Sam Howell showing signs of regression in loss to Jets
Breaking down quarterback Sam Howell's performance in the loss to the Jets
The Washington Commanders benched starting quarterback Sam Howell for the second consecutive week. It’s obviously not a good sign for the young quarterback, which Ron Rivera and his staff have pinned all their hopes on this season. Howell showed some nice progression earlier this season and was allowed to play through struggles earlier in the year, but these past two weeks Rivera has opted against letting him play through his issues and benched him for Jacoby Brissett instead.
Howell’s numbers are tough to swallow. He completed just six of 22 passes for 56 yards and had two interceptions. Based on that alone, it’s easy to understand why the Commanders benched him in favor of Brissett, who immediately came in and led the offense on multiple scoring drives to take the lead. Now I’m not going to make excuses for Howell as the performance overall was poor and he had plenty of issues within that performance that I will break down later in this post, but he also was a bit unlucky too, especially at the start of the game. Let’s start with the interceptions for example, I don’t believe either interception was his fault.
This was Howell’s second pass of the game. The Commanders use a little play-action fake and have Howell rollout to his left on a bootleg. Tight end Logan Thomas chips the defensive end inside before releasing to the flat. Howell initially looks further down the field but the Jets cover things relatively well. Perhaps Samuel was open as he made his break, but it would have been very hard for Howell to get his body aligned to make that throw while on the run, which speaks to a bad play design. So instead of throwing down the field, Howell looks to hit Thomas underneath as his checkdown. He delivers a throw that is perfectly placed right on Thomas’s facemask, but somehow Thomas bobbles the catch and ends up tipping it up in the air for a defender to drive down and make a play.
This isn't on Howell at all. You could maybe argue he should have thrown the ball to Samuel, but the throw to Thomas was accurate and perfectly acceptable. Thomas failed to make the catch and ended up deflecting the ball up in the air to put it up for grabs, which the Jets defense took advantage of. Similarly, I don’t think the second interception Howell threw, which was his last action before being benched, was his fault either.
Here, the Commanders line up receiver Curtis Samuel in the backfield and have him run a choice route. This has been a good source of success for them in recent weeks and it initially looks to have worked again as Samuel breaks inside across the face of the defender. Howell delivers the throw as Samuel breaks inside, which is completely the correct thing to do here, but unfortunately Samuel slips. That slip prevents Samuel from taking a clean path to the ball and opens up the lane for the defender to drive on the ball and intercept the pass completely uncontested.
Again, this isn’t on Howell for me, he did the right thing and just got unlucky that Samuel slipped coming out of his break. It’s unfortunate, but it happens sometimes and on this occasion it just so happened to cause him to be intercepted.
These interceptions weren’t the only time Howell could count himself a bit unlucky. Early in the game he didn’t get a lot of help from his receivers. And again I will stress I’m not making excuses for Howell and I will get onto the bigger issues, but the game could have gone quite differently if he had a bit more luck on his side.
This was the first play of the game for the Commanders. They call an RPO (run-pass option) with a counter run scheme inside and a bubble screen tagged on outside. The Jets run a slot corner blitz into this look, which couldn’t be a better look for the Commanders to have a bubble screen called. With the slot corner blitzing, the Commanders have two receivers against one defender outside. The outside receiver makes a block on the single defender leaving Samuel in acres of space and only the deep safety to beat. If he catches this ball, there’s every chance he could pick up a huge gain and if he can make the safety miss, it could even have become a touchdown. But unfortunately, the ball goes through the hands of Samuel and winds up incomplete.
On the very next play, Thomas dropped a similarly accurate pass and it resulted in an interception. So Howell’s first two throws of the game could have been catches for big gains and ended up with two drops and an interception. A few plays later for Howell, he had another unfortunate mistake by a receiver.
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