Observations from a brief All-22 study

I just spent about an hour sifting through the all-22 from Sundays game, mostly because I wanted to see what we had Kamara running in the passing game in traditional dropback sets.

I've obviously been vocal about utilizing Kamara more on the choice route versus man coverage.. and honestly, Tampa ran a lot of Cover 2. There were next to no opportunities to take advantage of Kamara in man coverage. Outside of designed screens, it was mostly flares and routes to the flat, with one stick route coming out of a slot type position.

The bigger issue here, is that for the entire game we continued to try and bang our heads into the strength of Cover 2 with a lot of horizontal routes without challenging the middle of the field vertically. Tampa didn't really change anything throughout the game. The middle of the field was wide open all game and we didn't attack it. Next to no seam routes even run, let alone thrown to. When we took deep shots, it was easy reads for these safeties because they didn't have any sort of choice to make.

It's not like this is rocket science. It's well known that the seams are how you exploit Cover 2. And with corners having to respect the flats with Kamara being so dangerous, it can open up the sidelines for big plays too so as long as you even have a threat in the middle of the field and force the safety to play a side. But these safeties didn't even have to think. And if the MLB runs with the seam, you take the lower read with room for yards after the catch. I don't want to hear anything about the unexpected Juwan injury either. Graham, while he isn't what he used to be, he knows more than anyone how to attack a seam. Mike has done it and can do it. Taysom could have posed a threat.

It's honestly just amateur hour at best. So while I hear everyone in that the season isn't lost, we're 2-2, getting healthy.. Yeah, that's cool, but we're still very much blind at the wheel. I don't know what Tampa has shown this season in terms of defense, but if they caught you off guard and Cover 2 isn't what you were expecting - then it's really easy to adjust. If they've shown a lot of Cover 2 this season and this was the plan to attack it, then we're in even bigger trouble. This level of incompetence is absolutely wild.