Missed opportunities for Taylor Heinicke against Giants
Breaking down Heinicke’s performance and his missed opportunities against the Giants
The Washington Commanders will be disappointed to have missed out on a big opportunity to establish themselves in the heart of the playoff race after losing to the Giants on Sunday night. Losing doesn’t take them out of contention, but it does put them more on the back foot, which is frustrating given they will feel there were plenty of opportunities to beat the Giants and give themselves a buffer over the chasing pack as the outright sixth seed.
The performance of the offense has rightly come under criticism, with the defense holding the Giants to just 13 points at home and the offense scoring just 12 along with conceding a touchdown on a sack-fumble. Quarterback Taylor Heinicke finds himself under pressure this week with more and more people, including Head Coach Ron Rivera, starting to wonder if it's time to go back to Carson Wentz. So how did Heinicke do? Let’s take a closer look.
The Commanders offense actually moved the ball pretty well early on. They drove the ball down the field on their opening drive behind a strong running game from Brian Robinson and some chunk plays off of play-action. Heinicke, though, felt a bit too conservative and missed some opportunities for bigger plays.
Here are three examples of potential seam throws on the opening drive that Heinicke either passed up on or missed. The first play of the clip shows tight end John Bates running wide open up the seam against a defender playing outside leverage, while the deep safety is on the opposite hashmark. This should be a simple throw up the seam for Bates to catch and potentially pick up some nice yards after the catch, but instead Heinicke checks it down underneath to Robinson.
Now sure, Robinson ends up having lots of space to work with and picks up a nice gain before being forced out of bounds near midfield, but Bates was at midfield already when he should have been thrown the ball. The opportunity was there for a bigger play.
The second play of the clip is just a four verticals concept out of an empty set. The Giants show single-high coverage again so the seam to Logan Thomas should be the right option. Unfortunately, Heinicke fails to drive the ball to Thomas and ends up sailing the throw over his head, missing him completely.
On the third play of the clip, Thomas works the seam and grabs the attention of the deep safety to that side of the field. That leaves Curtis Samuel one-on-one against the slot defender without any safety help. Samuel beats his defender and has a shot at a touchdown, but Heinicke instantly looks to check the ball down underneath to Antonio Gibson instead.
I thought that was going to be a bad sign for Heinicke going forward, missing three opportunities to attack further down the field on the opening drive. To his credit, however, he came back out after that drive and showed a much more aggressive mindset throughout most of the rest of the game.
These three plays show how Heinicke was much more aggressive than normal as he progressed into the game. The first play of this clip is a sail concept. The general idea is for the outside receiver to occupy coverage and open up the sail route for the tight end. However, as the play progresses, Heinicke reads the deep safety focusing more on the sail route and not so much on Dyami Brown’s post route on the outside. Based on his leverage, Heinicke decides to take the shot. Unfortunately, he gets hit as he throws which causes his throw to just lack a little velocity, but the process of the decision was sound.
The second play of the clip came on third down. The Commanders go to their favorite third down concept - mesh - with a dagger concept built into it too. Now you could argue that on this play, Heinicke should be prioritizing the first down marker and he could easily hit Jahan Dotson on his shallow cross to move the chains. That’s the style they have been successful with over the last few weeks and maybe on reflection it’s what he should have done. But I don’t mind a quarterback looking to be more aggressive when they have an option further down the field. Curtis Samuel gets a yard on his defender on his deep over route and Heinicke sees the opportunity for a bigger play, so he takes the shot.
Ideally he’s maybe a touch earlier with the ball to ensure he beats the deep safety, but I think the Commanders will feel hard done by here given the safety made contact with Samuel before the ball arrived and in my opinion should have drawn a pass interference penalty.
The third play is the flea-flicker call which actually worked out quite well. The defense bit up on the play fake and the deep coverage was all flat-footed as Brown suddenly took off and ran by them. Heinicke again shows some aggression, making the throw with Brown not quite clear of the coverage, but knowing he can lead him across the field to help him clear the coverage. Unfortunately, the throw is just out of reach of Brown, who does his best to get there with a dive but can’t quite reach it.
On another day, Heinicke is rewarded for his aggression and hits on at least one, maybe two of those shots and maybe comes away with a touchdown or two as well. Unfortunately for this game, he couldn’t quite connect on them but I appreciated the more aggressive mindset and willingness to try and make use of this group of weapons the team has at receiver.
Unfortunately, while Heinicke was more aggressive than he typically is when taking shots, he still missed plenty of opportunities to put points on the board.
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