Drive Time: Run Game Trend and How Miami Can Ride the Wave

we were. This thing had been built this offseason to beat the Buffalo Bills. And after considering all of those factors, I text him and I said, you know what, but if the Dolphins don't like move the ball consistently, I'm gonna heal turn on these guys because with the caveat that, I do believe that there are reinforcements coming that could be the next thing that kind of got some over

that hump. But they did exactly what I said I didn't want them to do in order for me to stay on board with like, oh, this is an all time historic offense, which you know it had been the last couple of years they were trading in that direction, and I thought that all the added skill pieces and the third year in the system, all that stuff, I thought it was going to be just another step in the right direction for the Dolphins offense. Not only is

there a heel turn with that in mind. I think the Dolphins broke me like I had to actively avoid football matters and Twitter. I didn't delete the app, but I might as well have over the weekend because I've been thinking about this, that same friend that I text with, you know, when Tua got his extension and last year happened, you know all the results we didn't get, you still were this considerable part of the NFL conversation. Every single week.

You were mentioned in power rankings, you were mentioned in big matchups of the weekend. That's the luxury of being or you know, I guess the primetime games never go our way, but you get those because you're good in every other game and you earn those through being a good football team. And that's who the Dolphins had become and established themselves over the last couple of years. And

I'm not riding the obituary today. I just think it's worth putting our thoughts out there because I know, just like every single person listening to this podcast today, you're in a tough spot. You are really down about the thing that has the potential to bring you the most joy in your life outside of your children or your family or you know whatever other major pillars in your life.

You may have if it is the Dolphins, that probably means you're nineteen years old like I was once upon time and had no responsibility outside of a part time job and try to figure away through junior college and just love football. But I cannot fathom right now going back to the era of twenty fifteen or twenty eighteen, or two thousand and nine or two thousand and five and this team that maybe they can get nine wins and get into the playoffs and then be two touchdown

underdogs in Foxboro and get slacked by the Patriots. Maybe they can do that. Nah, I just have no interest in that thought, that conversation to have finally uncovered a true franchise quarterback, someone that moves the needle, someone that get you excited to go to the ballpark, someone that you know that when you're down by twenty one points in the fourth quarter at Baltimore, you can come back

and win that game. When you need a touchdown on back to back drives in Los Angeles in the opener, you can come back and you can win that game. To to lose that you know, I don't know what's gonna happen quite frankly, you know, to put the news

out there that he doesn't intend to retire. That came out Sunday morning, But like to live in that gray area forever now with every single hit and I just I just I thought I thought it was over because of last season, the way he protected himself, the fact that he endured an NFL season and we see we see guys take these hits all the time, and guys get hurt, guys get concussions, guys get knocked out of games.

It just felt like different that time, right, And so I just keep thinking about where we were and where we have, where we've come from, where we are and where we're going.

zeal I had for this profession. When I pledged to every Dolphins fan Lockdown Dolphins, and I was going to take you through what's going to be a tough season from a wins lost perspective, from matchups getting destroyed like nine times out of ten, But I was always going to find that tenth one where Devon Godshot got a good run stop, or Eric Rowe showed us that he could be a potential safety of the future or whatever

whatever the hell it was. And watching all the college prospects that year, and watching all the quarterbacks in college and deciphering Tua and Burrow and Herbert and Jordan Love and all these quarterbacks that were so much fun to watch, and all these prospects and all these draft picks we had,

and we were building, We're building, We're building. They have this multiple war chest of draft picks that even if they bat four hundred in the drafts, they're gonna be a great team because they're gonna get valuable resources at low cost and they have all these free agent dollars and they can do it. Throughout the course of two oswickiy contract and we're gonna build and then the head coach turned out to be a total loser. All right, we'll reset, go back and try it again. We find

this guy, Mike McDaniel. Oh my goodness, record pacing offense top ten offenses back to back year's number one offense. I've been waiting twenty five years for this, since I had peaches and NFL team themed pencils doing fucking freaking you know, learn how to write cursive.

you probably check out at that point. It's like how I imagine a Patriots fan might feel today, Like did they really care? Anymore like they won six championships. Is

it ever going to get better than that? I don't know, existential crisis, ma'm because throughout that rebuild and throughout the picks and the free agency signings and the pivot to the new coach and the options and the ability to get out of contracts and the good contracts and the way they structure things and just continue to build this thing forward to what I still feel is a really good football team with a massive question hanging over its head. And just look at we're six and a half point

dogs of the Seahawks. You know, like, I don't I don't want to go back to watching like I remember last year watching this like the Saints and Panthers in Week two and the Saints just couldn't move the ball and that was the whole entire year for them, And I was just like, I can't go back to watching this stuff, dude, I can't go back to watching Chad, Henny John Beck, Cleo Lemon say, I mean, you know the names.

Or you know, Lewis Riddick last year in Week fourteens, and this is a team that's going to really surprise look down Like being part of those conversations made everything else more fun because all the content was so much more fun to watch.

Just I don't I don't know when the quarterback comes back, but when he if he's not, I don't know how I can pick this team to win football games because I just don't see it, And so all these thoughts have gone through the head. I've thought about the prospects,

I thought about the veterans, the trade possibilities. Something to put a band aid over the gaping wound in Dolphins fans hearts right now, I think was what from my perspective, the weekend was all about trying to find and the more I tried to find it, the more I found that I just wanted to be in the Atlantic Ocean with my two year old who was having an absolute blast.

You know, every year we say I'm done buying any of this team. I'm not going to predict them to win these games until they and then the year comes around, you're like freaking awquall painted face paint.

the season. Twenty twenty one broke tw was Ribs in Week two and gave Brian floor As the opportunity to sit him for longer than he should have sat. And that effectively made you one in seven and then two it comes back in and you win eight games, seven games in a row. Big surprise flow, right, And that season was ended right there because of the Buffalo Bills injury to two in week number two. This is the one year you can argue it as the Titans in Week seventeen that year.

twenty four. Number two, our quarterback that has gotten over all the ailments and woes of his career and bad coaching and injuries and all these things. Week two goes right back to the issue that made twenty twenty two a miserable roller coaster ride of a season with all the ups and downs following the health of the quarterback. So yeah, it's basically a Buffalo Bills problem. In fact, if you go to I think Warren Sharp tweeted it to my bookmarks, just give me a second, I'm gonna

find it. Of course, now it's gone, I can't find it. Essentially, the Dolphins have like a five ninety winning percentage against the rest of the NFL, but are one and eleven against the Bills over the last twelve games over that same spans, Like they're basically a top five team against

everybody else, but they cannot beat the Buffalo Bills. And how sad is that that it comes off the heels of Tom Brady literally handing over the keys in twenty nineteen is last year and Josh Allen's breakout year comes in twenty twenty, Like, does it ever get better? No? God, man, I don't know. Yeah, the Kugs won the Apple Cup. Let's go ahead and take a break. Comeback on the

other side. I'm gonna tell you about how this trend of the running game in the National Football League could be the Dolphins path to finding victories without QB one. That's Next Draft Time podcast, your host Travis Wingfield, brought

to you by AutoNation. We are two weeks into a brand new NFL season, and we've got a pretty significant trend developing across the league and it might coincide with how the Dolphins can carve out some paths to victory over the coming weeks or for as long as QB one is down, and I want to start with this. You'll notice this through the life of the NFL. It

is a league of cycles and trends. Because Dan Marino ushered in the era of the long ball, and though it took a while for the NFL to catch up to that and through various routes of the passing game, we eventually did see the spawn of the aerial attack. In the nineteen nineties with Jim Kelly and the Buffalo Bills. We saw Brett farre introduce a new style of quarterback play. We saw Warren Moon carry on Dan's approach and legacy

into the nineties. But then came the bell Cow running back em At Smith, Terrell, Davis Ladany, and Tomlinson, Priest Holmes, Ricky Williams. For all you youngsters out there, there was a time where your perception across the media was tied to the quality of your running back and usually paired with a stout defense. Look at those early two thousands

Dolphins teams and how they were built. And when Ricky Williams hung it up in two thousand and four, look at what happened to a team that had won eleven, nine, eleven, and ten games the four years prior four wins, nine wins, six wins, one win, and by that point Peyton Breeze, Roethlisberger, Brady. The passing era had arrived, and then it peaked, and

that peak was lengthy. It's difficult to say exactly where it culminated because Patrick Mahomes toppled the records set by Manning in twenty thirteen in the twenty eighteen season, and those Manning records toppled the Brady records of two thousand and seven and that unprecedented season they had that year. I think we're seeing the cycle accelerate early in twenty twenty four, when early in twenty twenty three that was the beginning of the pendulum swing.

then thirteen of them in the next sixteen seasons. But it's been it gets Barron a year since our last one. Twenty twenty three was just one of two seasons since twenty seventeen that didn't have a five thousand yard passer. If you can believe it, Jameis Winston was once a five thousand yard passer, and if trends are any indication, we ain't getting one in twenty twenty four either. But why might you think that is here's one place to start. The number of two high shells has increased by over

twenty percent inside of a five year period. In twenty nineteen, teams ran too high or more at thirty eight percent of the time. Through two weeks of the new season, teams are running too high at a sixty two percent clip, and it has caused this ripple effect on numbers, effectively changing the game. Depth of target averages are way down. It's under seven for the first time in two decades. In fact, the lowest it got prior to twenty twenty four was seven and a half. It's six point eight rate.

Now it's trending towards being a full yard lower. And the reason you've been told for a decade plus now that running backs don't matter comes squarely from the analytics community that focuses on a stat called EPA expected points added. The math behind it is that a good run is four yards, right. A back who averages four yards per carry is a good back, but a quarterback that wants to be a good quarterback needs to be around seven

and a half yards per attempt or so. So pretty basic to look at that and say our good runs are half as effective as our good passes while teams taking shorter, quicker throws and the implementation of penalties or misses on those throws on top of what teams are willing to give up in the running game to prevent those big plays, Well you're getting this inverse of EPA per run play compared to EPA per pass play. It's a fascinating dichotomy, but also kind of a simple one.

Offenses began to spread things out, defenses didn't adjust, and explosive plays were the result. Ten to fifteen years ago, then defenses adjusted because they have the tangible proof that they have to play lighter boxes to contend with all the speed and skill on the perimeter. So they remove hats from the box to match. And what does the offense's focus then become? You guessed it to run into those looks. It's a cycle that will never die in

this sport. Create overplay, react to overplay. But there's more. It's not as simple as too high equals run. Don't get this twisted? The spread revolution one and long gone are the days of Mike Allstatt donning shoulder pads of Jake Berman in Little Giants. That's the kid that shows up to practice in Bubble Rap. By the way, I could have sworn he had a name like Squints and Sandlot. I just feel like you have to give that character a more defining name than Jake Berman.

behind a defensive back for one play. On Thursday, the Buffalo Bills refuse to let Miami do to them what the Dolphins did to the Jaguars. We saw the eighty yard touchdown the Tyreek hill, the sixty three yard play to Jalen Waddle. The Bills played too high at a rate of seventy five percent and stayed in Cover two two man or quarters. Cover two is a high low concept and zone safeties take half the deep field. The underneath cornerbacks play the curl flat. They can re route

through press from here or playoff. It doesn't matter. It's a zone coverage all the way across the board. That's different than two man, which keeps those same half field safeties up high in the top of the defense. But you play man coverage with those cornerbacks, and they typically do so with press to funnel those routes to their help.

This is a big reason why Miami was able to run the ball for over one hundred yards in the first half against Buffalo, and had Miami stayed in the game on the scoreboard and not had those errors in the passing game, it probably would have continued all night long. Hence why defenses are willing to do this. It opens

up more opportunities for mistakes for posterity. Quarters coverage is a four high look where the defense puts four deep zone defenders down the field, each covering a quarter of the deep part of the field.

in the game last Thursday. We know alec Ingold's role in the offense. The World Champs kept an undrafted rookie and Carson Steele to play full back in an offense that has not rostered a fullback in the Patrick Mahomes era. The defense's counter highbrid off ball linebackers who can play

the edge. Players that allow the defense to counter the offense's use of versatile players like a George Kittle, who can be one of the game's best blockers one week and one of the game's best pass catchers the next. So you get players like July Tavia in New England who typically aligns in an off ball position but can also condense down off the edge to change the front and the count for the quarterback, for the quarterback to assess all of that within a forty second shot clock.

Defenses all over the league have these guys Caden Ellison Atlanta, Leoschanel in Kansas City, Pete Werner in New Orleans, and Frankie Luvu Go Koog's in Washington. Just like Mike Allstatts type are extinct, so too is the neck rolled shoulder pad shelf higher than my helmet nasal strip I black wearing Mike linebacker. And that's before we get to the big nickels from the safety position like Brian branch or Kyle Hamilton or Buffalo's do it all slot cornerback Taron Johnson.

It's a game of constant cat and mouse. Offenses have to start to incorporate motion or have begun. I should say, in corporate motion to give them information pre snap. Defenses are starting to play half field structures that allow them to not react to the motion, and quarterbacks will then have to win post snap, which is usually around two

and a half seconds. By the way, and I'm not sure which is tougher picking up a ninety nine mile per hour fastball or figuring out a defense in two and a half seconds with my.

twenty twenty and twenty nineteen. It was still triple digits at a bucko five. Again, rushes per game are up twenty seven and a half rushes per game we are knocking on the door of a fifty to fifty split. Points per game are down twenty one point four per game. That's lower than last year's lowest in a decade of twenty one point eight, and if you go back at twenty twenty, teams were scoring just a hair under twenty

five points per game. As for the rush and pass disparity, last year it was thirty four to twenty seven in favor of the pass. In two weeks, that seven play gap has shrunk to less than three. It's more than cut in half. And if you go back just a few years in twenty twenty, it was thirty six pass attempts per game and twenty six rush attempts per game. So in less than half of a decade, we've gone from a sixty to forty split to fifty two forty eight.

That's not just a pendulum swing. That's Dan Marino taking the pendulum, rearing it back behind his ear and humming it in the other direction like one of those nerve vortex footballs that you had as a kid back in the nineteen nineties. If you're my age, it's fitting, isn't it. When they were inventing a fantasy football to give you and your friends more long bombs in your backyard game. The NFL was a three yards and a cloud of

a dust league. Now, after a decade of the aerial revolution, just like high wasted baggy jeans, we're right back where we were in the era of TGIF programming. Boy meets world, pleated khakis and undercut hairstyles. Just like the game of football, we are a people of cycles. Let's go ahead and take our last break right there. Come back on the other side. Tell you about Tyler Huntley and how we can craft an offense with all this information in mind to try to win games with both Tyler Huntley and

Scalar Thompson. That's next Draft Time podcast, your host Travis Wingfield, brought to you by Auto Nation. Not exactly fresh off the wire, but since we're doing this podcast on Tuesday morning, I think is when it comes out. The news that came across the wire on Monday was the Dolphins acquisition of quarterback Tyler Huntley off the Baltimore Ravens practice squad. Let's go ahead and open this segment with coach McDaniel on Tyler Huntley.

team absolutely believed could lead them to victory. I think that's a very huge tangible thing for a non QB one necessarily, and so for us without knowing exact timelines, you know, we got to learn firsthand a nice nice reminder of uh, how how it only takes one play and uh, you're you're what you think, your your depth

is changes abruptly. So this was you know, that's a that's a move for you know, moving forward to to secure some depth you know, in case of the unforeseen, which is timelines for for us as as it relates to a.

as well. I actually find it to be an interesting pairing with the whole bit I just did on the podcast here talking about the shifting landscape of football schema. I don't think Huntley's game is one where he's going to one hitch timing, dial up deep shots, or rip these anticipation shots that look like they're heading for a triangle of defenders only to be perfectly cut off and

intersected by a Dolphins wide receiver for eighteen yards. But I think you can parse out his game from both the stats and the tape, and the tape tells me that he is a creator and a big play hunter. I hate comparing anybody to this guy because he's the worst human being in the league. But it reminds me of Deshaun Watson when he was with the Houston Texans, where he would just drop back and look around and move and shuffle and create space and hit the big play with his arm and then have a big run

that changes the game as well. That's basically Huntley is a prime to Shaun Watson, a poor man's prime to Shaun Watson, minus all the other stuff. He has a twenty percent pressure to sack rate in his career and a two point nine to three average time to throw rate to A Conversely, just a fifteen percent sack rate, which also is more impressive because he takes so many fewer pressures because of how fast he plays the position.

But he also to A has a two point four to five career time to throw and actually just the last two years is two point three to two, so literally more than a half second more or less that he gets rid of the ball than Tyler Huntley. So it's a complete land shape landscape shift for Huntley. But here's my thing. We lose all that stuff with Skyler two. So why not take the guy that actually adds an

element to your offense. One thing that he has that no other quarterback has in this roster is the running ability. And I'm not even talking about scrambling. Yes, that is a big part of his game. Obviously in his career he has fifty two scrambles on four hundred and sixty eight dropbacks and thirty two sacks taken. His rushing splits go like this, though, three hundred and fifty six of his rushing yards career are on scrambles and two thirty

five are on designed runs. The quarterback he backed up in Baltimore the greatest running quarterback of all time. I will hear the argument from Mike Vick, but I think it's Lamar Jackson is split at twenty three hundred yards on scrambles and thirty seven hundred yards on designed runs. Obviously, nobody is Lamar except Mike Vick. But I think that's more in line with how you'd expect Huntley to look

in Miami. He can create when things break down. But I think the best thing that he adds to your offense is the ability to run the football with the quarterback and then what that does to the defense's fits against the actual run game, one more complex run game, one of the more complex run games, I should say, in the entire business, because suddenly the quarterback becomes part of the misdirection, part of the keys, and the manipulation of the defense's eyes and all the short motion, all

these things that he can in corporate. So I'm intrigued by that. I'm intrigued by how it pairs with his deep passing abilities that are okay, because when he goes off script, the best thing that we can do is attack the vulnerabilities down the field. And he has that pliability slash elasticity in his arm that I don't think Skyler has. I know too, it doesn't have it in this way to fire that thing deep down the field from awkward positions.

did there. If you play an offense that has Tyler Huntley, Devon eight, chan alec Ingold and Julian Hill in the game, you better bring that safe down in the box. And if they do that, it means that someone has to cover ten or seventeen solo. And that's where I think you can live in this world between run heavy occasional deep shop. It's kind of like Russell Wilson for the Seattle Seahawks for all those years, but obviously again a poor man's version of it. That's how I'd envision the

offense for hunting. But we also have to envision an offense for a skyler who will get his shot at it after waiting since the playoff game in twenty twenty two. Now record this on a Monday, I'm pretty sure he'll be Skyler in the game on Sunday. But for him, I think it looks a lot different. More so the offense that you're run with Tua, primarily because of his familiarity with it, not because of the skill set. But I think you do have to adapt to his skills.

And I go back to that Vikings game in twenty twenty two, and there was all kinds of play action boot get him on the move, more half field reads, less static pockets. This offense already plays with a limited drop back game, and that's what the whole league is doing now. If you haven't noticed by the way talked about it all summer long, look at the Saints. They just threw up forty seven points in the Cowboys, and they called three true in the game and never once

put an offensive lineman on Micah Parsons. It was a combination of unblocked with movement or backs and tight ends chipping multiple pieces at the time. Parsons actually after the game called it a maze to get through their plan. He was really impressed by it, but with Skyler Thompson, I think a strong running game is paramount and the play action boot game off of that, not to mention all the different ways we have of getting the balls to the two playmakers on the outside and the screen

game jet sweep all that fun stuff. So yeah, I think you have the option to lean into this trend of the running game coming back to life at least while QB one gets healthy.

you guys for staying with me on that. But it's been a tough few days trying to had to get back to to feeling like I didn't just break up with A didn't just get divorced like it felt like a breakup. Didn't It didn't this week for like this weekend, for like a breakup like you were still in love with someone that you couldn't have, Like that's what it felt like. So starting to feel a little bit normal. The boys took you out to the club over the weekend.

Whatever the comparisons are you want to call. That's that's where we are right now. So you all please be sure rambling to subscribe to the podcast, leave us at ranting and leave us a review. You can follow me on social at Wingfield NFL and the team at Miami Dolphins. Check out the fish Tank podcast with my guys Seth and Juice. Check out the YouTube channel for Media Availabilities and Dolphins h Q. We have tons of breakdowns devon achan this game. It's going up on the fillustration for

this week. For me, I cannot wait to break it down for you guys. Also check out where we at Miami Dolphins dot com. Until next time, fins.