Football
One of my favorite football strategy quotes comes from the great coach Chris Vasseur: “Football is a simple game made complex by coaches”.
Often times, we’re left grasping for some major complex or exotic reason why one team beat another, when the game really is simple: if you can win up front, you’re more than likely going to win the game.
That was on full display in New Orleans, as the Philadelphia Eagles throttled the Kansas City Chiefs en route to a Super Bowl victory. It marks one of the worst performances of the Chiefs Andy Reid era and QB Patrick Mahomes’ career, but it wasn’t too exotic at all. In fact, if you’re looking at some complex thing that befuddled the Chiefs’ offensive braintrust, you’re going to be looking for a very long time.
The Eagles just whooped their ass up front, simple and plain. University of Georgia head coach Kirby Smart talks a lot about how stopping the run and investing in the proper bodies up front to dictate the game allow you to do whatever you want on the back end of the defense, and the Eagles embodied that on Sunday. Mahomes was pressured on 38% of his dropbacks, sacked six times and had the worst EPA per play of his entire career–almost all of it coming without blitzing or using a single high shell.
The Eagles’ dominant defensive performance is a culmination of the work GM Howie Roseman and head coach Nick Sirianni put in to constantly improve year over year. Seven of the Eagles’ defensive starters in the Super Bowl in 2022 aren’t on the roster anymore, and the defensive line has constantly retooled and reworked itself to get to this point. Adding in DC Vic Fangio obviously helps, but this was just about the Eagles having more dudes than the Chiefs. There’s not much out-scheming you can do when you don’t have the dudes. The Eagles didn’t even need a monster performance from DT Jalen Carter! He was relatively quiet, while EDGE Josh Sweat stole the show. That depth and ability to just trot out waves of linemen who can get after the QB is almost unheard of in the NFL.
Let’s get to the Fangio aspect of this. When you play as many two-high shells as the Eagles did on Sunday, you’re banking on both your front dominating the run game, while also constricting the yards after the catch in the RPO/quick game. There are many ways to cut a sandwich, but the Eagles were able to both shut down the run (when the Chiefs actually tried to run it) and constrict space on all the RPO stuff the Chiefs tried to do. Having DBs that were willing to make tackles in space can elevate a defense from great to elite, and Philly inserting CBs Cooper DeJean and Quinyon Mitchell into the lineup was massive for their defensive outlook. Kansas City had nobody who could separate when Philly went to man coverage, and DeJean was the star of that, harassing TE Travis Kelce all game.
People will look for schematic tells or exotic blitzes and fronts to try and find a reason why the Chiefs got throttled, but the game is simple: if you can win up front, you can win a lot of important football games.
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