Most of our blocking will be man assigned. But with the Eagles you can bet they will do a lot of crosses to confuse the blocking assignments. It will be critical for the line to stick to the fundamentals and keep their heads on a swivel. If we get caught on a cross and double team a man who shouldn’t be, someone will come in unblocked and ruin Kurts day. This is where Brown and Tuman will come in at. They will need to stay in to help. If we can cover them up, the flats may be open quite often for the dump pass on his check downs. Not that he will need to check down. Really, who can guard Fitz and Q? You can’t double both. I call that taking a page out of the Eagles own playbook. A few bubble screens to Boobs would be awesome as well since both Fitz and Q are great down field blockers.

I will be at work and will miss the live thread, but our first offensive play of the game will be a jump ball to Fitz, which will result in a pass interference, followed by Edge pounding for 26 yards on the ground. The first score will probably a fade to Fitz in the back of the endzone. I feel good about that.

I’ll give you a few tidbits from my noggin regarding our blitz scheme and packages.

1) There is a staple of our blitz package, specifically the run blitz package, that the Cards either saw rarely or not at all during the first meeting. Although it’s nothing shocking, I think it adds another dimension to the preperation your offense needs to do. Now that you’ve started to run the ball more effectively, I would assume you might see some of this. On running downs, JJ will pull either two LBs or a LB and a S tight to the line in the A Gap. The strength of our defense is our speed. If we can stretch your run laterally, that’s what we want. If we show run blitz on the A Gap and you have something called inside, you will have to change to something like a sweep or a pitch wide. This plays into our hands. This is what JJ wants. If you don’t change the play, JJ assumes you’re not going to run into the blitz, so odds are the two players showing blitz will back out at the snap. If you change the play, you were probably going to run into the blitz, so we have probably eliminated anything in the middle of the line.

2) Our blitz package doesn’t exclude anything. You’ll see various run blitzes, safety blitzes, corner blitzes, lb blitzes, overload blitzes, zone blitzing and occasionally a zero coverage look (although you might not need to worry about this possibility). Alot of DCs fall into a rut of sticking to certain packages and taking their shots on certain downs. JJ will send whomever, whenever from wherever. You have to be prepared for every possibility.

3) There has been one significant change I’ve seen this year. We’ve shown blitz a lot more than past years, but backed out of it. In the past, if JJ showed blitz presnap, they came, and we showed less. Now, we’re showing more often, but either back out or send a completely different group than you are expecting. It just adds more complication to reads and pickup responsibility. Also, I’ve noticed a propensity for Warner to change to a quick slant to beat the blitz. Count on JJ showing a blitz that will invite this action, only to pull out of it and drop someone into that slant lane.

4) There is one key to JJ’s blitzing scheme, and it is a very simple concept. Offensive lines have certain protection schemes that they run. You tailor your protection to the strengths and weaknesses of your players for maximum effect; so that’s something that’s hard to simply change. What JJ will do is find out the kind of protection you like to use and purposefully send one more person than you can handle at the weak spot. It results in alot of routes being broken off two or three yards into a pattern. One thing our D does extremely well, that we don’t get much credit for, is wrapping up and tackling. It’s not always about sacks and throwing the ball away. If it’s 3rd and 7 and we can get you to throw a 2 yard pass and wrap you up, that’s a win for the series.

Overall, I do understand that your line is going to be responsible for alot of information and breakdowns, but I think your key is Warner. First recognizing if anyone is coming, then who is coming and who is not, then is it an attempt to bait a throw, then do I need to change the play, then where’s my safe outlet at… That’s a lot to handle. BTW, I think you should put Rex Ryan in the same sentence as JJ and Dick.

The Eagles D is good, and Jim Johnson is one of the best, and they have great players on D (Dawkins), BUT, this team didn’t go 16-0 for a reason. They went 9-6-1, with the tie coming to the Bengals, the BENGALS! I’m not trying to disrespect but there are ways to get past the D and make them pay, and I’m sure Whizenhunt and Haley have been planning it out. It will be a battle but they aren’t going to shut out the Cardinals on their home field.

Good stuff foos05.