Bucs Offense Needs To Be Better Than Week 2

In a rematch between two bitter rivals, the Bucs look to get back to .500 on the season while maintaining their division lead on Monday Night Football against the Saints. The Bucs won the initial matchup between these two teams, 20-10. This result was highly dependent upon a standout defensive performance that not only saw Tampa Bay stymie New Orleans’ offense to the tune of just two scores, but also generate a touchdown on their own (a Mike Edwards pick-six) while generating a season-high five takeaways.

The Bucs offense was pedestrian at best during this bout, creating only 13 points. To rely on these outcomes as a gameplan for success on Monday would be a fool’s errand. The Saints will be starting Andy Dalton at quarterback rather than their Week 2 starter, Jameis Winston. Dalton is much less careless than Winston with the ball, as evidenced by his 3.4% career turnover-worthy-play rate as opposed to Winston’s 4.7% mark. How can the Bucs offense improve over their Week 2 performance? There are a few things they can do to elicit a more beneficial outcome the second time around.

Stay Out Of Third Down

Head coach Todd Bowles mentioned in his post-game press conference following last week’s loss to Cleveland that the team struggled to win third down on offense. He stated that this was a contributing factor to the offense’s failure to generate enough points to win.

“We’re not finishing third downs,” Bowles said. “Third downs have been crucial for us. Stopping us from driving the ball. I think we were like 4-of-16, something like that. Might have been 5-of-17, which was about 24%. If you can’t score or move the ball on first down, it’s going to be tough to stay on the field. ”

Bowles has a point there. If you are consistently unable to convert on your third down opportunities, you are going to have trouble staying on the field and generating points. However there seems to be an approach many of the best teams in football are taking that looks like it is working. The offensive powerhouses in the NFL these days are looking to bypass third down altogether.

Weekly update of the moving the chains chart. Chiefs and Bills are still a good chunk ahead of the league through two and three downs.

The Dolphins are very efficient on 1st down, as opposed to the Bengals.

Titans are 7-4, but can’t move the sticks on offense. pic.twitter.com/gpM1OGpo7V

— Timo Riske (@PFF_Moo) November 29, 2022

There are eight offenses that convert a new set of downs 52% of the time or better – Kansas City, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Miami, Baltimore, Jacksonville, Seattle and Atlanta. Seven of those teams rank in the Top 10 in scoring in the NFL. Meanwhile the Bucs are tied with three other teams for 20th in the league at creating a new set of downs with a 47% conversion rank.

The teams converting at that rate or lower is a who’s who of offensive ineptitude this year. The Bucs were 4-of-15 on third down against Cleveland. They were 5-of-17 against New Orleans the first go-round. As a matter of fact, the Bucs have played seven games where they have logged 14 or more third down attempts. Meanwhile, the Bills and the Chiefs, the top two scoring offenses in the NFL, have a combined three such games.

To really belabor this point here is a scatterplot graph showing the Bucs point totals by number of third downs faced going back to the beginning of 2021.

If you look at the line of best fit, you can see it goes down the further it moves to the right. That shows that on average the more third downs the Bucs face in a given game, the less points they score. Over this time period, the Bucs have averaged 29.2 points per game when they logged 13 or less third downs as compared to their 20.4 ppg when they hit 14 or more 3rd downs.

Staying Out Of First Down Step 1: Pass On First Down More

Let me introduce you to my dead horse. His name is “Pass More On First Down.” We here at Pewter Report have gone over this point ad nauseum, but it bears repeating. The best way to convert a new set of downs before you get to third down is to pass on first down.

1st-and-10 pass rate in neutral situations only pic.twitter.com/yZX55puBaV

— Computer Cowboy (@benbbaldwin) November 29, 2022

Again, let’s look at the top of this chart and compare it to the top-scoring offenses in the NFL. Of the 10 top-scoring offenses in the NFL, seven appear in the Top 10 of this list. Even run-heavy attacks like Philadelphia and Baltimore, have learned that passing on first down makes it easier to run later in the series.

Now the Bucs rank 14th in the league in the above metric. That’s top-half. Aren’t I being nit-picky when I excoriate the team for running too much in these situations? Well, you know the old saying “Do what you do well more often.” This is where Tampa Bay and the world of reality have a disconnect.

Also, the Bucs ranks 5th in EPA/dropback on first down. They rank 29th in rush EPA on first down.

The Bucs rank 7th in dropback success rate on 1st down. They rank 30th in rush success rate on 1st down.

They absolutely need to run the ball less on first down.

— Jon Ledyard (@LedyardNFLDraft) November 29, 2022

Bucs Set To Face Single-High Looks At High Rate On First Down

So, having established the need to pass on first down, let’s look at the passing concepts that can be successful for Tampa Bay. According to The Kneeldown, the Saints have run cover-1 or cover-3 almost 60% of the time on first down this season. Assuming those coverages to be more prevalent on Monday Night the Bucs can create a gameplan that calls for pass concepts designed to beat those coverages.

Ways To Beat Cover 1

For Cover 1, a few concepts that tend to work well are mesh, slay and switch. Here is an example of mesh from the week two matchup against the Saints.

You see Mike Evans (No. 13) in the slot lined up against Saints cornerback Marshon Lattimore. Following the snap Evans runs a shallow crossing route across the formation. Because the Saints are in Cover 1, Lattimore is responsible for covering Evans no matter where he goes, so he begins to follow Evans across the field. The problem for Lattimore is the fact that the mesh calls for short crossing routes coming from the other side that are being run by tight ends Cade Otton and Cam Brate.

Between Otton, Brate and the defenders tasked with covering them, Lattimore has to sift through four players while trying to stay in phase with Evans. The result was quite beneficial for the Bucs, as Evans was able to use the middle of the field traffic to create separation from Lattimore. From there it was an easy catch and run for seven yards.

“Slay” is a route concept that combines a shallow cross or slant route from the outside receiver with a flat route by the slot receiver. You can see the Bucs executed this well on the following clip.

Here Evans runs a slant route from the outside, bringing Lattimore with him towards the middle of the field. This allows Russel Gage (No. 17) to sprint to the flat underneath Evans, creating easy separation for him from his defender Justin Evans (No. 30). Brady makes an easy toss to Gage that allows him to field the ball and turn up field for eight yards.

You can see from these concepts that the Bucs aren’t picking up huge swaths of yards. These are seven-to-eight-yard gains. But if executed on first down against a coverage the Saints run about 1/5 of the time in these situations it will set them up in second-and 2 or second-and-3. And that is where the Bucs can get their run game involved with a much higher degree of effectiveness.

Now here is a great example of a switch route that the Bucs worked for an explosive gain.

Here the Bucs put Evans in the slot, but still have him run a vertical route to the outside in the form of a slot fade. They pair that route with a short dig route by Gage over the top. By “switching” the routes and the Bucs create a natural pick of Evans’ defender and gives Evans easy separation going vertically.

Beating Cover 3

While the Saints run Cover 1 about 20% of the time on first down, their most prevalent coverage is Cover 3 (38%).

The Bucs have a few plays that can beat this coverage. One that they pulled out last week against Cleveland was a “hi-lo wolf” look that forced the field side corner to commit deep, allowing an underneath out-route to come wide open.

Wide receiver Julio Jones comes in motion across the formation. With a single-high safety and no defender motioning with Jones, Brady is able to decipher quickly that this is Cover 3. The high safety correctly shades his help to the field side where the Bucs now had Jones and Evans pairing together. Jones is able to clear out both the safety and the field-side corner to follow him on his deep vertical, allowing Evans to break off his deep out with no one around him for days. If the outside corner had broken off with Evans, then Brady would have been able to hit Jones deep leading him to the sideline away from the deep safety.

The other opportunity that Cover 3 presents for the Bucs is giving their “Y” receiver the opportunity to cross underneath the deep safety, but over the top of the underneath zone defenders. The Bucs call this a “delta route.” Here is an example of it being successfully run against the Seahawks.

From a bunch formation, Jones pulls the boundary corner to his deep third, while Evans does the same thing with his corner to the field side. The deep safety initially shades his hips to Evans’ side as he tries to read Brady off of the play action. This quick cat-and-mouse game works to Brady’s favor as it pulls the safety’s body positioning away from Godwin running the delta across the middle. By the time the safety rotates back to the other side, Godwin has gotten enough depth over the linebackers to make the 19-yard catch.

Bucs Need To Play To Their Strengths

Tampa Bay’s offense has to score more points. There are no two-ways about it. A fantastic defense is being squandered by an offense that cannot generate 20 pints per game even though they barely turn the ball over. The Saints defense is good, but it isn’t infallible. And the Bucs have the weapons to take advantage. With an offensive line that is now missing it’s two best players the Bucs can ill-afford to compound injuries with insults like leaning into their inept rushing attack on early downs.

If they are to survive what is surely going to be a prize-fight of game on Monday night, they need to self-evaluate what they do well and what they don’t. Then they need to game plan to accentuate the good and minimize the bad. In my opinion that means creating a game plan that includes using the above passing concepts early and often to hopefully create some much needed offense.