They left him out there

[cold open. Eleven seconds, hard‑cut out of 2:21:06, dropped in front of the greeting with nothing around it.]

Rogers: Do you want to do the game, or do you want to talk about how you are feeling.

Sikkema: I want to do the game.

Rogers: Okay.

Sikkema: I would like the record to show I asked for the Chargers game.

[laughter]

Sikkema: I am a professional. I have been paid to be a professional. Not right now, but I have been.

[hard cut to the opening bell graphic]

Sikkema: Welcome to the opening bell of the NFL Stock Exchange podcast, Trevor Sikkema, that is Connor Rogers, Tyler is in the back, and it is the Monday after Cleveland fifty‑four, Tampa Bay seventeen.

Rogers: Fourteen.

Sikkema: Fourteen. Fourteen. I have said seventeen twice today and I do not know where I am getting it.

Rogers: You are getting it from wanting it to be seventeen.

Sikkema: Probably. Okay. Start, Bench, Cut first.

14:55 · “Football Starts Here”

Sikkema: Right. What I watched, so nobody sends me a clip of a run I did not talk about. Live, then the first quarter four times last night, then every Mayfield dropback after it this morning, which is thirty‑one of them.

Rogers: Mhm.

Sikkema: First quarter. Tampa scores on a thirty‑six yard ball to McMillan, Cleveland punts them back inside the fifteen, and on the first snap after the punt Godwin goes eighty‑seven. Two plays, eight minutes apart, both past the same corner.

Sikkema: Now the eighty‑seven. I do not think that one is on him. Cleveland shows two‑high, they roll it late, and when Godwin gets vertical there is nobody in the middle third. Savage passes him off and there is nobody to pass him off to. That is a communication thing and I do not put it on the corner.

Rogers: Pull it up.

Rogers: The safety is where he is supposed to be. He is at fourteen and he never leaves. Savage is in off‑man, no help expected, and he opens to the sideline on a post.

Sikkema: Yeah. Yeah, no, that is off‑man. I have that wrong. The reason I have it wrong is I watched that one live and never went back to it, I went back to the thirty‑six, and I built a story off the one I went back to. He opens the wrong way and there is no exchange to blow.

Sikkema: So it is two, in eight minutes, both his, and I have just spent ninety seconds explaining why it was not.

Rogers: J Whack had it.

Sikkema: J Whack had it. He has had a rough two weeks in my replies and he was right both times.

Sikkema: Alright. What changed. It changes at three forty‑four of the first quarter, off a timeout, and you can see it on the broadcast. They stop playing man. Everything after is two‑high or pretending to be, corners off and squatting, and when they pressure they are not adding people. They show five, rush four, and one of the four is a defensive lineman dropping to the flat.

Rogers: Twice.

Sikkema: Twice, and the second one is an interception. And a zone pressure with a big man in the throw lane is not a new idea. Every defence in this league has it in the folder. Calling it in the first quarter of a game you are losing by fourteen, having practised something else all week, is a different act than having it in the folder.

Rogers: Or Tampa is bad.

Sikkema: Or Tampa is bad. Yes. That is on the table and it stays on the table all afternoon.

Rogers: Hold on, I have one thing and it is going to come out wrong.

Sikkema: Go.

Rogers: Everybody is going to write zero for eleven. It was the graphic on two shows last night. I charted the distances off the broadcast, so this is my count and not an official one and somebody will correct me. After the first quarter, Tampa’s eleven third downs averaged a shade under ten to go. Nine of the eleven were seven or longer. They did not have one inside of five all afternoon.

Sikkema: Say the rest of it.

Rogers: So zero for eleven is not a third down number. It is a first and second down number that got written down on third down. Somebody won early downs by so much that the third down was decided before they lined up for it. Four tackles for loss, a sack on second and eight, two throwaways on first. And I do not think the interceptions were third down plays either, from memory, which you should not trust.

Sikkema: Where did you get eleven distances.

Rogers: I wrote them down.

Sikkema: You wrote down eleven distances.

Rogers: It took four minutes and I was going to be up anyway.

Sikkema: Okay, but do you see that you have just made the Cleveland case stronger and not weaker. Because winning first and second down eleven straight times is harder than getting a stop on third and nine.

Rogers: I know what I did. I am not going to tell you what it means about a coaching staff, because I do not know how much of it is Cleveland and how much is a first‑year play‑caller in Tampa who never got to second and five. Both of those produce the same chart.

Sikkema: That is fair.

1:02:05 · Boston, Concepcion, and one catch

Sikkema: One catch, and then Connor can do the volume.

Sikkema: Denzel Boston, second quarter, back shoulder, Zyon McCollum with outside leverage. And the reason I have watched it eleven times is not the catch. It is that Boston knows where the sideline is before the ball is in the air. He takes the corner two steps up the field, stops climbing, starts widening, boxes him out the way you box a man out under a rim, and both feet come down with room left over.

Rogers: He is a dude.

Sikkema: He is a dude, and I had him twenty‑second and he went thirty‑ninth and I am going to keep saying that until somebody stops me.

Rogers: Concepcion, seven for ninety‑six, forty‑six of it after the catch, and that is down from last week and I think that is Tampa. They played him off. Gave him the first six yards and tackled him at six, over and over. That is a defence that has watched him.

Sikkema: The rookie tackle, quickly. Two weeks, two first‑round edge rushers, no pressure either week, and I looked both times, because I ranked him twenty‑six and I would like to be right.

Rogers: It is two games.

Sikkema: It is two games.

Rogers: I had him in the twenties too and I am not moving a board in September off two afternoons.

1:29:14 · Vita Vea against everybody

Sikkema: Six for loss. Somebody in the chat is going to have to tell me the last time I watched that happen.

Sikkema: And it is a role thing more than a man‑beats‑man thing. Your nose occupies two, a third one comes to help and he occupies that one too, so Tampa never has to put an eighth in the box. Light box, four over the top, and Cleveland still runs into a wall for twenty‑nine carries and eighty‑four yards.

Rogers: The guard had a bad day, the centre had a bad day, and the thirty‑year‑old they signed in March to fix exactly this had a bad day, and that last one is a different sentence than the other two.

Sikkema: It is a different sentence.

Rogers: Two weeks in a row now.

2:14:00 · Super Chats

Sikkema: Three dollars from Blake, and it is a real question. Normal pressure, you send five or six and everybody behind plays man. A zone pressure is you send five and still play zone behind it, so somebody standing on the line at the snap has to turn around and go cover grass. Cleveland did it twice with a defensive lineman, and a quarterback does not expect a three‑hundred pounder in the flat, because why would he.

Rogers: And it is a bad idea against somebody who gets the ball out fast. You have given up a rusher for nothing.

Rogers: I will take it and I am going to flag something before I say a word, which is that I have a reason to like that argument, so weigh it however you want.

Sikkema: Take your time.

Rogers: I did eleven years. Unpaid blog, freelance, then a research job where I was in a car six hours a day, and I did not resent an hour of it and I have called it the best thing that ever happened to me on this show. So when a man who spent thirty years on staffs says somebody walked past all of that, I understand him completely. I have said a version of it in this chair.

Rogers: Then I read the actual quotes yesterday, all of them, not the clips. And I did not like being in that group.

Sikkema: Say why.

Rogers: Because half of it is not about the line at all. It is about what kind of person gets to be in the building, and there is a tone in some of it I recognise from every time somebody who was not supposed to be in a room got into a room. I was that guy in 2014. Business degree from Albany and a blog. Somebody in a press box was making the same face about me that these guys are making about him.

Sikkema: So where does that leave you.

Rogers: I do not know. It is all still sitting there and I have not done anything with it. Next one.

Sikkema: A hundred dollars, Gary, and please do not do that again.

Sikkema: Some of it was you. Eighty‑six points in two weeks is the most in football, and that is not one bad Sunday, that is a number that takes effort. They lost the best receiver in that building’s history in March, the best linebacker in that building’s history retired six days later, and everybody in Tampa spent the summer talking about the schedule.

Rogers: Mhm.

Sikkema: So, no. I do not think Cleveland is what Cleveland looked like on Sunday and I do not think Tampa is what Tampa looked like on Sunday, and both of them spend six weeks finding out which half of that is true.

Sikkema: One.

Rogers: He watched one.

Sikkema: I watched one and it was the good one.

2:38:50 · Outro

Sikkema: Appreciate the Super Chats, appreciate the seven odd thousand of you who stayed to the end of a Monday show about a game that finished at halftime. Wednesday is Summer Scouting, safeties, which I have put off three weeks because I said in June that I do not enjoy watching safeties and forty of you have not let it go. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you on the next episode.

Description
Monday night live. What Cleveland changed at 3:44 of the first quarter, the distance chart nobody is talking about, Vita Vea, Boston's catch. Super Chats and Trolling Trevor at 2:14. Wednesday: safeties. #NFL #Browns #Bucs
Edited by Tyler Cook. Chef out.