Yesterday’s 23-20 overtime loss to Seattle was a microcosm of Gary Kubiak’s tenure in Houston: A mostly-well-executed bread-and-butter game combined with a failure to turn opportunities into points and a fatal predictability on offense that sabotaged the team in the most important moments of the game. It’s a pattern that’s been with Kubiak’s teams since […]
Month: September 2013
DeMarcus Ware: Transition from OLB to 4-3 DE
Monte Kiffin was hired by the Cowboys to be their Defensive Coordinator despite some red flags: He was 73 years old, and he’d been unimpressive at his last two stops at the University of Tennessee and University of Southern California. (To be fair, head coach Lane Kiffin was probably a much bigger cause of those […]
Tuesday Armchair Quarterback: Week 3 Power Rankings
I wanted to start writing a brief wrap-up column as soon as possible after the NFL week ended. It turned out “Monday Morning Quarterback” was already taken. So I decided to wait until after the Monday night game. It turned out “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” was taken as well. But, as I am still essentially a […]
Indianapolis Colts: Protecting Andrew Luck
In April 2012, the Colts drafted Andrew Luck and, in doing so, found another elite level franchise quarterback. By January 2013, it became clear that the Colts needed to find a way to protect that asset. In the 2012 season, the Colts offensive line gave up 112 quarterback hits, 21 more than any other offensive […]
Why is the Giants run game so important?
The Giants have started the season in probably the worst possible way they had envisioned. First, they suffered a loss in Dallas in which they outplayed the Cowboys in every way, except for giving away touchdowns and not executing in the red zone. Against the Broncos, they were able to hang on early, but turnovers […]
Analyzing the Trent Richardson trade
Our first reaction is: Wow. No one anywhere can say they saw this one coming, maybe not even Jim Irsay himself.
Nath’s Power Rankings After Week 2
One quick note for readers: You can now follow us on twitter @zonereads if you’d like to be notified immediately as to when new posts go up. Apologies for missing week 1 on the blog. I know it’s not a good look for an up-and-coming NFL blog to not have anything after the first week […]
NFC Preview: Short Writeups
Got the AFC Preview out of the way before the first AFC game was played. (I’m feeling much better about my projections for Denver and Baltimore, although I may have actually underestimated the Broncos.) With less than 24 hours before kickoff, let’s go through the NFC teams:
AFC Preview: Short Writeups
To a certain degree, projecting records is a little futile– so many factors go into a team’s performance level, let alone its record, and many of these are difficult to discern. Anyone who could predict things like injury and fumble luck reliably would stand to make a great deal of money doing so– there’s a […]
The question of gay players in the NFL
Kicking around some ideas with the rest of the Zone Reads crew today, someone brought up an interesting point: Kerry Rhodes, a safety who’s versatile in coverage and as a blitzer, who’s been a starter for eight years in the league and was still a solid, above-average player last year, was cut by Arizona and […]
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