This is a pretty middle of the pack defense overall. On negative EPA/play produced, they rank 20th layered between the Rams and the Giants. Two decent defensive schemes that lack the players to make them good. On drop backs alone, they move up to 14th. They are very poor against RBs though, and we’ll get to why.

  • The most important thing: they have two really good young corners in Spoon and Woolen, you are not gonna throw long and far with them. They move their older DBs to play with everything in front of their eyes, let the young athletic DBs move around on the long routes across the MoF. Similar to the Jets and Panthers in that regard. Tariq Woolen grew up in Fort Worth, went to high school at Arlington Heights. So y’all know he’s gonna want to show up big in his home town.

  • When we do wsnt to throw deep, it is going to be on play action and designed or forced roll outs. Anything where the QB is extending plays.

  • It’s going to be a big TP/Dowdle day for multiple reasons. Their run defense is poor. But you can’t really run between the tackles alone a lot due to the LBs Brooks and of course Bobby Wagner. Hit them at the edges.

  • The other reason it’s a big TP/Dowdle day: They’ve got great run and hit LBs but Bobby is old and Brooks isn’t as athletic, so force them to cover you and you’ll feast. Which moves me to:

  • Hit them with the arrow / Texas routes with the RBs. You know the ones in Madden where they run diagonally towards the sideline then cut back to the MoF? And your RB either drops it, it’s forced out on a huge hit, or it’s a big play the 5% of the time it works? Do that. They won’t be able to cover you. We don’t do those routes a lot but we ran one against Washington, which makes me wonder if we were prepping that kind of play this SEA game.

  • In short, we got to use the short game (run the ball to set up PA, or fake the short game for deep balls) to set up the long ball. Run the ball to set up Play Action*, or hit them with short passing concepts to surprise them when you push the ball down the field.

*Pedantry note: Data heavily suggests you can Play Action regardless of how much you have ran to that point. Just need a credible run threat. You can even PA to set up run plays.