Evaluating Sam Howell’s performance against the Giants
Taking a closer look at how Sam Howell performed against the Giants
Sam Howell and the Commanders offense had a poor outing in an extremely disappointing loss to the New York Giants on Sunday. Obviously a lot has been made about the game plan and play calling, the lack of run game and the poor pass protection up front by the offensive line. Yesterday I broke down the six sacks the Giants racked up on Howell, so check out that post if you missed it.
The team around him didn’t play well, but Howell also had a poor game. He completed just 22 of his 42 attempted passes for 249 yards, no touchdowns and an interception. He looked rattled at the different pressures that the Giants sent at him and he struggled to find a rhythm. Obviously it’s tough to go execute when under pressure and the offensive line wasn’t great, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t plays to be made.
Missed quick game throws
One of the biggest criticisms of offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy in this game was not calling enough short, quick passes to help get Howell into rhythm and get the ball out of his hands before any of the blitzes that the Giants sent had a chance to get to him. While I don’t necessarily disagree with that criticism, there were certainly quick passes called and Howell just missed them.
For example, on the first play of the Commanders second drive, Bieniemy called one of the staple concepts we’ve seen from the Commanders’ offense so far this season.
This play is one we’ve seen run by Washington in almost every game this season. To the right, Howell has a bow concept, likely known as Tampa Bay in Bieniemy’s offense. To his left, he has two thunder routes, which are simply hitch routes that convert into fades against press coverage. The Giants have their defenders playing off in this situation so both receivers end up running hitch routes.
Howell snaps the ball and instantly works left where he knows he can hit Samuel on his hitch route outside. It should be an easy process for Howell where he just has to catch the snap, set his feet and throw immediately. It couldn’t get any easier and Howell simply misses the throw, sailing it over the head of Samuel.
Similarly, Howell missed another opportunity for a quick pass at the start of the second quarter.
On this play, the Commanders call for a quick pass one second and nine after a one yard run by Chris Rodriguez on first down. The aim here is again to get the ball out of Howell’s hands quickly to avoid any blitz and get the team into a third and manageable situation. To the left of the formation, Howell has two slant routes with his running back swinging out to the flat underneath them. This is a good concept against man coverage, which the Giants had shown a fair bit of up until this point in the game.
Off the snap, Howell can see the linebacker following the back to the flat and knows it’s likely some form of man coverage. He correctly looks left where he has those two slants and really should see his tight end Cole Turner winning a slant from the slot instantly. There’s no real reason for him to pass up on that opportunity and get the ball out quickly, but even if he doesn’t like that throw for whatever reason, he should know that linebacker is having to work through a lot of traffic to get to the running back, so he could throw that swing and probably get some easy yards after the catch.
Howell takes neither option and instead works back to his right side. That invites pressure onto himself because this play is designed to be out quickly and not have to stress the offensive line by asking them to protect for too long. But even as he does that, he has a throw to the flat available and doesn’t take it.
Now Howell does salvage a nice gain on this play by stepping up in the pocket to avoid the initial pressure and then continuing his run up the middle of the defense to pick up a first down. However, a positive result on this occasion shouldn’t overshadow the fact that he made the wrong decision when he had open throws available to him. There’s every chance Cole Turner runs for a big gain after the catch if he hits that slant on time and in stride and most importantly, it would prevent the pressure from having a chance to get there.
Now could Eric Bieniemy have called more of these quick game concepts? Of course he could have and probably should have, but these plays show that he didn’t completely abandon the idea of those throws and that Howell failed to take those opportunities when called.
Correct decisions, poor execution
In a game like this one, it’d be easy to just write off everything the offense did as terrible, but that’s not how you go about teaching a young quarterback to grow. What you need to do is evaluate each play on its merit and find if mistakes were made in the decision making process or if they were execution based mistakes. There were a few examples in this game where Howell actually made the correct decisions but his execution was off, leading to missed opportunities.
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