Following a Legend

Paul Domowitch continues his road trip visiting former Eagles. This time he checked in on Carolina Panthers defensive coordinator Sean McDermott:

"Following somebody who has had a lot of success, the expectations are almost unfair," [Panthers Head Coach Ron] Rivera said. "When I was playing for the Bears, Vince Tobin came in and replaced Buddy after he left to become the Eagles' head coach. Vince never got the respect he deserved because it was Buddy this, Buddy that. But when you look at some of the things Vince did, you say, ‘Wow, that's pretty doggone good.'

“So when I look at Sean's situation — and Andy and I talked about it — just the expectation level was so great, Andy thought this would be a great opportunity for Sean to come down here and reinvent who he is."

Our memories of McDermott's convoluted schemes are certainly tempered by Juan Castillo's disastrous coaching job last year. I wonder how much following Jim Johnson really doomed the former Eagles coordinator. Certainly we know that he struggled to command respect from veteran players.

The Never-Ending Coaching Search

It was a year ago this week that Andy Reid fired Sean McDermott and kicked off a league-wide search that culminated in the underwhelming and, frankly, absurd promotion of Juan Castillo to defensive coordinator. One year later, the Eagles are supposedly conducting another search, but signs increasingly point to this one being bungled as well.

While Reid seems reluctant to demote or fire Castillo until his replacement is ready to go, obvious front runner Steve Spagnuolo is already interviewing with other teams. Meanwhile, Marty Mornhinweg has resumed interviews for his second head coaching opportunity, with Indianapolis a potential fit. Within a week, the Eagles could easily see both their current offensive coordinator and best prospective defensive coordinator slip through their fingers.

It’s unclear where that would leave the Eagles. Is there a Plan B on defense that doesn’t involve retaining Castillo? Or would they switch him over to a job he is equally unqualified for — offensive coordinator? Maybe long time wide receivers coach David Culley, who’s never gotten any interest from other teams, is ready to take over on offense, or maybe Reid could convince Brad Childress to return, but neither of those are slam dunk hires either.

Going into the offseason, the plan to turn around this team wasn’t rocket science. Step one: hire a better, more experienced defensive coordinator. Step two: draft/sign some linebackers. Step three: help Michael Vick get back in track. In recent days, with the mismanaged wooing of Spagnuolo, the departure of college scouting head Ryan Grigson, and the potential loss of Mornhinweg, the Eagles may have suffered setbacks to all three goals.

Perhaps this speculation is too early. Many of these things are still up in the air, and could land in the Eagles favor before long. But if the worst does come to pass, I wonder how resilient and resourceful Reid can be. He outright failed a year ago when he fell back to Castillo. Here’s hoping he can do better the second time around.

Photo from Getty.

Best Case Scenario

Spags to Philly, Juan to Minnesota. I don’t have any faith that this will actually happen, but Andy Reid managed to find a nice landing spot for Sean McDermott, too.

(via Jason Hutt)

The Real Problem

New coaches often talk about having players “buy in” to the team they are trying to build. Players have to believe that the system they are contributing to is worth personal sacrifice. They have to be accountable to their actions and understand that the play of one man affects the whole. They have to trust each other, and they have to trust their coach.

Buying in is not close to sufficient to win football games, but it does seem to be necessary. To my untrained eyes, many players have not bought in to the greater whole at NovaCare — mainly on defense.

Lets look at a test case: Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. DRC came to Philadelphia this offseason as a young, talented player needing a home. Arizona was apparently not the right place for him, maybe this would be. But what does he see when he walks in the door?

Rodgers-Cromartie is almost immediately demoted to nickel back. He’s asked to play in the slot, a position he’s never had to handle. Who’s telling him to make this unwanted change? An offensive line coach whose promotion his new teammates have already questioned.

Not only is Rodgers-Cromartie playing a new position, but he’s doing so in an unclear system that’s fundamentally unsound in the back seven. He has linebackers next to him and safeties behind him who don’t seem up to the task and are being swapped in and out constantly, to little effect. Every linebacker and defensive back has either been benched or has had their position adjusted. And none of it has worked.

In short, Rodgers-Cromartie has about a dozen different excuses he can use to explain away his poor play and obvious lack of effort. There’s no accountability from the top, because Juan Castillo hasn’t earned that respect. There’s no accountability among the players, where the best and longest-tenured player among the secondary demonstrates a notorious I-know-best attitude — and he might be right.

We saw Sean McDermott slowly lose the players during his two year stint as coordinator. But most of the malcontents were fringe players like Chris Clemons. Quintin Mikell and Stewart Bradley, who may not have always been the best players on the field, were leaders in the locker room who publicly and consistently bought in to the message from above.

The Eagles let go of veteran players that could establish continuity and trust in the locker room. They brought in a host of new, highly compensated free agents from different systems. They promoted a coach whose strategies and solutions were suspect, at best. And then they started losing.

I keep repeating that this team has many problems, but is still more talented than the one that won 10 games last year. It’s true. The whole is much less than the sum of its parts. Until that attitude is fixed, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Rodgers-Cromartie or Jamar Chaney missing a tackle. Nothing will change.

Photo from Getty.

Measuring the Jim Washburn Effect

Yesterday, I detailed how Jim Washburn’s coaching resurrected Jason Babin’s career and turned him into a sack machine. But what about other players? How is Washburn and the wide nine formation treating veteran Eagles defensive linemen?

That’s the question I set out to answer, using Pro Football Focus’s great stats. Below is a table calculated based on snap counts and pressure data compiled in 2010 and 2011 for Eagles linemen who have played in both Washburn’s system and Sean McDermott’s.

The first column shows change (Δ) in frequency of pass rushes per snap the player is in the game. There are some interesting trends there alone.

Mike Patterson used to be a largely first and second down defensive tackle, but he’s now getting the chance to rush the passer more. The opposite appears to be true for Trevor Laws. Meanwhile, Washburn has smartly eliminated Trent Cole’s occasional coverage responsibilities in 2010.

So, once these players are going for the quarterback, how are they doing? There are clearly some winners and some losers.

Patterson, Cole, and Darryl Tapp are all way up in total pressure per rush (sacks, hits, pressures). Antonio Dixon was too, before his season-ending injury. Juqua Parker seemed like he’d be a good fit for Washburn’s scheme, especially because Babin’s addition would keep him fresh. But that hasn’t happened at all. As for Laws, the numbers don’t match up with my anecdotal memory of his solid performance.

Overall, it’s clear that Washburn and the addition of successful free agents is having a big, positive effect on the Eagles pass rushers. You probably already knew that, but now at least you have the stats to back it up.

Photo from Getty.

Jason Babin, From Scrap Yard to Sack Yards

Jason Babin is just a hair off the pace to tie Reggie White’s record for most single-season sacks (21) as an Eagle. That’s crazy, especially because it was less than two years ago that the career journeyman was kicked to the street by the same Eagles team he now stars on.

I would say that the 31-year-old’s career was revived in Tennessee, but that would be inaccurate. “Revived” suggests that he returned to a former glory, one that never existed. At age 30, Babin signed a one year deal with the Titans. It was his fifth team in six seasons. After the Texans drafted him in the 1st round and immediately slotted him into the lineup, Babin only started 10 games over the next five years.

And then came Jim Washburn. Below are the sacks per pass rush and total pressure (sacks + hits + pressures) per pass rush stats, courtesy of Pro Football Focus:

What a huge jump from 2009 to 2010. Babin got pressure and sacks 50 percent more in the wide nine formation than he did the previous season in Sean McDermott’s more typical 4-3 scheme. And that’s despite more playing time on run downs.

I was worried that Babin’s 2010 performance was a fluke, but his numbers have only gone up since returning to Philadelphia. His overall pressure per rush figure is similar, but he’s actually getting more sacks — another 50 percent bump. Maybe that’s luck, but maybe not. Considering his only two games without sacks came while Trent Cole was injured, it isn’t much of a leap to suggest that his opportunities are increasing with a fellow Pro Bowler coming at the quarterback.

Photo from Getty.

Why Castillo? Look to Sean McDermott

Others have tried to explain what exactly Andy Reid was thinking when he promoted Juan Castillo to defensive coordinator. For the record, I didn’t understand it to begin with:

Even scarier is that Castillo seemingly has no conceptual plan for the defense… Washburn runs the defensive front autonomously, and Castillo’s going to plan the back seven to “complement” his ideas? That doesn’t sound like a defensive coordinator with a coherent plan… At the end of the day, Reid couldn’t justify this decision with Castillo’s experience or knowledge or preparation. He had to fall back on “desire” and even an outlandish connection to the risk other people took when promoting Reid himself (under much more logical circumstances).

The best explanation I can come up with nine months later doesn’t actually have much to do with Castillo himself, but rather his predecessor Sean McDermott.

To start, I don’t think Reid is particularly partisan when it comes to defensive schemes. He was happy to bring Jim Johnson and let him run his blitz-happy system, although if Johnson was a Cover Two guy, it might not have made much difference. Reid has always been an offensive coach, and making sure he had a defensive coordinator who could pick a successful system and run it without help must have been the goal.

When Johnson died in 2009, Reid promoted McDermott, hoping that the young secondary coach could carry the defense forward. And if you remember, all of McDermott’s statements echoed that call for stability. Like this one:

“There is one thing I know, and that is that this system,” McDermott said. “It works. Jim has spent a considerable amount of time in his coaching career researching and finding things that work and finding things that didn’t work, quite frankly, and I’m going to respect that and we’re going to build on that. From there we’ll add wrinkles.”

Not only did the Eagles not have the time to conduct a full coordinator search, Reid was hoping that McDermott could keep everything going in such a way that the head coach wouldn’t have to worry about things on that side of the ball.

Obviously it didn’t work out. But what problems did McDermott have that Reid felt he couldn’t ignore? The first was tactical. McDermott’s schemes were often overly complicated. His “wrinkles,” like frequently dropping Trent Cole back into a zone or having a linebacker race across the defense to cover a tight end or running back, hurt more than they helped. Complicated schemes made the players seem a step slow. McDermott also lost the respect of the players in the locker room. Reporters started to hear off-the-record bad mouthing of the coach that never would have happened during Johnson’s time.

If those were your two biggest problems, I could see where it might seem logical to find someone as opposite of McDermott as possible. That’s where Castillo comes in. The man has always been respected and praised by his unit. He’s an enthusiastic, energetic leader. Plus, without a deep background in defensive coaching, a simpler scheme was almost guaranteed:

“First of all, what we’re going to do is be fast and physical, and we’re going to be fundamentally sound. We have good players here. This is the NFL, you change, you upgrade, players get hurt, but that’s what we’re going to do.”

As Sam Lynch noted, Reid’s course correction away from the McDermott errors may have been the right move in theory. But, clearly, Castillo’s promotion took the idea at least a a few steps too far.

Photo from Getty.

Fire Juan Castillo Yesterday

If he can’t bottle up the anemic San Francisco offense, Juan Castillo deserves to be fired posthaste.

That’s what I wrote just two days ago. And after the defense’s wretched performance in the second half against the 49ers, it’s time to end this farce.

Look, Castillo is not and has never been the only problem on the 2011 Eagles. Dropped passes, missed opportunities, bad playcalling, turnovers, inadequate rookies. You can spread that 1-3 blame around pretty easily.

But there is simply no denying that the Juan Castillo Experiment™ is over. The results are impossible to ignore. Three straight fourth quarter leads blown. Career high passer ratings for the last two mediocre quarterbacks to visit the Linc. An incompetent run defense rivaled only by a routinely torched pass defense.

Some people (at least as of a few days ago) still put the blame on the players. And, heck, the players certainly blame themselves. But let me explain to you exactly why it’s Castillo, not the players, who’s at fault.

Let’s start by traveling back in time about 10 months, when Andy Reid kicked Sean McDermott to the curb. I don’t think there were many people who disagreed with that move. The Eagles defense had disappointed for two straight seasons and McDermott had lost the respect of the locker room.

That defense also had major personnel holes. Neither Ellis Hobbs nor Dimitri Patterson were quality NFL starting cornerbacks. Ernie Sims played like a shark out of water. Stewart Bradley was similarly, if not quite so hopelessly inept in the middle. And there was not a single pass rushing threat outside of Trent Cole.

Ultimately, the Eagles decided to overhaul both the players and the coaching. They let Sims, Patterson, Bradley, Bunkley, and Mikell walk. In their place they brought in Pro Bowlers Jason Babin, Cullen Jenkins, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, and Nnamdi Asomuga. McDermott was fired, along with the rest of the defensive staff. Reid brought in Jim Washburn to install a new defensive line scheme and Castillo to oversee it all.

After four games, we can see what was evident in the preseason: the defense continues to have major personnel issues. The linebackers, even slightly improved with Brian Rolle subbing for Casey Matthews, remain a work in progress. Jarrad Page leads a revolving door of subpar safeties. Still, overall you can’t look at this defense and say that the talent isn’t significantly better than the one McDermott managed to a 10-6 record last year.

Castillo has more to work with, but has done less than the man he replaced. He has so far been completely unable to scheme around and protect his weaker starters. There is zero evidence of adjustments as the games go on, causing second half leads to disappear faster than full sentences at a Reid losing game press conference.

Even worse, Catillo’s schemes have actually mitigated the strengths of some of his best players. Look at Asomugha. This is a player who’s one of the top two or three man-to-man press cover cornerbacks in the NFL. When they call his number to match up one on one against Roddy White or Hakeem Nicks or Vernon Davis, he shuts them down. That’s what the $60 million contract was for. But frequently Castillo asks Asomugha to drop back into zone coverage, give the wide receiver a big cushion, or go all the way back into a free safety spot. Quite simply, that hasn’t worked.

In today’s game, for example, Asomugha was playing zone on an Alex Smith rollout pass in the third quarter. Nnamdi was sucked out of position to his left, allowing Kendall Hunter to break free for a 44 yard gain. It was ugly, but foreseeable. A good defensive coordinator finds ways to maximize the talents and minimize the weaknesses of his players.

Furthermore, Castillo’s main message all offseason was a return to fundamentals. Supposedly he was going to re-instill a basic attacking defense that lets the players play without overthinking. After all the missed tackles and blown assignments, it’s clear that he can’t even deliver on that promise.

Castillo may be a great motivator for his players. But he’s bringing little else to the table. His promotion didn’t make sense at the time, and after an offseason and a quarter of the season gone, Castillo still hasn’t done anything to change our minds. Time to fire him while you still might be able to salvage the defense.

Photo from Getty.