Andy Benoit impressed with our offense

[TheSpecialJuan]

Benoit: Christian McCaffrey was the featured point, Gary, for Carolina. He was the guy the offense ran through.

Gramling: That Jonathan Stewart touchdown catch, that was a neat little play they drew up there.

Benoit: Stewart and McCaffrey in the backfield together, they had some good backfield passing designs. So we’ve talked a lot about Carolina’s offense this year. And I think our listeners know I’m skeptical that what they’re trying to do can work, at least what I was expecting they were trying to do, which is use McCaffrey kind of as their Julian Edelman/Darren Sproles type of guy, have that kind of offense, get those easy underneath completions for Cam. What’s made me skeptical is that Newton is a power thrower, he’s not a precision/accuracy/timing type of thrower, two very different things. And we saw that in the first half, by the way. Newton was rusty, until the two-minute drive at the end of the first half, and then he got going and warmed up. But you saw the inconsistencies in accuracy. The difference though, Gary, is a lot of that are playing this way, with the shifty underneath guys and the inverted formations, they spread out and do it. Carolina did not spread out. They stayed in condensed formations. The wide receivers were just a few yards outside the offensive tackles, they often had two guys in the backfield, it was McCaffrey and Ed Dickson or McCaffrey with Stewart, someone moving around, an off-set guy. They were very diverse schematically. And it did a few things. For one, it sets up all the moving pieces in their run game. They feature pull blockers and misdirection elements. They try to get you moving in the wrong direction defensively in the running game. When you put a lot more bodies in the middle of the field you can do more things in that regard. So I was a little bit impressed with how they’re doing it, and it’s something I hadn’t considered, it O.K., they’re going to be a shifty, underneath controlled passing game at times, but maybe they’re not doing out of spread formations. They’re going to try to do it out of some of the running formations that we’ve seen from them before. We’ll see if it works. It worked today, it’s a long season though. We’re watching this, and their opponents are watching it too. But so far off to an intriguing start. Let’s call it an intriguing start for Carolina’s offense.

[TheSpecialJuan]

Gramling: What did you think of Cam? He missed a couple throws, but I didn’t think it was a red-flag type of performance for him. I thought he was fine.

Benoit: I was happy with how he settled in. I thought it was pretty red-flag-y early on. I thought some of the misses were inexcusable. And they were misses how he’s been known to miss: wild wide and high. He got settled in late in the first half. Actually, [Kyle] Shanahan went for it on fourth-and-1 around midfield, which baffled me that he did that. They didn’t get it. Carolina pushed the ball down the field. Newton had a skinny post completed to Kelvin Benjamin to set up a field goal and it was almost like, right from there, the light bulb went on. Kind of like Aaron Rodgers, when he hit Davante Adams at the end of the half in that playoff game against the Giants last year, how all the sudden Rodgers got on track just like that. It was around the same time in the game and it was a similar scenario, and once Newton got on track I was impressed. But he’s gonna have to do it for all four quarters. That’s the other reason I’m not sure the approach can work over the long haul. Can he be a consistently accurate passer for four quarters, because right now he’s a streaky jump-shooter. And in the second half he hit some threes, but he missed a lot of shots in the first half.

[TheSpecialJuan]

https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/09/11/cam-newton-christian-mccaffrey-nfl-week-1-breakdown-analysis

[Snake]

Cam was the MVP of the league and your questioning his longevity? How's luck doing at this point with his shoulder? 

[Saca312]

Andy Benoit's takes on Cam are baffling. Seems to always have an agenda against him.

Otherwise, he does bring up good points. 

Our run game was extremely diverse. As another guy put it, "ran about every concept that exists [from] Inside Zone, Outside Zone, power, counter, inverted veer, zone read, crack sweep/toss, duo, wham, pin and pull outside zone, and so forth." 

Issue I had was the timing and rhythm in which we ran these run plays. I'd also argue execution wasn't too great, more specifically from Matt Kalil. 

Shula created some really nice plays, but it didn't flow well with the game imo. If he gets the timing and situational aspect down, boy this offense is going places and I might be singing Shula's praises.

[Hogmolliesmaht]

Good stuff. Honestly though,  I would like to see us spread out every once in a while too. We may do it. We will just have to wait and see.

[*FreeFua*]

9 minutes ago, Saca312 said:

Shula created some really nice plays, but it didn't flow well with the game imo. If he gets the timing and situational aspect down, boy this offense is going places and I might be singing Shula's praises.

Couldn't agree more about the flow part.

The one "shot" we did take that was perfectly timed was a Cam audible and not so much Shula. As soon as Foster left and I saw them line up I said "send Shepard across the middle" which ended up going for a score.

But after pondering for a day and a bit about game 1, I really liked what I saw overall from the offense. We keep hearing the word "evolve" and I think we saw a good glimpse of that.

I left the stadium thinking "damn, what a boring game, literally nothing happened". But I think that's the point, usually we need Cam to pull out the cape and instead we saw CMC and Stew carry the load.

We saw Cam make a few throws to different guys, we saw the short passes to CMC on 3rd downs go for 1st downs, we didn't see Cam get sacked and in the end, Cam was able to basically hang out for the day and walk away with a 23-3 win. 

Going forward, this offense has some serious potential. Obviously, Cam will shake off the rust and once this O starts firing on all cylinders it could be very, very good. I think this offense will have more of a team effort feel to it than a 1 man show. 

 

[TheSpecialJuan]

18 minutes ago, *FreeFua* said:

Couldn't agree more about the flow part.

The one "shot" we did take that was perfectly timed was a Cam audible and not so much Shula. As soon as Foster left and I saw them line up I said "send Shepard across the middle" which ended up going for a score.

But after pondering for a day and a bit about game 1, I really liked what I saw overall from the offense. We keep hearing the word "evolve" and I think we saw a good glimpse of that.

I left the stadium thinking "damn, what a boring game, literally nothing happened". But I think that's the point, usually we need Cam to pull out the cape and instead we saw CMC and Stew carry the load.

We saw Cam make a few throws to different guys, we saw the short passes to CMC on 3rd downs go for 1st downs, we didn't see Cam get sacked and in the end, Cam was able to basically hang out for the day and walk away with a 23-3 win. 

Going forward, this offense has some serious potential. Obviously, Cam will shake off the rust and once this O starts firing on all cylinders it could be very, very good. I think this offense will have more of a team effort feel to it than a 1 man show. 

 

 

[TheSpecialJuan]

1 minute ago, TheSpecialJuan said:

To the casual fan it might have seemed boring but I personally, loved every minute.

 

[Castavar]

Why do people keep saying Cam can't run this style of offense? The reason he never threw/checkdown to RBs isn't because he was incapable too, it's because we never had anybody that could do it. I, for one, am so fuggin excited for what this offense can become. We haven't even seen the start of it yet.

[panthers55]

Imagine more folks singing the creativity of our playbook while posters praise Cam and blame Shula. Shula is doing exactly what he promised which is to run all kinds of different plays out of the same formations so the defense won't know what is coming. This offense was already one of the most diverse running the ball. Now we are developing one of the more creative passing attacks run out of our running formations. Best of all we know that Cam is rusty and will return to form. This offense is going to be good and with our defense, this has got to be a playoff team.

[Fox007]

1 hour ago, Castavar said:

Why do people keep saying Cam can't run this style of offense? The reason he never threw/checkdown to RBs isn't because he was incapable too, it's because we never had anybody that could do it. I, for one, am so fuggin excited for what this offense can become. We haven't even seen the start of it yet.

We've had Stewart this whole time and he did it yet again in this game. 

[Castavar]

7 hours ago, Fox007 said:

We've had Stewart this whole time and he did it yet again in this game. 

Stewart isn't what you would call a "receiving" back. Hell, his most receptions was back in 2011, and even that was only 47 catches. We have never had a Danny Woodhead, Theo Riddick, Gio Bernard, Darren Sproles type pass catching RB that can run great routes out of the backfield until now. And CMC has a WAY higher ceiling than all of them.

[Snake]

My only complaint is not using more personal. But Cam was rusty so we shall see moving forward.