NFL News

[Iron Lion]

I wonder if Jerry Jones is still sensitive about the criticism for getting rid of Jimmy Johnson so now he overcompensates with his loyalty.

If you fire a guy after winning back to back Super Bowls you just don't want to win. Fuck him, may the curse lifted from us pass onto them Cowboys.

[froot loops]

If you fire a guy after winning back to back Super Bowls you just don't want to win. Fuck him, may the curse lifted from us pass onto them Cowboys.

Might be that. Some people claim it's because he still wants to be in charge of what they are doing on the field, so a guy like Belichick would never fly with Jerry. I'm not sure how much meddling he might do anymore.

It's always hard to tell with the Cowboys because they do draft well, so they always have talent. And they have had a good QBs for almost 30 years straight. But the talent they have does get overrated. Their 12-5 record this year was good but they feasted on shitty teams.

[whatever_gong82]

An interesting paywall article from The Athletic.

How a Stanford professor helped lay the foundation for this 49ers era


David Lombardi
Jan 17, 2024



For his first few frenetic months as the San Francisco 49ers’ general manager in 2017, John Lynch left his family behind in San Diego. His temporary home at the Santa Clara Marriott became a brainstorming center for reversing the fortunes of a moribund franchise.

The 49ers, coming off a 2-14 season, had perhaps the NFL’s worst roster. Lynch had no NFL front office experience. He’d have to learn on the fly with coach Kyle Shanahan, his new partner at the top of the 49ers’ power structure.

Tony Dungy, a coach under whom Lynch starred as a Hall of Fame safety with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, recommended that he and Shanahan build an organic bond by watching as much film together as possible. So the duo immediately began watching hours of game tape. As the film rolled, they talked. They philosophized. They connected.


As the 49ers begin another playoff run, one can trace their current success — they’ve played in three of the past four NFC Championship Games — to the stream of football consciousness that flowed from Lynch and Shanahan during those marathon film sessions.

“I’m over here at the Marriott and I’m like, ‘God, we’ve got to capture these beliefs,'” Lynch said recently in his office.


The GM would remain restless until the 49ers could harness his and Shanahan’s confluence of knowledge in an efficient, usable way.

Then, the light came on. Lynch remembered Burke Robinson, a lecturer at nearby Stanford who’d been his instructor in a spring 2014 course called “The Art and Science of Decision Making.”


“I’m trying to think of how, and boom, I remember in Burke’s class on decision analysis, we did this deal on vision statements,” Lynch said. “I knew this is what we’ve got to do. Because that’s how you capture it all.

“Who better to go to than Burke?”


Over two-plus decades at Stanford, Robinson has taught his graduate-level course and advised students on significant life decisions. Lynch, who starred in football and baseball at Stanford from 1989 to 1992, returned to campus to resume his studies in 2014. He enrolled in Robinson’s class and worked on writing a vision statement for his immediate family.

“I think it’s the most valuable class that I took at Stanford or anywhere else,” Lynch said. “Burke’s a brilliant man, he really is. The basic fundamentals of just putting a framework to decisions is really invaluable because you can do it with anything in life.”


Robinson took the same principles he’s used to guide Silicon Valley businesses to his meeting with the 49ers. He joined Lynch and Shanahan in April 2017 at the team facility in the John McVay Draft Room, named after the GM who had worked with coach Bill Walsh to build the dynasty teams of the 1980s and 1990s.



The new regime’s first NFL Draft was coming up. It was time to solidify their sense of direction.

“I’ve advised some of these startups and they don’t have a vision of what they want to do,” Robinson said over lunch in Palo Alto near Stanford’s campus last month. “It’s like, ‘Hold on, you’re not just tech geeks designing features on some tech product. These have to add benefit to a customer somewhere. Where is the unmet market need that you’re going to satisfy? Where’s your vision for developing a product that meets the minimum set of needs and then advances from there?’


“It’s the same in companies and a football team. If you’re on a sailboat, you have to know which port you’re heading for.”

Robinson began by individually interviewing Lynch, Shanahan, 49ers CEO Jed York and executive vice president of football operations Paraag Marathe. He gauged the temperature of a franchise that was on its fourth head coach in four seasons and starved for organizational unity, which many within the franchise felt had been lacking under former general manager Trent Baalke.




Lynch and Shanahan were then joined by 49ers vice president of player personnel Adam Peters and senior personnel executive Martin Mayhew, all meeting with Robinson in the draft room. (Peters was hired last week as the Washington Commanders general manager; Mayhew was hired by the Commanders as their GM in 2021.)

This was the main event, where the 49ers would craft the vision statement that would set a tone of cohesion in the front office for years to come.


Robinson began by asking all four men to write down and share their top three proposed inclusions. Desired traits in players soon cluttered the whiteboard. Some ideas, like “speed,” pertained to the physical nuts and bolts of playing football. These naturally formed a grouping titled “49er Talent” on the left side. Others like “football passion — loves the game” and “contagious enthusiasm” were functions of player demeanor, so a grouping titled “49er Spirit” popped up on the right.

Shanahan, according to Robinson, was initially ambivalent about the whole exercise. He just wanted to continue watching film with Lynch.


“I get it,” Lynch remembers telling Shanahan, “but we have a bunch of scouts that we’ll be working with for the first time, so everybody in this building has got to know (what exactly we want in players). We’ve got to be able to articulate that. It’s got to be crystal clear.”

For about three hours, the four men brainstormed, discussed verbiage and voted on orders of importance for their inclusions. An early draft of their work looked like this.


After a recess, Robinson narrowed the exercise to just Lynch and Shanahan, who have made it a point to meet immediately after every 49ers game since their hirings.

“The conversations we had after Adam and Martin left were about how they’re going to work together,” Robinson said. “It’s easy to work together when you agree. But you’re going to have times when you don’t agree. You’re going to have to have a consistent message going up to the draft room, to the media, to the players. You can’t be telling the players one thing and the media another.”

continued..

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Said Lynch: “Kyle came alive, which was cool. And then it got real, then it got good. We hit our stride. Burke started challenging us. And Kyle likes to be challenged. The last two hours were money, and this is what we walked out with.”

That more refined version of the vision statement listed “contagious competitiveness” as one of its primary player traits on the right side, and it’s probably the most distinct example of a marriage between separate thoughts from Shanahan and Lynch.


Shanahan wanted “competitiveness” to be a key trait, but he envisioned it falling in the talent column. Lynch was also insistent on including that trait, but — in keeping with his emphasis on culture — he wanted a juicier term that would fit in the spirit column.

“We want guys who compete every day, but everybody has that,” Lynch said. “We want it to permeate the whole team.



“Burke was great at leading us. He’s probably like, ‘These simpletons.’ But he wouldn’t say it for us. He’d say, ‘Come on, how do we capture it?’ And I’m like — ‘Oh, contagiously competitive.'”

Robinson noted that the entire foursome — plus York and Marathe in their interviews — emphasized the importance of the 49ers returning to their winning processes of the 1980s and 1990s. This tie to the franchise’s illustrious history became the North Star of the vision statement.


“Our nucleus of dedicated players will reestablish The 49er Way and lead our organization back to the top of the NFL,” the top reads. “These players will represent our core values and beliefs in both their talent and spirit.”

Then there’s the closing sentence, which is underlined by silhouettes of the 49ers’ five Lombardi Trophies: “We firmly believe that players who embody these core values will change the culture and reestablish the 49er Way — a Brotherhood that will lead us back to competing for championships year after year.”


The 49ers emblazoned the final version on a large wall chart, which they hung up in the McVay Room for the 2017 draft.

“We sat down looking to make something just for that first draft,” Lynch said. “Then we liked it so much, we said ‘Let’s make it the guiding light for our organization.'”


Said Robinson: “They wanted to be the role model for the NFL. They said, ‘We’re rebuilding what we used to have.'”

“Things like this aren’t just a piece of paper,” Lynch said, waving a laminated copy of an updated 49ers’ vision statement. “You start to see it come to life. And that’s when it’s really cool.”


The 49ers have made much of their vision statement a reality. They haven’t yet won a Super Bowl, but the barren roster Lynch and Shanahan inherited in 2017 is now one of the most talented outfits in the league. This season, the 49ers have nine Pro Bowlers and five first-team All-Pro selections, the most of any team in the NFL. The “49er Talent” column is thriving.

There’s also plentiful evidence of realized success on the “49er Spirit” side. Stories of the locker room’s cohesiveness have helped position the team for their best odds yet to win a Super Bowl under the current leadership.


It started with unity upstairs. A collaborative process between the coaching staff and scouting department has enabled the 49ers to target and land enough of the right players to make their system work, even as they’ve walked a tightrope around the salary cap with a formula that’s put pressure on hitting mid-to-late-round draft picks. The team has been exceptionally productive in the fifth round (tight end George Kittle and safety Talanoa Hufanga are two All-Pros selected there) and the seventh round (quarterback Brock Purdy was famously the last pick of the 2022 draft).

“Our scouts know they’ve been heard out — they know they’ve been listened to,” Lynch said. “That’s culture to me. And Kyle said it well when we first started the interview process: ‘Culture is the people you surround yourself with. We’ve got to bring quality people to have a great culture, and it will happen naturally once we start to do that.'”


When Lynch began his tenure as the 49ers’ GM, he didn’t have any executive experience. But he did have a wealth of observational knowledge collected from his time as a Fox broadcaster.

“People in football have this very focused, insular view,” Lynch said. “When I was a player, I knew how they did things in Tampa and Denver — but you don’t really get a global outlook on the league the way you think you would. As a broadcaster, I started being a curious person about football. I asked, ‘What are the common threads?’


“I could be in John Schneider and Pete Carroll’s office (with the Seattle Seahawks) and they were saying the same thing, and then I’d go to bad organizations and the GM would say: ‘Man we’ve got all the talent, John, but the coach can’t get it out of them’ — and the coach would say, ‘We don’t have the talent, look how bad it is.’ … They weren’t connected. But there were things about the organizations that were perennially successful. It was like, ‘Gosh, it’s not that hard.’ You just have to have a good relationship.”

Though the 49ers have been unified under Lynch and Shanahan, they certainly haven’t been perfect.


A handful of early picks never came close to meeting expectations for them, including the two first-rounders — defensive lineman Solomon Thomas (a Stanford product who was a classmate of Lynch in Robinson’s decision analysis class in 2014) and linebacker Reuben Foster — the team selected in that 2017 draft. The blockbuster trade-up to select quarterback Trey Lance in 2021 wasn’t fruitful, either. And despite substantial on-field success, frustrating injuries and gut-wrenching losses have, at least so far, prevented the 49ers from reaching their ultimate goal.


But many of these setbacks have helped highlight another 49ers’ strong suit: adaptability.

“We haven’t been afraid to tweak the vision statement a little bit when things have changed,” Lynch said. “We’re all a product of our experiences.”


The first changes came after 2017 and 2018, when they began emphasizing a desire for “finishers” after blowing several late leads. After a 2020 season that saw the team put a record amount of salary on injured reserve, “availability” became a stated priority.

The evolution of the vision statement has tangibly affected the on-field product. Lynch said their 2019 draft selection of bruising receiver Deebo Samuel was a direct response to a league-wide resurgence of physicality at the line of scrimmage from defensive backs. To improve perimeter run defense, the prototype for the team’s speed-rushing “Leo” defensive end position has morphed from a lighter edge rusher to a much larger and more physical run stopper.


At this point, the 49ers’ success in talent acquisition speaks for itself. So does the annual league-wide popularity of the organization’s coaches and executives. Teams have hired away three Shanahan assistants to be their head coaches (Robert Saleh, Mike McDaniel and DeMeco Ryans) and two of the four participants in that original vision statement meeting — Mayhew and Peters — have landed GM jobs elsewhere. It’s clear the rest of the NFL is interested in adapting key parts of the 49ers’ formula.

Lynch hopes that it continues to be self-sustaining. He believes a precise sense of direction creates an ideal environment for internal development, which can organically replenish the 49ers’ brain trust even when key figures leave for promotions elsewhere.


“That’s the lifeblood,” Lynch said. “You want to grow from within so you have people indoctrinated in what we do.”

It all circles back to the foundational pillars the 49ers established before that 2017 draft.

“We didn’t want it to be just a cheesy slogan that we talk about every now and then,” Lynch said. “We wanted it to be about who we really are. It’s our beacon that reminds us who we are and what we’re trying to be.”



David Lombardi is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the San Francisco 49ers. David joined The Athletic after three years with ESPN, where he primarily covered college football. Follow David on Twitter @LombardiHimself

[whatever_gong82]

[whatever_gong82]

The fatal flaw that could doom each remaining NFL playoff team



Analysis by Neil Greenberg
January 19, 2024 at 9:15 a.m. EST



Every team remaining in the NFL playoffs has strengths; otherwise, they wouldn’t be among the eight left standing. (Well, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers can also thank a weak division and a generous first-round matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles.) But while some teams dazzled in the opening weekend of the playoffs (and the top seeds both enjoyed a bye), none of the remaining teams is without a potential Achilles’ heel.

From defensive struggles to offensive lapses, from poor special teams to quarterbacking inexperience, each of the final eight teams faces at least one (potentially) fatal flaw. One of them will overcome its weaknesses to end up on top. But seven will not, and these are the issues that could bring them down.


AFC

No. 1 Baltimore Ravens

Flaw: Shaky pass protection

The Ravens produced seven Pro Bowlers this season, including center Tyler Linderbaum. He was at the heart of an offensive line that allowed 41 sacks during the regular season, tied for 16th in the NFL. However, after adjusting the offensive line’s performance for the down, distance and field position of each play that ended in a sack, the Ravens ranked just 25th in adjusted sack rate, a below-average number that is troubling for a would-be contender. Just one Super Bowl champion in the past decade had an adjusted sack rate that ranked 13th or lower, according to Football Outsiders: Seattle in 2014 (following the 2013 season).


No. 2 Buffalo Bills

Flaw: Quarterback Josh Allen’s decision-making under pressure

When he is on, there are few quarterbacks better than Allen. However, he has been prone to tossing interceptions this season, which partly explains Buffalo’s inconsistency. His interception rate is higher than all other qualified quarterbacks in 2023 save for two, New England’s Mac Jones and Washington’s Sam Howell, both of whom were benched. Most of the problems arrive when Allen is pressured; his percentage of turnover-worthy throws rises from two percent in a clean pocket to five percent when facing pressure, according to Pro Football Focus, and those situations accounted for nine of his 18 interceptions this season.

Interceptions are drive killers; they cost a team an average of about four points each, per data from website TruMedia, a not-insignificant sum in a game such as Sunday’s. Oddsmakers think the Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs are separated by about three points in talent.

Josh Allen's 2023 interception rate.jpg

No. 3 Kansas City Chiefs

Flaw: Unproductive wide receivers

The Chiefs got a statement win over the Miami Dolphins on Saturday, punching their ticket to the divisional round. Yet an underlying problem all season has been a lack of production from their wide receivers, and that hasn’t gone away. Rookie Rashee Rice caught eight of 12 targets for 130 yards and a touchdown against Miami, but no other Chiefs wide receiver had more than two catches. And no, dangerous tight end Travis Kelce (who had seven catches) doesn’t count in this mix.

Here’s why it could be an issue: Since 2002, only two Super Bowl participants (the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers and 2015 Denver Broncos) had a team passer rating when its wide receivers were targeted that ranked in the bottom half of the NFL. A vast majority of Super Bowl participants in that span (36 out of 42) were ranked in the top 10 in passer rating when throwing to wide receivers. But Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes ranked 25th in passer rating when targeting his wide receivers during the regular season (85.0, vs. an average of 91.0), per data from TruMedia. Even with Rice’s heroics, Mahomes’s passer rating when he looked to his wide receivers Saturday was slightly below league average since 2002.




To be fair to the two-time MVP, a lot of the issues in Kansas City concerned dropped passes. No team in the league lost out on more expected points because of dropped passes this season than Kansas City, but that problem could be dangerous in the playoffs.


No. 4 Houston Texans

Flaw: Inexperience and inefficiency at quarterback

First-year Houston coach DeMeco Ryans saw his young team demolish the Cleveland Browns’ defense on Saturday, with rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud leading the way with three touchdown passes. However, no rookie quarterback has ever started in or won the Super Bowl. That doesn’t mean it will never happen, of course, but we usually see the league’s most valuable passers vie for the championship ring and Stroud falls short of that status.

Nine of the past 10 Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks were among the 10 most valuable passers during the regular season, per ESPN’s Total Quarterback Rating. The lone outlier was in 2015, when a diminished Peyton Manning was limited to nine starts during the regular season for the Denver Broncos and Brock Osweiler was his backup. This year? Stroud finished the regular season ranked 15th in QBR, far below the AFC’s other three remaining starters.

NFC

No. 1 San Francisco 49ers

Flaw: Subpar special teams

The 49ers were a powerhouse this season, but they faced worrisome challenges on kick coverage and field goal attempts. Rookie Jake Moody had a respectable 84 percent success rate on field goals, but compared to other kickers with at least 10 games played in 2023, he ranked just 22nd in accuracy. The team’s offensive efficiency limited Moody to 25 attempts, and only three from 50 yards or longer. He also faced pressure on a critical Week 6 kick against the Cleveland Browns; Moody missed the 41-yard attempt with six seconds left, resulting in the 49ers’ first loss of the season.



It’s not just missed field goals. The overall performance of San Francisco’s special teams unit was ranked 25th by Pro Football Focus and 25th by analyst Aaron Schatz’s defense-adjusted value over average, which adjusts a team’s efficiency for strength of schedule. Since 1981, just eight teams have made the Super Bowl with a special teams ranking of 25th or worse, per defense-adjusted value over average.


No. 3 Detroit Lions

Flaw: A quarterback who doesn’t operate well under pressure

Detroit quarterback Jared Goff secured a triumphant win against his old team (the Los Angeles Rams) last weekend; now it will be up to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to take advantage of his inferior performance under pressure. Goff, like most quarterbacks, sees a production dip when facing pass pressure, but few have such a stark difference in performance between pressure and a clean pocket. According to the game charters at Pro Football Focus, Goff’s passer rating dropped from 114.5 in a clean pocket (second best in the league) to 62.5 under pressure (17th out of 24 qualified passers). Against the Rams, it dropped from 136.3 to 51.6.



No. 4 Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Flaw: Below-average pass defending

The game charters at Pro Football Focus ranked the Bucs’ pass coverage 22nd this season, with their highest performing defensive backs, Christian Izien and Jamel Dean, ranked 37th and 38th out of 81 qualified players at the position. Those two have allowed opposing quarterbacks to post a combined 113.3 passer rating when targeting them in coverage. That’s an extremely high number, considering 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy led the league in passer rating with a similar number (113.0) this season.

It has also dragged down the team’s net passer rating, called by some the “mother of all stats” because it is a useful barometer of Super Bowl contenders. Since 2002, 25 of 42 Super Bowl participants have finished with a passer rating differential among the top five in the league, including six of the past 10 winners. The outliers among the Super Bowl winners include the 2007 New York Giants (24th), 2011 Giants (12th), 2012 Ravens (12th), 2015 Broncos (18th) and 2021 Buccaneers (16th). The Buccaneers finished the 2023 regular season ranked 10th in net passer rating, leaving them as the second-worst team by this metric left in the playoffs.


Net passer rating 2023 regular season.jpg

No. 7 Green Bay Packers

Flaw: A faltering defense

If defense wins championships, Green Bay has a problem. The Packers’ defense finished the regular season ranked 27th per Schatz’s defense-adjusted value over average, ranking 26th in both passing and rushing defensive DVOA. Over the past decade, no Super Bowl champion ranked in the bottom half of the league in both passing and rushing defensive DVOA during the regular season. The last team to do it was the 2011 Giants, who upset the New England Patriots to become the first team to claim a Super Bowl title after winning only nine regular season games in a non-strike season.



Neil Greenberg is a staff writer with The Washington Post whose beat is sports analytics. His analysis and insight can be found in the sports section, where he covers the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB as well as college football and basketball.

[whatever_gong82]

[whatever_gong82]

The RGIII vs. Jay Gruden online war is getting really salty!!!

[edindetroit]

Drama queen

[whatever_gong82]

[Topweasel]

It's funny you have so many first round picks including a couple of #1s and a #2. But that's contrasted against the non-first round QB, that isn't a just a later round pick, but the very last pick.

[jaadam4]

It's crazy that Purdy was picked in the 7th round. Like him or think he's over his head, he's really out punched his draft status.

[Cody_Russell]

I didn’t even expect Purdy would be drafted given his college career and draft profile. Purdy found the right home as his strengths match the Kyle Shanahan offense. Processing information quickly and distributing the ball out to the 49ers elite playmakers.

…

Raiders named Antonio Pierce HC. The right move given the job he did and how Pierce has some MCDC qualities. Leader of men.
One fewer opportunity for Jim Harbaugh too. Chargers or bust maybe.

[jaadam4]

I still think Harbaugh to NFL team is a bad idea. He’s a fantastic leader of men but he just rubs everyone the wrong way. It’s not going to end well

[Mainevent]

Almost all coaching stints don’t end well. He’s proven he can win at a high rate in the NFL (really anywhere). To expect he won’t win is sort of a fool’s errand at this point.