, weeks 1-3, and 4-7. So if it's not the situational play calling, it can really only be one of two other possibilities. Consistent poor player execution and the scheme in general. We've certainly seen poor player execution, but today's game I'd argue was almost entirely based on the offensive scheme being almost totally understood by the Browns defense.
Roman called a huge number of run plays (which were working) and when we passed were always in heavy sets. You'd expect that generally, when an offense is having a very good game on the ground play action would be very effective. We had no play action success at all today. And it wasn't because Roman didn't call them. He did and what I saw was that consistently, no one was open following the play action. The most egregious was a play in the earlier part of the game where we had 2 guys running routes into the same ish area of their secondary which had 5 defenders.
Long story short here, even when we play penalty free and disciplined offense the team is still struggling especially in the redzone. Roman is calling imo a very limited offense in terms of the personnel groupings. The question becomes why?
Well if you think about it, he actually only has 4 WRs total at his disposal. Additionally, those 4 WRs are not great. Bateman is playing like a WR2 and Duv like a WR3. DRob and Proche playing like PS players. So what is Roman even to do? Roman can't even run a 3 WR set in good faith because he doesn't have 3 NFL WRs. And it's a negative feedback loop.
His WRs are bad so they don't get separation. He therfore doesn't use them and calls a limited scheme. This makes the offense predictable. This makes his bad WRs have an even harder time getting separation.
I think it's pretty obvious to win in this league you mead a top 3rd passing game, this team does not have that and it starts with EDC doing precisely nothing to address WR except for shipping out Hollywood.
With that being said the season has been (ignoring the defense entirely) a tale of two of two offenses, weeks 1-3, and 4-7. So if it's not the situational play calling, it can really only be one of two other possibilities. Consistent poor player execution and the scheme in general. We've certainly seen poor player execution, but today's game I'd argue was almost entirely based on the offensive scheme being almost totally understood by the Browns defense.
Roman called a huge number of run plays (which were working) and when we passed were always in heavy sets. You'd expect that generally, when an offense is having a very good game on the ground play action would be very effective. We had no play action success at all today. And it wasn't because Roman didn't call them. He did and what I saw was that consistently, no one was open following the play action. The most egregious was a play in the earlier part of the game where we had 2 guys running routes into the same ish area of their secondary which had 5 defenders.
Long story short here, even when we play penalty free and disciplined offense the team is still struggling especially in the redzone. Roman is calling imo a very limited offense in terms of the personnel groupings. The question becomes why?
Well if you think about it, he actually only has 4 WRs total at his disposal. Additionally, those 4 WRs are not great. Bateman is playing like a WR2 and Duv like a WR3. DRob and Proche playing like PS players. So what is Roman even to do? Roman can't even run a 3 WR set in good faith because he doesn't have 3 NFL WRs. And it's a negative feedback loop.
His WRs are bad so they don't get separation. He therfore doesn't use them and calls a limited scheme. This makes the offense predictable. This makes his bad WRs have an even harder time getting separation.
I think it's pretty obvious to win in this league you mead a top 3rd passing game, this team does not have that and it starts with EDC doing precisely nothing to address WR except for shipping out Hollywood.
