Breer: Lessons Learned From the 2019 NFL Season

Lessons Learned From the 2019 NFL Season
Here are 10 things we learned from this past season and the Chiefs’ and 49ers’ runs to Super Bowl LIV.

ALBERT BREER

https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/02/05/2019-lessons-learned-mailbag-tom-brady?utm_campaign=themmqb&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Big people beat up little people. That’s actually a Chip Kelly quote, used after he spent his first draft pick as Eagles coach on Lane Johnson in 2013, and it holds true now. The one thing that ties the conference finalists of the last couple years together? Deep investment at the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. Invest in big people, as Kelly said seven years ago, and you’ll win your share of fistfights.

Of the eight starting tackles in the conference title games, five were on contracts paying them more than $11 million per year. Two of the three exceptions (Jack Conklin and Mike McGlinchey) were top 10 picks still on their rookie deals. And the eighth guy (Bryan Bulaga) just played out the final season of a five-year deal that was near the top of the market when he signed it in 2016. That, to say the least, is staggering.

On the other side of the ball, the two Super Bowl teams already had stars up front going into 2019 (DeForest Buckner and Chris Jones), and both made moves to add pricey vets to complement them (Dee Ford and Frank Clark), and the Niners spent the second overall pick on Nick Bosa, who you could argue wound up being the best player on the biggest stage, at least before Patrick Mahomes took over in the fourth quarter.

Bottom line: Good coaches can cover up a lot of things, but it’s hard to hide weakness in the trenches if your opponent is bringing strength.

Rookie QB deals remain the best bargain. For the third straight year, a team with a quarterback taken in the top 10, playing on a rookie contract, reached the Super Bowl. And for the second time in that span, they won it. Yes, that’s fudging it a little—Carson Wentz was hurt for his trip to the big game—but whether he played or not, Philly had according financial flexibility. And as we head in the ’20s, we still haven’t had a QB making $20 million-per QB win it all.

That, of course, will eventually change. But there’s no doubt that those Eagles, Rams and Chiefs were able to build their teams in a way that clubs with big quarterback financials can’t. And in a way that Philly and L.A. themselves no longer can. Jared Goff’s cap number jumps from $10.6 million this year to $36.0 million next year, and Wentz’s figures go from $8.4 million this year to $18.7 million next year to $34.7 million in 2021.

That doesn’t mean the Eagles and Rams (and eventually the Chiefs) can’t keep winning. It just means their margin for error is cut way down, and they’ll probably need their QB to be good enough to cover up some holes, which is why you’re willing to pay the guy that much in the first place.

Quarterback trade-ups are worth it. While we’re there, think about this: In the 2016 and ’17 drafts, four teams dealt away future first-rounders to get quarterbacks in the top 10. Two of those four have won championships (Philly and Kansas City), three of the four have made the Super Bowl (the Rams), and the other team (Houston) has advanced in the playoffs.

Now, missing in the first round on a quarterback can be crippling, because not only does it mean you have the wrong guy, it also means for at least three years or so you stop looking for one. But the payoff for hitting is huge.

The trade market has changed, and maybe for good. This is quantifiable: From the advent of the 2011 CBA up until the end of March 2018, just eight players were traded for packages involving a first-round pick or more. Since then, over a 21-month span, the NFL has matched that number, with eight such deals (Brandin Cooks, Khalil Mack, Amari Cooper, Odell Beckham, Frank Clark, Laremy Tunsil, Minkah Fitzpatrick and Jalen Ramsey).

Why? There are a bunch of reasons – all of which we detailed in September. The analytics boom, the financial landscape, an NBA influence, the state of job security in the NFL and a crop of younger, more aggressive GMs are among them.

The overarching truth, though, is that draft picks are being valued differently than they were in the past and teams are getting in front of deteriorating situations with players quicker than they used to. Which leads to more blockbuster deals.

It doesn’t matter what side of the ball your coach comes from. You can make a solid argument that the best hire of the 2019 cycle may well have been Miami’s Brian Flores, who was one of just two defensive coaches to land jobs. Tennessee’s Mike Vrabel, another guy from that side of the ball, led his team to the AFC title game. Baltimore’s John Harbaugh, an old special teams coach, had the best team in football for most of the year.

All of that is to say, yes, it’d be nice to pair an offensive play-caller with a young quarterback, like Kansas City and San Francisco have, because if that play-caller is your head coach, there’s a lot less risk that you’ll lose him. But that should be seen more as a really nice bonus, not a necessity. Tom Brady and Russell Wilson are OK, despite having had head coaches that came from the defensive side for the entirety of their careers.

Bigger than offensive tactics or quarterback knowhow is leadership. That, by the way, is how the Eagles landed on a position coach named Andy Reid 21 years ago. They didn’t know then that he’d become the play-caller he has been. Which was, yup, a really nice bonus to what wound being a home-run hire.

Defense still matters. With seven minutes left at Hard Rock Stadium, it sure looked like we were, for the second straight year, going to have defense carrying Super Bowl Sunday. And that Mahomes is a force of nature and screwed up that fun narrative doesn’t change this: Each of the NFL’s top four defenses made the playoffs, and two of the top four offenses didn’t. The Niners rode their defense to the Super Bowl. The Chiefs won it because theirs was much better than what they had on that side last year.

Don’t get me wrong—a team with the makeup of the 2000 Ravens could still win it all two decades later, though it’d be tough to make that happen. What I am saying is that having balance really matters after all, and after what so many people thought was an offensive revolution in 2018. Speaking of that…

Football is about evolution, not revolution. There’s a reason why fullbacks are suddenly back in style, and why an old-school, 240 lb. hammer, in Derrick Henry, won the rushing title. And that relates to what football’s always been—a giant cat-and-mouse game. The rebirth of the run game is a direct response to teams putting 220 lb. linebackers, 250 lb. defensive ends and a constant stream of nickel packages on the field.

It’s not complicated. Put a defense on the field to combat a spread offense, and teams are going to bring in tight ends and fullbacks (see: Ravens, Baltimore) for their tailbacks to run behind. And when you put bigger defenders on the field to deal with those guys? Offenses will throw it on them.

College concepts keep coming. A year and a half ago, I did a fun story with Bears coach Matt Nagy, then on the eve of his first training camp, on the idea of stealing plays—from other NFL teams and the college game. Later in the year, Sean Payton admitted to me that he’d taken ideas from Sean McVay by studying Rams tape. A few months after that, McVay told me he was doing the same to Payton, through watching Saints tape.

So if there’s a real revolution on offense happening, it’s there. Coaches are way more open-minded than they used to be. Ideas and even entire systems, like what the Ravens ran this year, that once would’ve been derided as “college” are now ingrained in the NFL, partly because teams are doing more to meet young quarterbacks halfway in getting them to adjust and learn the NFL game.

There was plenty of that in the Super Bowl and, yes, we have a good example for you. On the Niners’ third offensive snap, Deebo Samuel broke off a 32-yarder on an end-around. Three plays later, they ran another end-around to Samuel. On this one, there was a wrinkle—a throwback to Jimmy Garoppolo. The Chiefs had it covered, and Samuel cut it back for seven yards to pick up a third-and-two.

But the bigger thing here is that even just a few years ago, you might see one of these “gimmicks” a game. This year, you saw it twice within the first five minutes of the Super Bowl, and no one batted an eye at it happening.

Backup quarterbacks matter. You guys know the story of Tannehill. He bailed out a team that was ready to win in so many places, but also on course to pay for missing on a QB taken second overall five years ago. You probably haven’t heard as much on Matt Moore, who the Chiefs lured from a scouting job with the Dolphins when Chad Henne got hurt.

Moore went 2-1 in place of Mahomes, if you include the game when Mahomes dislocated his kneecap. And you can argue his ability to lead a game-winning drive against a stout Vikings defense in Week 9 helped Kansas City win the Super Bowl. If the Chiefs don’t win that one, they don’t get the bye, and they have to play the Titans in the wild-card round, and go to Foxboro to play the Patriots in the divisional round.

I’m not saying they wouldn’t have won it all anyway. But it would’ve been a lot tougher. And on the flip side, the Steelers’ mess of a backup quarterback situation felled a season in which they finally found a way to fix a defense that’s been wobbly for close to a decade, only to lose Ben Roethlisberger early on. Which makes me think…

Mike Tomlin’s better than people give him credit for. He’s dealt with a lot in Pittsburgh. We saw who Antonio Brown was this year. Le’Veon Bell, too. Despite all of it, 13 years in, he still has yet to endure a losing record as Steelers coach, which, again, is a good illustration of what’s important in finding a head coach.

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