Something for Rivers to work on with the new coaching staff?

[Heatmiser]

I love Rivers. I think he is a great QB and a great person off the field. Under McCoy, he was given a lot of freedom to change plays as he sees how the defense lines up. That is a good thing. And I realize that with all the injuries, he has to make sure everyone is lined up correctly and even make line calls sometimes. A lot on his shoulders.

But I noticed a pattern the last 4 years. The ball is snapped, almost every play, when there is 2-3 seconds left on the play clock. In a league where tendencies are studied, I cannot believe the Chargers did not self-scout this. It gives the defense a tremendous advantage -- they know when the ball will be snapped every play. Why not occasionally snap the ball quickly? The defense will be lulled into expecting it to be snapped 10 seconds later.

TG

[captaind]

Or he will waste a timeout.

Think I've seen that a time or two....

[Boltergeist]

Some of it may be caused by the turnover on offense. When you have to tell each person what his assignment is, it takes time. I'm not saying that is always the reason, but it must be hard to run a hurry-up with RB who are brand new to the team.

[Steve]

The same thing is true of a lot of vet QB. But I think it is a good point. You don't have to change the pace up very often, just enough that they think it is definitely coming soon.

The first run and shoot coach (high school guy named Tiger Ellison back in the 1950's) when he first put his slot guys in motion, insisted that was going to have his play hit to the backside almost 50% of the time. But the QB would just keep going front side, and they never got anywhere near 50%. But then he realized that even at only 20-25% of the time going backside, and teams were so scared of it (backside WR was only ever single covered) that the backside defenders would run around calling ball-ball-ball, even when the play had gone frontside right from the snap. The point is, we just have to mix it up enough to hurt teams. 70-80% of the time, do the same old thing. You screw them up on the snap enough, they will swear you gave up doing the same old thing and that will be much more effective too.

The same can be said of our WR being deep threats. VJ and Floyd are probably going to go down in history as much, much better deep threats then Benjamin and Williams. I think they probably will be. But in the end, I think both have a chance to be really special because they are better all around WR. Williams and Benjamin have both got a lot of short passes going long, and that gets set up by getting DB to play off and respect their speed. Boith still need to get a lot better at their release vs press coverage, and in route running, but both are fast and athletic enough to do that. IF they can do that, they may go down as better deep threats, even though it won't be true. They will probably be better all around WR, but the true speed is more dangerous overall than what VJ and M80 could do, provided you have the other skills to set the long ball throws up.