Who’s to blame for Terry McLaurin receiving no catches against the Dolphins?
Breaking down why star WR Terry McLaurin had no catches against the Dolphins
One of the standout statistics from the Commanders loss to the Dolphins on Sunday was the stat line of star receiver Terry McLaurin. McLaurin had no catches on just three targets, which is obviously not good coming from the number one receiver on the team and someone that will be the 12th highest paid receiver in the NFL next year as his contract extension kicks into the back half of the deal. It’s only the second time in his career that McLaurin has gone without a catch, the other being in December of 2021 against the Cowboys, where he also had no catches on three targets.
McLaurin is clearly unhappy with the situation, saying after the game he “ran a lot of cardio” which is about as outspoken as McLaurin has ever been with this team. This comes after last week when McLaurin only had four catches from 11 targets against the Cowboys in another blowout loss. So what exactly is going on here? Is Eric Bieniemy not feeding McLaurin enough? Is McLaurin failing to get open? Is Sam Howell failing to find him?
The answer is more complex than just one of those things. I wrote a piece last week about how the style of the offense isn’t to feed a particular receiver but rather spread the ball around to the big group of playmakers and force the defense to pick its poison. So you could certainly say Bieniemy isn’t finding ways to get McLaurin the ball often enough because that’s the style of offense he’s opted for. But having gone back and watched every snap McLaurin took in this game, there were opportunities to get him the ball.
This play happened to be the first sack of the game on Sam Howell. The Commanders are running a version of the dagger concept, with the two inside receivers running clear out routes designed to occupy the safeties and take them away from the middle of the field. On the outside, Terry McLaurin runs a deep dig route designed to break into that space vacated by the other two receivers. As the ball is snapped and the play progresses, you can see that’s precisely what McLaurin does.
Now, Howell looked to be thrown off by something on this play. You can see from the end zone angle at the snap he checks the safety rotation and locates both safeties, but then strangely he works all the way down to the cornerback on the outside to the right side of the formation. Howell doesn’t have a receiver attacking his area so he shouldn’t really need to check him. The only reason I can think of for checking that corner is if he thought he could could the inside route on the deep over, but the deep safety is in position to account for that and Howell would have already seen that when he checked both safeties post-snap.
While Howell is busy reading the wrong part of the field, the play is developing to the left side. The two inside receivers drag their respective safeties out of the middle of the field and McLaurin begins to break inside into that vacated space. Howell’s misread causes him to be slightly late working back to McLaurin, who should be his primary option on the play. With a good read and some anticipation, this ball could be thrown as McLaurin makes his break and potentially lead to a big gain. But Howell is late to get to the read and hesitates. By the time he catches up, the underneath linebacker has sunk under the throwing window and McLaurin is no longer an option. Howell is then immediately sacked.
So that was a play that was designed for McLaurin and he was open, Howell just failed to get him the ball. It was far from the only occasion that Howell was sacked on a play designed to go to McLaurin.
Here we have a version of a basic shallow cross concept with McLaurin running the shallow cross from the right side of the formation while Curtis Samuel runs a deep hook route from the left. Samuel’s route is typically run by tight end Logan Thomas and is designed to create traffic over the middle of the field for McLaurin to run under and away from coverage. If you read my breakdown of McLaurin and the receivers in this offense last week, you’ll have seen multiple examples of McLaurin getting the ball on this exact concept previously this season.
The goal here is to get man coverage, which the Commanders do get. McLaurin runs away from the defender assigned to cover him, however the Dolphins have a hole player in the middle of the field. This hole player is specifically there to identify shallow crosses and cut them off. Now, the Commanders have a way to deal with that with the hook route from Samuel, but as I mentioned, Logan Thomas is the player that normally runs that route. Samuel gets there a fraction early and fails to impact that hole player. That means the defender is able to drive down on McLaurins route and cut him off, taking him away from Howell, who is then sacked before he has a chance to work to a second read.
The Commanders even very nearly hit an explosive play to Terry McLaurin in the second quarter.
This time we see a called shot play to McLaurin off a play-action fake. The Commanders fake a run inside to Gibson while McLaurin takes off down the field. Washington gets the Miami defense to bite up on the fake, allowing McLaurin to fly by the safety and be left one-on-one with a corner he gets a step on immediately off the snap.
The issue for the Commanders on this play is the protection. The Dolphins get a free rusher off the left side of the line with a well designed scheme. The defensive tackle rushes inside and takes left guard Chris Paul inside with him. The edge rusher begins his rush to grab left tackle Charles Leon’s attention. This is just a distraction though to allow the linebacker to rush inside between Leno and Paul. The edge rusher then bails out of his rush and sinks back into coverage, leaving Leno blocking nobody while the linebacker bursts through untouched.
Howell spots McLaurin open down the field and takes the shot, but as he does so, the unblocked linebacker lands a big hit, preventing him from completing a full delivery of the throw. That hit causes the ball to lose just a bit of accuracy and sail just a few yards beyond McLaurin’s reach. He does his best to try and catch up to it and get his hands on it, but unfortunately he can’t pull in the catch.
This was another example of Bieniemy calling a play for McLaurin and this time Howell was on the same page, but unfortunately the protection didn’t hold up and preventing Howell from making an accurate pass.
So that’s three plays in the first half designed to go to McLaurin, but two of them weren’t even thrown for factors not in McLaurin of Bieniemy’s control. The third one was thrown but impacted by pressure. This continued into the second half.
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