Hussam Patel

Jonah Savaiinaea ending any chance of a comeback.

4 man pass rush with Hutchingson shifting inside, Jonah gets his hands on Alim McNeil, his head bobs to the right. On a clearer view it shows McNiel gets his right hand on Jonahs helmet.

Within that split second, Jonah loses his leverage and pressure is on Malik. Play is dead.

Kenneth Grant had his best game of the season so far on run defense.

Consistently clogging up holes in the run game and allowing his team to crash into the gaps.

With Grant on run downs, Jahmyr Gibbs had 7 carries for 18 yards, allowing only 2.57 YPC

Malik Willis INT.

3rd and 11 with a 6 man protection against Cover 1. It's a 5 man blitz with two stunts and its picked up well. Dulcich with the chip and release.

Clean pocket for Malik and he sets into his base, no one is open except for Malik Washington.

CD7 is disrupted a bit on the route, can't get to the outside in time and Chuck Clark comes flying in to make the INT

I like the play Hafley calls here. Shows pressure 5 with 2 high safeties pre-snap.

Post snap is a single high rotation into Cover 3 with Uche dropping into coverage and Chop looping around as a free rusher

Amon-Ra St. Brown is so good in finding the soft spot and JRod was following it through

Rodriguez needs to trust his eyes and get closer next time

I've been staring at the Dolphins' 1st and 2nd downs issues for a while, and I think I know what the problem is. It's the condensed formations.

Quick note before I get into it. This is 1st and 2nd down only, by what I've been charting through Week 9. League numbers and the series stuff are through Week 8.

Start with 1st down. Miami's success rate ois 33.9%. Dead last in the NFL. Rest of the league is at about 43%. Then they go out against Detroit and get 2 successful plays out of 20 on first down. Just Two.

Now look at where those snaps come from.

31% of their early-down snaps are 21 or 22 personnel under center, and that's the worst thing they do. -0.16 EPA a play, 28% success.

Run plays out of it are 65 carries at 2.3 YPC with 23% success. Opposing defense knows what's coming, because they run it 64% of the time out of that look and throw it 67% of the time out of 11 in shotgun.

Meanwhile 12 personnel is their best grouping, +0.11 EPA and 49% success, and they only use it on 12% of snaps. Even the passes out of the heavy look work. So there's your changeup. Get out of it. More 12, throw it from the heavy look, run from 11 under center.

I get what Slowik is doing. Same concepts out of different looks, run and pass off what the defense shows you. In theory that keeps a defense guessing. But when the look you keep going back to i I keep guessing what the strategy is supposed to be

Zone runs (inside + outside): 63 carries, -0.34 EPA, 20.6% success. Out of 11 personnel: 25%. Out of 12: 30%. Out of 21: 18%. Change the costume, same result.

Here's what it does to them. 56% of their 1st down plays go for 2 yards or less, the most in the league. So 71% of their second downs are second and 7 or more, also the most. Once they're in 2nd and long they're about league average. It's what happens on first down.

Then there's the sequence, and this is the one I really wanted to get to. Run, run, pass. RRP. 20 of the 77 series that got to third down went run, run, pass. Most in the NFL. League is at 14%.

After two runs they throw on third down 80% of the time, and the league is at 61%. 86% of their run-run series get all the way to third down, where the league is at 62%, a +24% delta.

So that second run sequence isn't moving anything. Close to half the runs in those series, 26 of 58, came out of the 21/22 under center look.

It sort of works on 3rd down though. They're 6th in the NFL in third-down EPA and 11th in conversion at 44%. RRP converted 11 of 20.

But they're 28th in conversion rate on 1st down and 28th on 2nd. The gap between how they do on third down and how they do early is the biggest in the league. 35% of their first downs come on third down, and the league is at 29%.

They're living on third down, this isn't sustainable. Against Detroit it ran out. 4 of 12 on 3rd down

Look, I'm fine with this for development. Run the ball, build an identity, let the young guys learn. 7 of their 13 picks in this draft were offensive players, Proctor, Douglas, Bell, Kacmarek, and Savaiinaea and Gordon are second-year guys.

Early on you could see it, 20 accepted penalties in the first four games. Then it cleaned up. One in Week 5, none in Week 7, and those were their two best early-down games. Then Detroit happens. 8 penalties, the most they've had in any game this year, about -7.4 EPA, and the league average is a little under 4. 6/8 came on first or second down. Kacmarek's hold wiped a 51-yard Coleman catch. Brewer's hold erased a Willis scramble on 3rd & 5.

It wasn;t just the rookies. Brewer and Jackson had 4/8, Kacmarek had 3. They didn't change the plan either. They were in 21/22 under center on 33% of early-down snaps against Detroit, about the same as every other week. They just didn't execute.

Is there growth? Yeah and it isn't linear. Early-down success was 32% in Weeks 1 to 4 and 39% since. League avg. is around 43%, but a successful play only gets followed by another one 41% (25th) of the time, and the league is at 46%. 41% of their drives end in three plays or fewer, and only a third of them score.

So that's where I am with Slowik and the Offense. This kind of sequencing is okay for some development. But if you want growth and continuity, at some point it has to turn into 1st down conversions on 1st and 2nd downs instead of praying on 3rd down