The Buffalo Bills are coming off a 37-3 waxing of the Washington Commanders in which they became the first NFL team since the 1985 Dallas Cowboys to put up nine sacks and four interceptions in a single game.
But by Monday morning, head coach Sean McDermott had thrown those good feelings right out the window, and for good reason. Buffalo must now deal with a Miami Dolphins offense that set all kinds of records in its preposterous 70-20 thrashing of the Denver Broncos.
So, as well as McDermott’s defense is playing, there’s no time for pats on the back.
“It gets shorter and shorter or smaller and smaller, that window, right? And in particular, when you got a team that put up 70 points, I don’t think I’ve seen that in my NFL career the entire time,” McDermott said Monday morning. “So they’re very explosive,”
In this week’s “Xs and Os with Greg Cosell and Doug Farrar,” the guys talked at length about the challenges presented by Miami’s offense, and how the Bills can best deal with them.
You can watch this week’s entire “Xs and Os with Greg Cosell and Doug Farrar,” featuring all of Week 4’s biggest matchups, right here:
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Now, let’s get into how the Bills can ostensibly stop this bullet train.
Get to Tua Tagovailoa with four.
Here is where the Bills have a hypothetical advantage. Their blitz rate of 16.7% is the fourth-lowest in the NFL – only the Rams, Bears, and Eagles have blitzed at a lower rate. But their pressure rate of 30.0% is the NFL’s third-highest – only the Browns and Steelers have a higher pressure rate. Blitzing Tagovailoa is a recipe for defensive disaster — this season, against five or more pass-rushers, he’s completed 20 of 27 passes for 241 yards, 104 air yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions, and a NFL-best passer rating of 140.6.
Against four or fewer pass-rushers, Tagovailoa has completed 52 of 74 passes for 783 yards, 437 air yards, four touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 111.5.
It’s not a great scenario either way, but you have a better chance without blitzing, and certainly if you can bring pressure without blitzing. Tagovailoa has faced pressure with four or fewer pass-rushers on 15 dropbacks, completing eight of 13 passes for 158 yards, 102 yards, no touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 72.0.
As much as there is a way through this buzzsaw, that’s it.
The Patriots found the way on this Christian Gonzalez interception in Week 2. New England showed a five-man blitz look with safety Adrian Phillips up at the line. At the snap, Phillips dropped to match Tyreek Hill’s motion to the wheel route, and edge-rusher Matthew Judon got heat on Tagovailoa to the other side. Tagovailoa tried to hit Hill as his backside read because he thought he saw a gap in New England’s Cover-2, but Gonzalez caught what was basically an arm punt, and that was the end of that drive.
Against the Commanders last Sunday, the Bills clamped down on this Sam Howell passing attempt with four-man pressure and good match technique out of Cover-3. Leonard Floyd beat right tackle Andrew Wylie off the edge, and while cornerbacks Christian Benford and Taron Johnson covered the backside switch release from Jahan Dotson and Curtis Samuel, safety Jordan Poyer dropped down to match Terry McLaurin on the front-side crosser. With linebacker Terrel Bernard on running back Antonio Gibson, the Bills had all the answers to the test. Samuel had come open downfield, but the pressure and timing of the play took that out of Howell’s hands. The Bills absolutely must do this to Tagovailoa on the regular if they have any hope of slowing this thing down.
Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel is aware of the challenge here.
“In a three-game span, I’ve [not] seen as opportunistic of a collective group,” he said Wednesday about Buffalo’s defense. “You want to talk about making people pay for their mistakes. If they get their hands on any sort of ball, they are turning the ball over. It’s a very, very important thing to be good at. There’s a lot of things that go into play. They’re very well-orchestrated with their assignments and knowing each other’s assignments. They play great team ball, and they really strain each and every play.
“Part of that straining doesn’t show up in the box score. But a couple of those turnovers were as a result of a quarterback pressure and a guy having to let it go before he wanted to, before he saw things. That’s what they rely on, depend on. They are very good at it and that’s a great way to win a lot of football games, which they’ve done doing that.”
Show disguised coverage... to a point.
Most defenses won’t show a lot of disguised late movement and safety switches against the Dolphins, due to the (legitimate) fear that any miscommunication will lead to major problems. However, the Bills have two veteran safties in Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer — at least, they usually do. Poyer is out for this game with a knee injury, which puts Taylor Rapp in the blender. That said, we have seen the Bills set Tagovailoa up before with late movement in coverage.
“Yeah, it helps them all,” Tagovailoa said Wednesday of the Hyde/Poyer combination, and what it gives to Buffalo’s pass defense. “The communication that they have in the back end. There’s some things on the fly that they don’t need to communicate that they’ve been playing that position and they’ve been playing this defense for so long that they understand the defense inside and out. But they show you what they’re going to run. They line up in their deal and they’re basically telling you like, ‘Let’s play football here.’ And you know what they’re going to do. Sometimes you don’t know what they’re going to do. But for the most part, they just play sound defense.”
This incompletion to Jaylen Waddle in Week 15 of the 2022 season happened in part because the Bills showed a two-high look pre-snap, and went into a Cover-6 variant in which safety Damar Hamlin (Hyde was injured in this game) did a nice job of breaking down and bumping Tyreek Hill on the quarters side of coverage, while cornerback Tre’Davious White pressed Waddle at the line of scrimmage, and matched him through the route. If you don’t force Tagovailoa to at least hesitate for half a hitch, you might as well tailgate your way through the game.
“We’ll count on our veteran players, their experience,” assistant head coach and defensive line coach Eric Washington said this week. “And we’ll also count on the younger players really being in tune and doing a lot of work on their own in addition to doing the research and the study that we will do as a coaching staff.
“We want to make sure we do a great job of maintaining a certain specific shell and just not allowing a team to identify what we’re doing before the ball is snapped.”
A great concept, as long as you’re not presenting opportunities for the Dolphins with any kind of miscommunication back there. Because we already know that if you give Miami’s offense any free space, it’s all over.
Of course… as Casey Stengel once said, “They say it can’t be done, but it don’t always work.” In that same game, the Bills switched from a two-high look to Cover-3. One of the best and most obvious single-high beaters is double verts, and that’s exactly what the Dolphins dialed up. It was Waddle and Hill in the frontside slot, and when Waddle ran the deep over, he did so with no obstruction whatsoever. When Hamlin dropped deep, and Poyer came down to be the middle hole defender, Waddle had a wide track to run through. This can’t happen again.
Maybe you just keep both safeties up top. Of course, that brings up another problem, which is the new nightmare the Dolphins are throwing at enemy defenses.
Stop the run, if you can!
We know that the Dolphins’ passing game is ridiculous, but especially in that 70-20 win against the Broncos, the run game with Raheem Mostert and De’Von Achane was the game-defining thing. The Dolphins ran the ball 43 times for 350 yards and five touchdowns, and outside of a one-yard loss by backup quarterback Mike White when the game was well past silly, these were all running back runs — this wasn’t Tagovailoa leaving the pocket, because he really didn’t have to.
But this Dolphins run game could be the biggest issue for the Bills, because as well as the Bills defend the pass, they have been extremely vulnerable against the run — especially in upfield runs.
In a word, yikes.
Yes! So far this year the Bills are even better (2nd stuffing runners) and worse (32nd in second-level yards per carry, 31st in open-field yards per carry). https://t.co/iPe1ShSFM7
— Aaron Schatz 🏈 (@ASchatzNFL) September 27, 2023
Of course, per Mr. Schatz’s metrics, the Dolphins are the NFL’s 10th-best offense when beating stuffs at the line of scrimmage, and they’re the NFL’s best offense on second- and third-level runs. This was all over the Broncos’ tape, and the ways in which Miami ties run concepts to pre-snap eye candy make them a tough out for a good run defense.
Remember that McDaniel spent a lot of time in Kyle Shanahan’s employ — he was a coaching intern with the Denver Broncos in 2005 under Mike Shanahan, and started working with Kyle in Washington in 2011. From there, the two worked together in Cleveland and Atlanta, and Kyle Shanahan made McDaniel his run game coordinator in 2017 when the San Francisco 49ers made Kyle their head coach. So, it would stand to reason that McDaniel knows a few things about building a run game with motion and misdirection to upset a defense.
The Broncos never really had a sense of what the Dolphins were doing on the ground, and they could never really attack it, because the ground game was coming from so many places, at so many different intervals.
Third-round rookie Achane had no snaps in Week 1, and just six offensive snaps in Week 2. But McDaniel had his new weapon ready for this game, as Achane used his legitimate Olympic speed to feast for 203 yards and two touchdowns on just 18 carries. That’s a gaudy 11.3 yards per carry, and it was fascinating to see how McDaniel and his staff deployed Achane — often in conjunction with Mostert (another speed guy), who gained 82 yards and scored three touchdowns on just 13 carries.
This 40-yard Achane run with 8:53 left in the third quarter was particularly diabolical. Mostert motioned to the backfield from the left slot, and Achane was wide right in another reduced split. At the snap, the Broncos had three pieces of eye candy to deal with — receiver Braxton Berrios’ jet motion across, the fake handoff to Mostert, and the eventual handoff to Achane in a play that turned into what the old Packer Power Sweep would look like in outer space. Add in the blocking all the way through the play on crack toss, and this was just about perfect.
As the game progressed, the Dolphins were just showing off.
In all my years I've never seen anything like this. pic.twitter.com/1CZ9pIacso
— Mark Schlereth (@markschlereth) September 27, 2023
The Bills will probably see more counter runs in the first quarter of this game than they’ve seen all season to date, and on this seven-yard run by Commanders back Brian Robinson Jr. in Week 3, you can see how Washington was able to block this up well beyond the capabilities of their undermanned offensive line.
No eye candy beyond a basic motion, so when you extrapolate things forward, Miami’s rushing attack is what the Bills should dread the most in this game.
Don't take the cheese.
The Dolphins aren’t just the NFL’s most prolific team with pre-snap motion; they’re also the best. And this is where the Bills are about to hit the ice cream factory with a quickness. This is especially true in the run game. Only the Philadelphia Eagles have faced fewer rushing attempts with motion than the Bills, who have defended 21 motion runs, allowing 90 yards, 47 yards after contact, two first downs, and one more forced fumble (one) than touchdowns (zero).
The Dolphins have the NFL’s second-most runs with motion (72, behind only the 49ers’ 81) for a league-high 524 yards, a league-high 259 yards after contact, a league-high six touchdowns… you get the idea.
The Bills have also been highly effective in pass defense against motion — they’ve allowed 19 catches with motion on 32 attempts for 204 yards, one touchdown, three interceptions, and a league-best opponent passer rating of 49.5.
But they now face a quarterback that, with motion, has completed a league-high 60 passes on a league-high 80 attempts for a league-high 863 yards, a league-high 491 air yards, a league-high seven touchdowns, just one interception, and a league-high passer rating of 133.5 among quarterbacks with at least 30 attempts with motion.
As Dolphins offensive coordinator Frank Smith said Thursday, Miami’s motion all comes with intention — run or pass.
“I think it’s kind of the bedrock to what we do. We start up day one in first installation and we’re moving. Like we’ve talked about numerous times, the real thing is that we don’t move to move. Like some people say, ‘Hey, that was eye candy,’ or something to that extent. For us, there is a reason for everything we move, and why we do it. The reaction of the defense, if it’s what we anticipate, there is a complementary play that connects off of it. And if it wasn’t a reaction that we anticipated, why? And what do we need to do to get to the reaction we anticipated?
“Ultimately when you move as much as we do to motion, shift, and do all of that, it comes down to the players and their understanding of what we’re trying to do, and what we’re trying to execute because you can move and get them all open, but if they don’t understand what the defense is doing inside of that, it would be fleeting. You’re just trying to move guys around for the sake of moving them. Ultimately it comes down to, yes it helps us attack the defense, but ultimately I think it comes down to the players, and their understanding of why we’re doing what we’re doing. And that’s been the best part so far.”
Sean McDermott, of course, is all too aware of this.
“It seems like they added to it this offseason, right?,” McDermott said about the speed motion stuff. “So, very good skill. Tua is throwing the ball extremely well. And their schematics are almost revolutionary in what they do. Coach McDaniel is very creative and does a lot of things to get you out of position on defense.”
This interception against the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 2 typifies the approach and result the Bills will hope to have. The Raiders ran receiver DeAndre Carter across the formation in the kind of “get-up” motion the Dolphins use all the time to get a guy in a speed vertical route, but it didn’t matter, because defensive tackle Daquan Jones busted through the line, pressured Jimmy Garoppolo, and the result was a quick pick. This was Cover-1 behind a five-man blitz with linebacker Matt Milano as the extra rusher.
Revenge is fleeting; execution is forever.
These two teams faced off three times last season, splitting the regular-season series, and the Bills won the wild-card game with Skylar Thompson as the Dolphins’ quarterback as Tagovailoa was dealing with the concussion issues that started in the Week 3 game.
These were all close games, with the Bills outscoring the Dolphins, 85-81. If the Dolphins are seeking revenge, they’re certainly not talking that way. Nor should they — if they do what they’ve done all season long, it’s unclear how any defense is going to stop them.
“I think division opponents, you have what’s been probably under-talked about is an opponent of this caliber coming off a nine-sack, five-turnover day,” McDaniel said on Wednesday. “If you need to be motivated for a game like this, check your pulse, or maybe consider a career adjustment. When you’re playing a quality opponent in your division, there’s always going to be – it’s the Bills. It’s the Bills game. This is the way it feels to us. They have earned the right to be the division champion for several years and they continue to play at a high level. I think it’s a very, very difficult challenge that I think our players are pumped for because you sign up to play the best, and I think they fit that.”
The stage has been set. Now, we just have to wait until Sunday to see one of the most compelling matchups we’ll witness all season long.
