Browns @ Chargers Game Day Thread / Post Game Discussion (Wk 5)

[Boltdiehard]

I just watched Skip and Shannon going over this win. What’s up with Skip endless hate on the Chargers. Did they screw him up at some point in time? :shrug:

The haters are absolutely essential and all the media hype bothers me I try to avoid it.

[Boltjolt]

Show me all the in-season trades Chargers have made then under Telesco…

Throw insults in the trash and use facts. It makes your argument much stronger.

Doesn't mean he won't, just he hasn't. We haven't also been in this position to do so and keep it going.

When is the last time under Telesco we were in first place with tie breakers going for us?

[CivilBolt]

Doesn't mean he won't, just he hasn't. We haven't also been in this position to do so and keep it going.

When is the last time under Telesco we were in first place with tie breakers going for us?

If Staley asked for it then I don’t think he can refuse unless the cap won’t cover it.

[Xenos]

Peter King talks about the game:
https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...ia-peter-king/

The NFL’s fun team


Isn’t it fun to watch the Los Angeles Chargers? The confluence of imaginative coach (Brandon Staley) and phenom quarterback (Justin Herbert) and offensive weaponry galore and defensive playmakers (Derwin James, especially, playing everywhere) getting off the canvas time and again. It’s just fun to watch. The 2021 Chargers are what the 2019 Chiefs were.

On Sunday, the Chargers beat Cleveland 47-42 in a wild and wooly slugfest, Creed versus Balboa. Forty-one points in the fourth quarter. Six touchdowns in the last 12 minutes. When I spoke with one of the heroes of the day, Austin Ekeler, 20 minutes after the game, he clearly hadn’t come down yet. He said “Wow” five times. He scored three touchdowns in the last eight minutes, two on runs and one on a screen pass. On Ekeler’s final touchdown, four Cleveland Browns dragged him into the end zone to max out how much time they’d have to come back and win. The defense dragged the offensive player into the end zone! Against his will!

Ekeler, unplugged, on the wildest game of the first month of the NFL season:

“Oh my goodness. Oh man, I’m still taking in that win and what just happened. It was incredible. Wow. On the touchdown pass in the fourth quarter, it was a screen, a play I fumbled on earlier in the game. That made me sick to my stomach. I’m still sick about it. But that’s the great thing about football—you can make up for plays like that.

“Man, it feels like, when we get on the field, we’re gonna go score. If we have to, guess what? We’re going for it on fourth down. That’s just the way we roll right now. J-Herb’s been smart with the ball. Finding us, and we’ve been getting open and giving him an option to throw to. It’s that feeling like we’re in a zone. We’re scoring every time we get the ball.
The Browns defense drags Chargers running back Austin Ekeler into the end zone for a touchdown. (Getty Images)

“Crazy play at the end. I’m not trying to score. Right? I’m trying to waste time. Which, I mean, if I was smarter in that situation I would’ve just immediately gone down. I was like, Oh let me try to waste more time. And I tried to get cute, kill some time, got greedy, and they came and grabbed me, picked me up, took me in the end zone. Weirdest play ever. Has anybody ever been sad to score a touchdown? There’s not many situations where you’re sad that you scored a touchdown, but that one was like, man, wow, I dropped the ball in that situation by not just going down.

“So now, big win. But we can’t caught up in hype. One of my old running back coaches used to tell me, ‘You can smell the cologne but don’t taste it. Don’t taste it.’ What does that mean? There’s gonna be a lot of people talking about you. You can say thank you, but make sure you know every single week you gotta show up to work. This is the NFL.

“Wow. Today was incredible. I got a feeling you’re gonna see this all year.”

[Xenos]

Maybe I overstepped? You think?

In a certain way, Fan Forums are families. Within families, you can generally call someone a 'knucklehead' (Eeyore) without drama. We're brothers.

As I pointed out, I would understand offense at something more denigrating than 'Eeyore', but... just where on the Outrage Meter do you see 'Eeyore' resting?

I'm thinking, if the volume knob goes up to '10', 'Eeyore' registers as a '2'. (If the volume knob goes up to '11', I'd concede a '3').

Within a family? I don't personally think 2's are reason for offense, but i can see where reasonable minds could differ.

So I'll as *YOU* as a forum brother, pbb... Do you think I owe uglytruth an apology? I'll definitely consider your opinion. Thank you.

No, you don’t owe UglyTruth an apology.

[blueman]

No, you don’t owe UglyTruth an apology.

I mean you pick that user name, you get everything that’s coming.

[Panamamike]

Show me all the in-season trades Chargers have made then under Telesco…

Throw insults in the trash and use facts. It makes your argument much stronger.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sportingnews.com/us/amp/nfl/news/why-nfl-trades-are-rare/1fwllykgo2amj1dka7oj352ah6

[Xenos]

Here is a great rundown of yesterdays game.

Brandon Staley is on a different level. Over the past 15 years and especially across the past five years, coaches have gotten much more aggressive and collectively made better decisions on fourth downs. Announcers and media members haven't necessarily caught up -- and coaches are still too conservative on the whole -- but going for it on fourth down isn't controversial in the way it was when the Patriots tried to seal a game over the Colts by going for it on fourth-and-2 in 2009.

No team made more mistakes on fourth down or with its game management over the past decade than the Chargers. Norv Turner, Mike McCoy and Anthony Lynn led the Chargers to week after week of infuriating, inexplicable late-game scenarios, and while the players were also to blame for some of those problems, the team often struggled to get out of its own way.


All of this makes what Staley has done over the first five weeks of his tenure with the Chargers all the more fascinating. Coachspeak about being aggressive and trusting your players is one thing, but as we've seen with coaches such as Joe Judge, they're often terrified of implementing that in practice. Staley has a defensive background, but many of his best players are on offense, so L.A. has been incredibly aggressive in going for it on fourth down. On Sunday, it almost unquestionably won the Chargers an exhilarating shootout against the Browns.

Let's review the fourth downs that Staley's offense faced in the second half and how they helped fuel the Chargers' 14-point comeback. I'll also use the Play Finder tool from Pro Football Reference to try to find how often coaches went for it in similar situations over the past decade, just to contextualize how aggressive Staley was with his offense. You'll see a common trend:

Fourth-and-2 on L.A.'s 24-yard line, 10:34 left in third quarter, trailing 27-13
What coaches usually do: Punt 100% of the time

Staley kept his offense on the field and ran a power play with Austin Ekeler, gaining 9 yards. Teams might go for a fourth-and-2 deep in their own territory in total blowouts or deep into the fourth quarter, but only teams such as the Colts and Ravens would typically consider going for it in this sort of situation. This drive had another fourth down later on.

Fourth-and-7 on Cleveland's 22-yard line, 7:45 left in third quarter, trailing 27-13
What coaches usually do: Kick a field goal 100% of the time

Most coaches are comfortable these days going for it on fourth-and-1, but they're far more conservative than most models suggest they should be once offenses need 3 yards or more to convert. Teams in the third quarter trailing by multiple scores from this range kicked field goals every time, despite the fact that they were trailing by more than a touchdown and about to hand the ball back to the other team after the play. Justin Herbert threw a 12-yard completion to Keenan Allen to extend the drive, then scrambled in for a 9-yard touchdown two plays later, getting the Chargers within one score.

Fourth-and-4 on Los Angeles's 41-yard line, 9:10 left in fourth quarter, trailing 35-28
What coaches usually do: Punt 100% of the time

Down by a score in the fourth quarter, while teams get more aggressive in no-man's-land, they typically don't want to run the risk of handing the opposing team a short field and going down two scores. Of course, punting hands the opposing team the ball and gives it a shot at going up two scores anyway. I didn't include this in the analysis, but with the Browns gashing Staley's defense for most of the day, possessing the football probably meant a lot more in this game than field position.

Here, Herbert scrambled out of the pocket and launched up a low-percentage pass to Mike Williams down the sideline, only for backup Browns corner A.J. Green to commit pass interference. Again, this drive would face another fourth down.
Justin Herbert had four touchdown passes and a rushing score in the comeback win over the Browns. Photo by Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports
Fourth-and-8 on Cleveland's 24-yard line, 7:48 left in fourth quarter, trailing 35-28
What coaches usually do: Kick a field goal 100% of the time (in a small sample)

Down seven points, coaches almost always see this as a scenario in which they need one possession to tie and two possessions to win. When they work with that logic, it's easy to talk themselves into the field goal they'll eventually need anyway, even if they're down a touchdown with eight minutes to go. Teams are more aggressive about going for the touchdown when this is fourth-and-2 or less, but they just don't go for it on fourth-and-this-long with the possibility of getting points on the board.

The Chargers did go for it and converted when Herbert found Allen for a 20-yard gain. Defenses are also prone to committing penalties on these stressful fourth-down tries, and Browns corner Greedy Williams held on the play, which would have also given the Chargers a fresh set of downs. Ekeler scored a touchdown on the next play to tie the game at 35. The Chargers didn't have to face a fourth down the rest of the way.

Those are four fourth-down attempts where I wasn't able to find a single comparable example of another team going for it from a similar down and distance, at a similar time and in a similar game situation. The Chargers went for it all four times, succeeded all four times and turned those fourth downs into touchdowns. Their fourth-down conversions generated 11.6 expected points; that's the most for any team on offense on fourth down in a game this season.

Any coach is going to look like a genius when they go for it on fourth down and succeed, and it remains to be seen whether Staley will continue to go for it if and when his team doesn't have the same level of success on fourth down, but he has said all the right things publicly. Herbert & Co. had to do incredible work on the field to fuel their comeback, but I can't think of a game in which a coach was more aggressive on fourth down and it more directly led to a team's victory than Sunday's win over Cleveland.

The Chargers still have some rough spots. If you thought that was too effusive, let's dial it back a bit, because Staley almost cost his team the game with what happened at the very end. After the Chargers finally came up with a stop and got the ball back at midfield down by a point, they quickly drove inside the red zone. On third-and-2, Ekeler ran for a first down and slid down inbounds at the 3-yard line, forcing the Browns to use their final timeout with 1:38 to go. From here, the Chargers could have simply ran the clock down before kicking a chip-shot field goal to win.

Instead, we got a beautiful farce. The Chargers ran duo and handed the ball to Ekeler, who clearly knew the situation and didn't want to score. The Browns, one of the most analytically inclined teams in the league in their own right, recognized that their most viable way to win was to let him score and get the ball back with as much as time as possible. With Ekeler hemming and hawing at the line, five Browns defenders surrounded Ekeler and pushed him into the end zone for a touchdown. The Chargers then came up short on the ensuing 2-point try, meaning that the Browns could win the game with a touchdown on their upcoming drive.

The better decision was almost assuredly to kneel three times and kick a 23-yard field goal from the hash of Tristan Vizcaino's choosing. Vizcaino had missed two extra points earlier in the game, which would worry me as a coach, but 23-yard field goals are 10 yards closer than extra points. Over the past decade, in the final two minutes of the game, kickers have hit field goals in the 22-24 yard range 45 out of 46 times. We're looking at a success rate north of 95%.

There's no way the Chargers can say that they were going to stop the Browns from scoring a touchdown 95% of the time with 1:30 or so left to go in the game, and that score would have either tied the game (if the Chargers succeeded on their 2-point try) or won it outright (if the Chargers missed). The Chargers have had kickers miss chip shots in the past, but they've also had running backs fumble inside the 2-yard line, too. Forget the numbers. It was clear what the Browns wanted Staley and Ekeler to do, and the Chargers fed into that. As good as Staley was in other situations, this move nearly cost them the game.

The Chargers need a kicker they can trust. Vizcaino has now missed four of his 14 extra point attempts this season. I don't know whether Staley would have kneeled and kicked if he had Justin Tucker to fall back on, but if he chose to try to score because he didn't trust Vizcaino, the franchise needs to rectify that situation immediately. Vizcaino nearly cost the Chargers a chance at overtime by missing an extra point in the fourth quarter, although they came up with a stop to get the ball back.

This article…..

[AZBolt]

I think fatigue both mental and physical was a factor on defense today. Well except for Derwin who was all over the place.

DERWIN has the mental toughness to excel as he does......I hope it rubs off on the rest of the team it probably will

[Xenos]

There’s no denying this is the second time in three weeks we’ve scored a TD when we should have burned clock and kicked the FG.

I give the KC game a pass because of the weather conditions, and because Herbert audibles to a TD pass. The Browns game they just got greedy and should have kneeled after getting the first down. Or go run it in on third down.

[CivilBolt]

Did you guys see Staley’s presser when he said ASJ was benched. I thought he was injured that’s why Campbell took over. I guess they needed to calm him down.

[equivocation]

I give the KC game a pass because of the weather conditions, and because Herbert audibles to a TD pass. The Browns game they just got greedy and should have kneeled after getting the first down. Or go run it in on third down.

Yeah, Ekeler was trying to kill extra time by stalling behind the line. Should just down it.