First and foremost, this isn't me trying to tell anyone how to feel right now. I understand the frustration, believe me, I was as crushed as anyone Sunday night after the game. This is how I see it, after a couple of days of digesting everyone's take around the situation.
- I think I underestimated how though these back to back west road games truly were. As I'm looking into the data on teams traveling west, which really isn't all that common as most research seems to focus on west teams traveling east, what I did find is that these games clearly favor the west coast teams by a wide margin. all I could find was data from 2002 to 2016. In that time span, the traveling team won 42% of their games, and that number falls to 28% in night games. That last part is hard to really fit into the Fins situation as they had already spent a good amount to time on the west coast prior to their night game. Nonetheless, the 42% rate is significant.
- The stretch isnt over by any means, it actually gets worse... They're closing their road trip visiting Buffalo in December, on a shortish week in what looks to be unfavorable conditions for a southern team. While the game isn't THAT important when it comes to actual playoffs implications, the ramifications of entering the final stretch on a 3 game losing streak isn't all that appealing. I need to drill into my head here that a Win is an AMAZING outcome, but a loss isn't as significant as my ego will lead me to believe live.
- If the Fins do lose and end this road trip 0-3... The easy assumption to make is that the Fins should build a team that wins in cold December games. I'm really not sure I buy this assumption... These games really make up a small % of games you'll play in a season and looking back, I might be inclined to give alot more weight to the 3 game losing streak the Fins had game 4-7 than the one they might have at the end of the game on Saturday night. And that losing streak was for reasons out of this teams control. Injuries. If we're being honest, we're not stressing as much as we are right now if the Fins record is 9-4, 10-3 or 11-2 at this point. But here we are.
- This feeling that the Fins offense has been figured out and there's this blueprint out going forward doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The scheme was fine to me vs SF, the players(Tua 80%) execute in that game and it might have been a blowout. So Im really left with the brainfart by McDaniel in the Chargers game, which again is a bad performance. I'm not ready to call anyone a one trick pony or incompetent over a one game performance, in an environment that has historically had people performing bad. (see point #1)
- Never mind the run-pass ratio or where McDaniel likes to target his pass attempts, I feel like the thing missing the most compared the earlier success they had passing the ball in the OL movement DURING passing plays. It seems like he has gone away from it alot and just put the whole passing offense in the QBs hands. There was alot of OL traffic on passing plays which kept the LBs honest opening the middle of the field they like to target so much... the last 3 games? not so much it seems. I've seen people talk about the passing offense struggling since the 1st half of the Houston game. I'm wondering if after scoring 30 in a single half, McDaniel didn't develop an over confidence in his passing attack. It'd be an easy thing to do considering you have guys like Waddle and Hill and a QB that's just destroying the league... Why bother with the smoke and mirrors? My personal answer to that is if it ain't broke don't fix it. Just go back to these looks because it was working wonderfully.
