FanPost

What we can learn from Big Joe's preseason game?

This is a post about a preseason game so I have to put in the obligatory disclaimer that "Preseason games are meaningless and we should be careful of drawing any conclusions from them." That being said I think there is quiet a bit to be learned from them. Jeremy already noted the delicious teases that we saw formation wise. I am going to be taking a peak at what Big Joe did both schematically and personally and try to extrapolate a little from there.

I am going to try and do this with some Gifs, last time I tried this the quality was not great, hopefully second time is the charm. I want to start by talking about the fifth play from scrimmage, where Reggie Bush got stuffed and lost a yard. A lot of people were pinning this loss on Fuaria because it was his man to make the tackle but if you watch the play you can see he actually held the block for a long enough period of time. Fuaria was lined up on the left side tasked with blocking the defensive end number 92, Desmond Bryant. The problem was that the linebacker got a good jump and Warford was a little slow on his pull meeting him in the backfield instead of in the hole or deeper up field. This delayed Bush from getting into the hole. He should have been long gone by the time Fuaria released not to mention if Warford had not gotten caught in the backfield the direction he released his player to should have been very safe. I don't fault Fuaria on this one if nothing else it goes to show just how well timed an run play has to be in order to be successful.

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via oi59.tinypic.com

On another interesting note about this play we see that Big Joe is lined up in line which is where he was for most of the game. This is a pretty big difference from last year when he was in he typically was a slot/pure receiver. This was also with the starters and speaks to at least allowing him to be tested blocking.

Now lets look at the play where Donte Whitner attempted to assassinate Theo Reddick.

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via oi59.tinypic.com

On this play Fuaria is lined up in his more traditional spot on the line as a receiver. We see both some good and bad from Joe on this play as he does a great job of getting his hands on the jamming linebacker first to keep him away from his body. Fuaria had issues with the jam last year and does a good job of avoiding it by utilizing his length here. The problem come when it is time to break on his quick in route. He disengages at the necessary 5 yard point but then curls another yard or so out allowing the linebacker to body him up and delays him being open for the briefest second.

On Fuaria's first catch we saw an example of some play action that we can reasonably expect to see more of.

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via oi57.tinypic.com

The naked boot leg off the play action is not something we have regularly seen in Detroit since Stafford's first two years. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing because teams did not respect the play action enough that it rarely worked. An adjoining problem was that for the most part in this configuration is that there are really only two routes that are available a deep and a shallow one. We see Fuaria lined up as an H back on the left side of the line and ran a short out route to the right, dragging across the formation and faking the chip block to slow down the free DE.

This leads into a more general observation about the "traditional" TE's role in the passing game for this offense. I am basically suggesting that a lot of the action we saw from Fauria last night will be the role that he and Pettigrew will share. Fauria ran 5 routes that I made note of from last night he ran 2 ins and 3 outs, all withing 10 yards of the line of scrimmage. He caught two out routes and a single in.

This is probably a good indication of how the non-Ebron tight ends will be used in the future. The way the routes are formed in combination with their neighbors is very reminiscent of the levels concepts as broken down here by Chris Brown. It was most commonly employed by Peyton Manning offenses, when he was with Caldwell and later the Saints offense. Going to more Out and In routes actually might be very beneficial to Stafford. He was actually one of the most efficient QBs on Out and In routes last year but he threw nearly half the amount of out routes that Peyton Manning and Drew Brees did, suggesting there is still room for saturation on the route.

There were a few more plays where Fauria displayed much improved blocking both in pass protection and run blocking. The plays I selected above showed a good bit about both his improvement as a player and suggested how we will use our tight ends.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pride Of Detroit or its writers.