The Everything NFL Thread - 2016-17 Season

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I'm excited to see how belichik deals with julio. I always hear how belichik always takes out a teams best player, so I'm really excited to put that theory to the test against the best wr in the league and maybe the best player period. I hate the Falcons because they're a boring franchise but Julio is an incredible player and it'll be fun to see if he can be shut down.

Of course that won't matter if the pats can't deal with everyone else but at least that matchup is one of the most exciting in recent years.
 
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some hero said:
I'm excited to see how belichik deal julio. I always hear how belichik always takes out a teams best player, so I'm really excited to put that theory to the test against the best wr in the league and maybe the best player period. I hate the Falcons because they're a boring franchise but Julio is an incredible player and it'll be fun to see if he can be shut down.

Of course that won't matter if the pats can't deal with everyone else but at least that matchup is one of the most exciting in recent years.
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I'm thinking Mohamed Sanu or even Taylor Gabriel are gonna lead when it comes to the pass game because Julio will always be double covered so it opens up more opportunities for those playmakers. Patriots usually run Cover 2 in games so we'll see how Kyle can work around that.
 
macle what team do you like? Or are you a bandwagoner. No joan just need to know

edit: lemme make it clear i am a die hard falcons fan. harrison smith is my propic because i think he's just the best free safety in the league
 
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It's going to be a different animal than Pittsburgh because the Falcons actually have wr depth after Julio. Julio himself is also much harder to double cover than ABrown because of his sheer size. Throw in the fact that the Falcons probably won't lose their running back in the first quarter and you see that, at least on paper, the Patriots' defense is overmatched. This will really be a great test of how well belichick can scheme, should be fun to watch.
 
Fun fact: the Falcons are 4-0 when Julio Jones has fewer than 35 yards receiving, and a further 2-0 when he doesn't play. (Conversely they are 4-4 when he eclipses 100 yards)

The key to stopping the Falcons this year is not stopping Julio. The Patriots are likely far better off leaving him with Butler and rotating or disguising their extra player in coverage and letting him have his. Butler is no Sherman, but if Julio is shut down in the passing game it's because everyone else in the Falcons offense is going off, and the Patriots will lose.
 
So the thing about the Falcons Offense is exactly as Killah is pointing out: when they have success it's because everyone is having success. But the thing about everyone's success is I'm not necessarily certain it's all because the supporting cast is that much more impressive or if it's because the offensive scheme is that good. If it's the former then there's gonna be lots of points scored for the Falcons. If it's the latter (which I suspect it might be) then this game will be fascinating because the Patriots secondary is deep enough in talent to challenge a group of good but not great recievers.

Most likely the Patriots will be playing more of their base nickel defense or even some dime if they feel like they can and using Devin McCourty's ridiculous range to slow down the Falcons passing offense and being stingy on 20+ yard plays as they always are. Naturally though the thing with playing Nickel or Dime is it's weakness to power running and then inevitably hard play fake passes which are things the Falcons love to do. But the way the Patriots usually play that out is by telling their defensive line to almost sell out against the run and maintain spatial discipline and never give up leverage. This is largely what they do all the time mostly because they're sorry pass rushers to begin with so might as well play to your strengths. For the most part the Patriots run a 4-2-5 line-backers-secondary style of play. From there the game becomes Shanahans play calling versus what the Patriots scheme their linebackers to do. Most of the Patriots pass rush is generated by blitzing linebackers but blitzing linebackers make your run defense weaker, but not blitzing slows your pass rush which makes it harder to cover blah blah blah etcetc.

All of this is to say that the Patriots defense has a lot of answers to a lot of what the Falcons do on Offense and vice versa. Chess match is over used and it's more like an extremely intricate form of Rock Paper Scissors but that's what this game comes down to when the Falcons have the ball. All that scheme stuff.

On the other side of the ball the Falcons have no chance unless Brady decides to get a case of the yips which sometimes happens but I don't think will. The Falcons are weak on short passes and to slot recievers and running backs. With Gronkowski out our entire offense has become playing an abnormal amount of slot recievers and running backs with a large amount of short passes. Dion Lewis and James White will be disasters for the Falcons to cover and Edelman will does as he always does and test the short game of guys who are used to covering threats of a deeper variety. I'd suspect someone like Amendola to have a surprisingly good game here given he tends to be the slot within the slot reciever next to Edelman. The biggest threat will be the Falcons pass rush but it's not like this is a star studded Falcons DLine. It takes more than good to really get after Dom Grady and the Patriots always aim to tire pass rushers out with the speed of their play and also by just running the ball whenever the pass rushers start getting too greedy.

What all this means is that if the Patriots offense can get out to a 2 score lead they will most likely end up closing out the game by making the Falcons more predictable offensively. If however the Falcons have a lead it isn't necessarily as safe (Unless of course Brady is playing badly which is not impossible considering he doesn't have the best record of consistent performances in the Super Bowl).

Thing to note: The Falcons just put up two 40 point games on what was a bad defense (rip earl thomas) and a VERY bad defense (rip Aaron Rodgers). So despite the Patriots defense not being all that either (their DLine is one fucker of a weakness to have) the Patriots defense is in fact significantly better than the defenses the Falcons have played thus far in these playoffs so I don't think the game will be as high scoring as people think it will.

I'd say the Patriots should be favored by about 5 points.



Also I thought last year was the White Supremacy bowl with Cam vs Peyton and that variety of fan bases. BUT BOSTON V ATLANTA??? Whoo boy if I wasn't a Pats fan I'd be rooting for Atlanta so John Lewis could show up at the White House visit as honorary captain. Fuck Killah tho. Never want to see him happy.
 
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I think you're being a little disingenuous regarding the Falcons D... to keep it short for now, they've allowed 67 points in the first three quarters of the last seven games combined, with a lot of garbage time points coming in late. They allow the leagues most YAC, but adjusting for the fact that they've seen 655 passes against them they are about league average in YAC/pass. They have one of the fastest defenses in the league, from the d line to the linebackers and secondary, something even Belichick gave them props for.

There is no other Tom Brady in the league, but the Falcons just dominated Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees over the last month and see the fourth best QB in the league every day in practice. The best advantage Brady has will be his ability to speed up the game and force a young defense to play on their heels, which I have little doubt the Pats will take full advantage of.
 
Brady is the goat and a playoff god and all, but isn't calling 21 points "a poor defensive performance" kinda ridiculous? Not gonna spend time arguing the arbitrary cutoff (personally would use 27), but I think Brady has certainly appreciated above average defensive play from his team in his most successful post seasons.
 
bludz said:
Brady is the goat and a playoff god and all, but isn't calling 21 points "a poor defensive performance" kinda ridiculous? Not gonna spend time arguing the arbitrary cutoff (personally would use 27), but I think Brady has certainly appreciated above average defensive play from his team in his most successful post seasons.
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You could use any random number as I cutoff and I guarantee Brady has the highest win percentage.

Also Brady has benefited from some spectacular defensive play throughout his career, i'd argue that no QB has benefited more in fact.

But tearing down Tom Brady because he plays on good defensive teams is probably the most disingenuous thing you can do to him since his teams have scored more PPG on average than any other QB in history (and hes the driving force behind that)
 
Pretzels said:
You could use any random number as I cutoff and I guarantee Brady has the highest win percentage.

Also Brady has benefited from some spectacular defensive play throughout his career, i'd argue that no QB has benefited more in fact.

But tearing down Tom Brady because he plays on good defensive teams is probably the most disingenuous thing you can do to him since his teams have scored more PPG on average than any other QB in history (and hes the driving force behind that)
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I'm not tearing him down. I think he's the best. I just don't think the statistic you came up with proves that he's the best at overcoming bad defensive play. I actually think that would be a pretty complicated statistic to come up with, because there are a lot of things to consider (though I guess just raising the point total allowed by the defense would be a sufficient proxy by most standards). I won't argue the claim itself though, I think being the best QB in history is probably enough to argue the point.

<.< I can be a pretty big stickler when it comes to statistics used in football. Also initially thought this conversation was about the playoffs which have a small sample size. my mistake on that one
 
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bludz said:
I'm not tearing him down. I think he's the best. I just don't think the statistic you came up with proves that he's the best at overcoming bad defensive play. I actually think that would be a pretty complicated statistic to come up with, because there are a lot of things to consider (though I guess just raising the point total allowed by the defense would be a sufficient proxy by most standards). I won't argue the claim itself though, I think being the best QB in history is probably enough to argue the point.

<.< I can be a pretty big stickler when it comes to statistics used in football
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You're definitely right that in that its an impossible statistic to accurately judge since you can't factor in all aspects of the teams performance into account (and the fact that wins are generally a bad way to judge QB success.)

But it'd be hard to construe together an argument for any other QB
 
Pretzels has this intense need to find every excuse he can to argue about how great tom brady is even though not a single person in this thread doesn't think he's great.

In other news that most likely only I care about, drama is beginning to surround Antonio brown at an alarming rate. I didn't notice this during the game, but apparently when deangelo Williams scored his td brown actually pouted on the field and on the sideline because he didn't get the ball. Ben had to spend several minutes talking to him to get his head back in the game. Now, this may not seem like much on its own, but it's part of a pattern I've begun to see with Antonio. Obviously he's one of the best wrs in football and has seen a ton of success, but more and more he's publicly displaying a "me first" attitude. This alarms me because Pittsburgh is not the type of organization to suffer guys like that (see: plaxico burress, santonio Holmes, Mike Wallace, etc), and they have not yet committed a huge contract to him. I'm worried they're going to have to get rid of him, and that we won't find anywhere near a comparable replacement. I wish he could go back to the reserved, ultra hard working guy he was 2-3 years ago when he was still tearing it up but hadn't gotten a big head yet. The steelers have stated several times that their priority this offseason is to get him a new contract, but now I'm not so sure. Am I crazy? Has anyone else noticed this?
 
WaterBomb said:
Pretzels has this intense need to find every excuse he can to argue about how great tom brady is even though not a single person in this thread doesn't think he's great.

In other news that most likely only I care about, drama is beginning to surround Antonio brown at an alarming rate. I didn't notice this during the game, but apparently when deangelo Williams scored his td brown actually pouted on the field and on the sideline because he didn't get the ball. Ben had to spend several minutes talking to him to get his head back in the game. Now, this may not seem like much on its own, but it's part of a pattern I've begun to see with Antonio. Obviously he's one of the best wrs in football and has seen a ton of success, but more and more he's publicly displaying a "me first" attitude. This alarms me because Pittsburgh is not the type of organization to suffer guys like that (see: plaxico burress, santonio Holmes, Mike Wallace, etc), and they have not yet committed a huge contract to him. I'm worried they're going to have to get rid of him, and that we won't find anywhere near a comparable replacement. I wish he could go back to the reserved, ultra hard working guy he was 2-3 years ago when he was still tearing it up but hadn't gotten a big head yet. The steelers have stated several times that their priority this offseason is to get him a new contract, but now I'm not so sure. Am I crazy? Has anyone else noticed this?
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He's still a fantastic player, but I've noticed that part of the reason for Big Ben's significant regression this year was that Brown would often go missing in big games or key situations, something that never happened when he was the best wr in the league last year. I don't follow the Steelers games all too closely outside of our bi-annual 3 point games, so I couldn't tell you whether its an attitude problem or a work ethic problem. From a Ravens fan perspective though, the only player that scared me going into matchups with you guys this year was Le'Veon Bell. From what I've seen, he's looked healthy on the field, but whatever it is that's affecting his play, he needs to sort out. It's not like the Steelers have the same defense as they had in the Polomalu era, they need AB at his best to even have a sniff of a sb.
 
i really dont think the falcons defense dominated us (packers), i think our mistakes just killed us from the start. The missed fg + fumble + our defense not stopping them put us into a 17-0 hole which made arod try a little too hard to force big plays. We still had like 300 or close to 400 yards.

the falcons completely destroyed our defense like the cowboys and even the giants should have. good job on executing against them unlike the cowboys or giants
 
Falcons defense is fine. If you actually watched football last year the Falcons defense put major work in the first few weeks and in the last few weeks kept offensive teams like the panthers and saints to 13 and 17 points respectively... This year since the stupid fucking loss to KC the defense has been absolutely ridiculous (made a complete turnaround honestly) and held every team down and won the turnover battle. Tom Brady is a methodical QB not loose with the ball like Derek Carr Drew Brees etc. so he likes to drive down the field anyway which ultimately means the Falcons just need to win the ToP battle.

macle 17-0 is always a hard gap to come from but I wouldn't say the defense didn't play a role in the first half shutout because the packers were still trying to run the ball and march down the field (which they eventually did but that was far after garbage time). Aaron Rodgers wasn't "forcing" anything. I mean we've seen MANY times this year where a 17 point lead has been overcome i.e. Chiefs versus Chargers, Chiefs versus Panthers, Bears versus Packers so to make a statement like that just kind of sounds like you're making excuses
 
The fumble was forced by a Falcons player, it was not a random Demaryius Thomas changing the ball from one hand to another kind of fumble.

The Falcons D# did a great job against Rodgers and the Packers, even though the Packers were banged-up as hell. Saying they can't put breaks on Brady is silly and naive.

OTOH, I really believe this game will be an offensive festival. But I thought the same of Packers/Falcons, so...
 
macle said:
We still had like 300 or close to 400 yards.
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This is completely misleading because of how the game was actually played. 240 of their 367 yards came after the game was 31-0, when the Falcons defense was in prevent mode to stop big passing plays. It mostly worked too - the Packers had 3 consecutive scoring drives of 75 yards after this point. Problem was the drives took 35 plays and 14 minutes off the clock, which is a pace that never would have won them the game and exactly what he coaches wanted.

I'm not trying to say the Falcons defense is elite or even Joe Flacco elite but damn they are so much better than people give them credit for. If I have to see another "#1 offense vs #1 defense, #3 offense vs #27 defense" his week I am going to vomit, both are misleading for a lot of reasons and conceal the fact that this is going to be a great game.
 
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